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 all 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. 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. Following the 2014 election, 31% of our Members of Parliament were female, compared with 9% in 1981. In the early 21st century women have held each of the country’s key constitutional positions: prime minister, governor-general, speaker of the House of Representatives, attorney-general and chief justice. The suffrage campaign in New Zealand began as a far-flung branch of a broad late-19th-century movement for women’s rights that spread through Britain and its colonies, the United States and

northern Europe. This movement was shaped by two main themes: equal political rights for women and a determination to use them for the moral reform of society. The suffrage campaign in New Zealand began as a far-flung branch of a broad late-19th-century movement for women’s rights that spread through Britain and its colonies, the United States and northern Europe. This movement was shaped by two main themes: equal political rights for women and a determination to use them for the moral reform of society. Three years after the vote was won in 1893, a convention of representatives of 11 women’s groups from throughout New Zealand resolved itself into the National Council of Women (NCW). Its aim was to ‘unite all organised Societies of Women for mutual counsel and co-operation, and in the attainment of justice and freedom for women, and for all that makes for the good of humanity’. More than a century later, the NCW still works in the interests of women, but it is a very different organisation from that established in the 1890s.