While I was in Ottowa, I saw a fantastic memorial to women’s suffrage, which reminded me:
American women have only been allowed to vote for 104 years. Barely more than a single lifetime.
That’s crazy.
Human beings — and men in particular — were sexist and stupid for a very long time.
Many still are today.
Canadian women — for whom this memorial commemorates — have only been allowed to vote for 106 years. The same is true for British and German women.
Russian women have been voting for 105 years, though Russian elections are a sham today, so the extent to which their votes actually matter is questionable at best.
Brazilian women won the right to vote just 92 years ago.
French women have only been voting for the last 80 years.
Chinese women began voting 76 years ago, though the extent to which votes matter in China is also questionable.
Indian women have only been voting for 73 years.
Swiss women won the right to vote in federal elections just 53 years ago — the year I was born.
Saudi Arabia gave women the right to vote in 2015, though the country is effectively a patriarchal monarchy, so voting rights overall are minimal. However, women and men at least share the same limited rights to suffrage within the country.
The earliest attempts at female suffrage actually took place in New Jersey, of all places. The state experimented with women’s suffrage from 1776 to 1807 before finally abandoning it.
Finland in 1906 and Norway in 1913 were the first fully sovereign countries to enact female suffrage. Women in New Zealand began voting in 1896, but New Zealand was technically a territory of another country at the time and not a sovereign nation.
Women now have the right to vote in every country and territory in the world except for one:
Vatican City — the smallest nation in the world.
Female suffrage does not exist in the center of Christianity and the seat of Catholicism. The leader of Vatican City — the Pope — is elected by Catholic Church cardinals, who must be male, so the women of Vatican City — approximately 32 in all — still live and work under an oppressive patriarchal regime for which they have no say.
Perhaps someday, the women of Vatican City will rise up against their 700 or so celibate, robed oppressors and demand a voice in their government.
It would make for a hell of a movie.
