Women's Suffrage - Research Paper Example

It was also considered inappropriate if women spoke in public or traveled alone. Women were trained to restrain themselves from pursuing any kind of education as it was believed that strong intellectual or physical activity would harm the reproductive system and the biology of the delicate body of a woman. Women were considered to be physically and intellectually inferior to men in the nineteenth century. "Women's interests were deemed to be subsumed in those of men" (Crawford 9). They were believed to be mere objects of beauty and desire and were supposed to be silent spectators of what was happening in their surrounding.

Organized religion also added force to this belief of women being inferior to men as it preached stern and distinct sex roles. This inferior treatment of women gave birth to a political and economical reform movement hose motive was to extend the right to vote or suffrage to women. This movement was called the Women's Suffrage movement. "The suffrage movement was a major social movement, which at its peak absorbed the energies of hundreds of thousands and represented a vital extension of the democratic principle" (Scott 9).

The movement first originated in the Eighteenth Century in France. New Zealand, which was a self governing colony of Britain, was the first country in 1893, to grant women the right to vote. . However, some of these were not independent while the others had brief periods of independence. Though the right to vote did not apply to all women, Sweden is believed to be the first independent country to grant women the right to vote, where some women were actually allowed to vote during the age of liberty which was between 1718 and 1771.

In Australia some women were given the right to vote in 1901, however this right was given to all non-native women in 1902. International law introduced voting rights to women in 1948 when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was accepted by the United Nations. "Everyone has the right to take part in the Government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives" (Donnelly 167). The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, which was adopted in 1979 by the United Nations, also clearly mentioned women's suffrage or the right to vote for women.

Throughout the world in various countries at different times suffrage was granted to women. Women's suffrage was granted before universal suffrage in many countries, and women from a few social classes and races were unable to vote. Voting for towns and city assemblies and meetings was open to the heads of the families in medieval France and several other European countries, regardless of their sex. The Corsican Republic of 1755 had granted women's suffrage. The Constitution of the Corsican Republic stipulated a national representative assembly, both men and women over the age of 25 elected it.

When France occupied the island in 1769, women's suffrage came to an end. In 1780s and 1790s the movements for women's suffrage is found in the writings of Antoine Condorcet and Olympe de Gouges, in France, who promoted this right