Women's Rights and Roles around the World since 1900

Half the world's history

In 1900, women could vote in national elections in only one self-governing country, New Zealand. In most countries women could not own property after marriage, could not attend most universities, were shut out of most professions and had few legal protections from violence. By 2026, women had led governments on every inhabited continent, and girls outnumbered boys in university in many countries. Yet in some places, women's rights have been rolled back. Expectation E3.3 asks you to analyse to what extent women's roles and status changed, and how that varied from region to region.

Winning the vote

• New Zealand (1893) was the first self-governing country to give women the national vote, after a petition organized by Kate Sheppard and others.
• Finland (1906) was the first European country to give women both the vote and the right to run for parliament.
• In Britain, suffragists used petitions and lobbying; suffragettes led by Emmeline Pankhurst used dramatic protest, and many were jailed and force-fed during hunger strikes. Women over 30 who met property requirements won the vote in 1918, and equal voting rights came in 1928.
• In Canada, most women won the federal vote in 1918, but many women of colour and First Nations women remained excluded for decades. Quebec women won the provincial vote only in 1940.
• The United States guaranteed women's suffrage in 1920, but many Black women in the South were kept from voting until the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
• Women's war work helped win the vote in several countries. France and Japan gave women the vote in 1944–1945; India's 1950 constitution granted equal suffrage from the start; Switzerland did so nationally only in 1971. In Saudi Arabia, women first voted and ran in local elections in 2015.

Wars, revolutions and work

• In both world wars, women took jobs in factories, farms and offices. Hundreds of thousands of Soviet women served in the Red Army in the Second World War, including as snipers and pilots.
• Communist states proclaimed equality. Soviet Russia made divorce easy in 1917 and legalized abortion in 1920 (Stalin later restricted both). China's Marriage Law of 1950 banned arranged and child marriages and gave women the right to divorce. Yet women in these states usually did paid work and almost all the housework, and few reached top leadership.
• In colonies, women took part in independence struggles, from the market women of West Africa to women fighters in Algeria and Vietnam.

The second wave and global feminism

• The French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir argued in The Second Sex (1949) that women were defined as "other" by a male-centred society. Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963) described the frustration of many American suburban women.
• The birth-control pill (approved in the U.S. in 1960) gave many women more control over when to have children.
• The UN declared 1975 International Women's Year and held a world conference in Mexico City. The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) followed in 1979. At the Beijing World Conference on Women (1995), 189 countries adopted a platform for action, and the phrase "women's rights are human rights" became a rallying cry.
• Women from the Global South shaped feminism, often linking gender to poverty, race and colonialism. Wangari Maathai founded Kenya's Green Belt Movement (1977), which planted tens of millions of trees and empowered rural women; in 2004 she became the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Leymah Gbowee organized Christian and Muslim women in Liberia to push for an end to civil war (Nobel Peace Prize, 2011).

Women leaders: Sirimavo Bandaranaike of Ceylon (Sri Lanka) became the world's first woman prime minister in 1960. Others followed: Indira Gandhi (India, 1966), Golda Meir (Israel, 1969), Margaret Thatcher (U.K., 1979), Benazir Bhutto (Pakistan, 1988), Kim Campbell (Canada, 1993) and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf (Liberia, 2006, the first elected woman head of state in Africa).

Continuity, backlash and new movements

• Education: Malala Yousafzai, a Pakistani schoolgirl who campaigned for girls' education, was shot by the Taliban in 2012. She survived and in 2014, at 17, became the youngest Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
• Afghanistan: since the Taliban returned to power in August 2021, girls have been barred from secondary school and women from universities and many jobs.
• Iran: after Mahsa (Jina) Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman, died in the custody of the "morality police" in September 2022, protests spread under the slogan "Woman, Life, Freedom". The jailed activist Narges Mohammadi won the 2023 Nobel Peace Prize.
• Violence: the #MeToo movement (2017) spread worldwide, encouraging survivors of sexual harassment and assault to speak. Nadia Murad, a Yazidi survivor of ISIS captivity, won the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize for her campaign against sexual violence in war.
• Work: in most countries women still earn less than men on average and do more unpaid care work.