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The Forum: Votes for Women: the Global Story

Discussion & Talk

Women Voting in Damascus - photo by REUTERS/Khaled al-Hariri

07/04/2018 GMT

Votes for Women: the Global Story

BBC World Service - The Forum, Votes for Women: the Global Story

The extraordinary stories of the women around the world who won the right to vote

Women in Britain started to get voting rights in 1918, but what were the contradictions and tensions that arose with women in the colonised parts of Asia and Africa?

It was exactly a hundred years ago that women in the UK won the right to vote: though at first it was only for property owning women over thirty. But Britain wasn’t the trail blazer. Seven countries were ahead of it including two of its colonies. So what were the deciding factors? Was it the changing circumstances created by wars and the collapse of Empires? Or was it the suffragettes’ sometimes violent tactics? And why did Switzerland take as long as 1971 to enfranchise women? Joining Bridget Kendall to look at the global story of how women got the vote is the Indian social scientist Nikita Sud, Jad Adams the author of “Women and the Vote”, and Lindie Naughton the biographer of the first woman elected to the British parliament Constance Markievicz.

Photo: Women voting (Reuters)

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