New Zealand gave women the vote first, in 1893

New Zealand became the first self-governing country to give women the vote in national elections when Governor Lord Glasgow signed the Electoral Act on 19 September 1893, extending the franchise to all adult women.

The campaign, led by suffragists such as Kate Sheppard and backed by the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, ran for seven years, and its weapon was paper. Campaigners gathered 31,872 signatures across 13 petitions, together the largest petition ever assembled in Australasia. Many retellings credit every one of those names to a single giant 1893 roll; the biggest single petition actually held 25,519 signatures. It is the only one of the 13 to survive and is now displayed in the He Tohu exhibition at the National Library in Wellington.

Women moved fast. Less than two months after the Act was signed, 109,461 had enrolled for the 1893 general election.

What “first” leaves out

The claim is true, but it needs two qualifiers. A smaller jurisdiction got there earlier: the US territory of Wyoming passed a women’s suffrage bill in 1869, by 13 votes to 6, and kept it at statehood in 1890. Wyoming was not a country, which is why New Zealand keeps the title.

The bigger caveat is that the 1893 Act let women vote but not stand. New Zealand women could not stand for Parliament until 1919, and the first woman MP, Elizabeth McCombs, was not elected until 1933, forty years after the vote was won. In most other democracies women began to win the vote only after the First World War; in the United States the 19th Amendment arrived in 1920.

The story has a modern coda. In October 2022 women came to hold 61 of the 121 seats in New Zealand’s House of Representatives, reaching gender-equal representation for the first time.