Votes for women. On 19 September 1893, when the governor, Lord Glasgow, signed a new Electoral Act into law, New Zealand became the first self-governing country in the world to grant the right to vote to all adult women. At the time this was a truly radical change: many other democracies did not allow women to vote until decades later. A movement for change In the late 19th century a broad movement for women’s political rights, including voting rights, developed in Britain and its colonies, the United States and northern Europe. Its earliest successes would come in colonial and frontier societies like Australasia and the American Midwest.
Suffrage campaigners drew inspiration from two sources. Ideas of equality were championed by John Stuart Mill and British feminists, including Barbara Bodichon and some women’s suffrage societies. Against women’s suffrage The New Zealand campaign was driven by the local branch of the American-based Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), founded in 1885.
Topic Explorer - Women's Suffrage. New Zealand women and the vote - Women and the vote. On 19 September 1893 the governor, Lord Glasgow, signed a new Electoral Act into law. As a result of this landmark legislation, New Zealand became the first self-governing country in the world in which women had the right to vote in parliamentary elections. In most other democracies – including Britain and the United States – women did not win the right to the vote until after the First World War. New Zealand’s world leadership in women’s suffrage became a central part of our image as a trail-blazing ‘social laboratory’. That achievement was the result of years of effort by suffrage campaigners, led by Kate Sheppard. In 1891, 1892 and 1893 they compiled a series of massive petitions calling on Parliament to grant the vote to women.
In recent years Sheppard’s contribution to New Zealand’s history has been acknowledged on the $10 note. Today, the idea that women could not or should not vote is completely foreign to New Zealanders. Kate Sheppard. Women's suffrage (New Zealand) | AnyQuestions. The right to vote New Zealand’s pioneering suffragists were inspired by John Stuart Mill's philosophy of equality, British feminists and the missionary efforts of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), an American missionary based organisation founded in 1885.
The websites below offer comprehensive coverage on the background and history of the movement as it unfolded in New Zealand and compares them with elections as held today. NZHistory NZHistory is a great website for information about New Zealand Aotearoa. If we go all the way down the page we can see that the website belongs to the Ministry for Culture & Heritage, so the information is well-researched and reliable. Select the section called Politics and Government.Look under Political milestones to find the link on Women and the vote.Look for Contents on the page to discover different aspects of this topic. Tips: We like sites like this because they’re reliable. Te Ara: The Encyclopedia of New Zealand Topic Explorer DigitalNZ.