The dates provided here supply only a beginning to the complicated evolution of enfranchisement around the world.

Exact details sometimes remain to be recovered. For a long time, for example, municipal, library and park board, and other local suffrages and rights to seek election were not recognized as important and, as a result, largely forgotten. Today we understand, much like earlier campaigners, that the ‘local’ offers a step toward the ‘global’ and we seek signs of such initiatives. Thus, our treatment of Canada includes local, provincial/territorial, and national franchises. That endeavour for other nations is, however, more than we can immediately contemplate. We also believe that there is merit in seeing the ‘big picture’ of international enfranchisement and decided to focus on the vote and the right to seek political office at the most senior level of government in other countries.

Readers should also remember that franchises may claim to be universal, as did many that have been in fact restricted to men. Similarly so ‘women’ or ‘woman’ suffrage has been hailed when it fact only a partial group is included. For example the 1918 Canadian federal franchise excluded the vast majority of Indigenous women, much like Indigenous men. Poverty and transiency have kept others off voters’ lists in an example of persisting discrimination against the poor. A posting on this site also describes how many Americans have lost the vote after they were jailed. Citizenship has also mattered. Until 1975, as a relic of empire, British subjects could vote in Canadian elections. Such ‘exceptions’ need to be remembered when any individual date is considered.

We have also offered links to organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which unlike the Canadian Civil Liberties Association/Association Canadienne des libertés civiles, offers a useful franchise chronology, the ‘ACLU Voting Rights Act Timeline’.  Below, you will find our contribution: a simplified timeline compiling the dates when women attained the right to vote and the right to sand for election in all nations with available data. Our source for this information is J. Martin and Mart Martin, The Almanac of Women and Minorities in World Politics (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 2000) and all page references are to that volume.