The Right to Vote and Women: A Global Perspective

In the 'era of globalization' women's participation and their representation are the issues that need to be discussed within a wider global context. The representation of women in a political system is a good test of its claim to democracy. The claims that women make for representation are claims for their citizenship and at the heart of their engagement with politics. Therefore, the suffrage campaign by women was an explicit movement for political participation and representation of women. Today, people often take for granted that women have the right to vote, but this was not the case across the globe just a century ago. Since the time of the world's first democracy in ancient Greece through the mid-1800s, political thinkers excluded women from notion of citizenship and male lawmakers from the extension of democratic rights. Politics was the domain of men, and women were thought to lack the qualities of capability necessary for equal citizenship. Furthermore, religious doctrine or practice and cultural traditions regarding women's proper place in society served as barriers to women's political participation. Women were gradually barred from speaking in public life and also denied the right to vote. In this context the French Prime Minister Edith Cresson has well observed that “there are three places where women have always been excluded the military, religion and politics…today still in politics they have least access”. Therefore, for women the struggle for voting rights had been long and hard. Thus right to vote has been relatively a recent phenomenon for women. Women's political rights have spread all over the world in the past one hundred year. Thus women's modern day participation in politics begins with the acquisition of voting right (suffrage). This paper examines the women's struggle for the right to vote and also compiles the granting years of right to vote for women in different years by countries of the world. This paper also emphasised on the status of women's representation in the national parliament of the world.