In October 2023, Pope Francis allowed women to vote at the Synod of Bishops for the first time. Allowed to attend only as observers in the past, five religious sisters were allowed to vote at the Papal advisory body in a momentous shift for the Roman Catholic Church, which has been male-dominated for centuries. With this historic move, Vatican City became the last country in the world to give its women the right to vote. In an important way, the addition of a state housing 764 people on a 0.44-sq-km patch of land to the world’s adult-franchise map marks the culmination of a democratic quest for justice that dates back more than a century. In that sense, the last piece being snapped into the puzzle should make us look back at this year with some satisfaction. Religious institutions tend to take the longest to reform, but they too can and do. It is nobody’s case that democracy has finally gone global. It’s evident that much of the world is under some form of autocracy. Yet, wherever elections of any kind are held, to whatever end, it is vital that no gender barrier distorts the outcome. An acknowledgement of equality is crucial to the very principle of collective decision-making. And patriarchal politics stood in its way for too long.
The women’s suffrage movement had its first stirrings in the 19th and early 20th centuries, with protest voices in the Anglosphere either at the forefront or recorded more durably for posterity. Legislation without involving half the people was plainly not representative, it was faulty, and yet women had to strive hard against the illogic of male resistance. At first, it was other forms of social activism that gave rise to the vote demand. In New Zealand, which in 1893 became the first nation to let women vote in national elections, it was a fight against alcohol that moved women to seek a role in policymaking. In the US, which followed much later, in 1920, suffrage activism can be traced back to protests led by women against slavery. The need to be heard acquired urgency after World War I, at least in the West. The exclusive leadership of men was clearly doing little to commend itself. Indeed, the historical record shows that the two World Wars hastened the enfranchisement of women. A 2020 Pew Research Centre study said that 129 out of 198 countries granted women the right to vote between 1893 and 1960. Some nations tried to place riders on it by using race, age, education level or marital status as a disqualifier, but these largely proved untenable.
It has been a long journey on that timeline to a point when women are no longer excluded from polling processes in any country, even if this right has not yet shaken the basic structure of the patriarchy that dominates power politics almost everywhere. Our focus must now shift to achieving proper representation in rule-making and governance, which differs from universalizing a basic right that nobody should have been denied in the first place. Democracy does not operate by popular consensus, as that bears the risk of political paralysis, but optimal results are arguably achieved when it captures and acts upon what all the people want, by and large, regardless of gender and other such identities. As it happens, the political agency of women still has a long way to go before it can be said to have made the world a better place. For universal adult franchise to be effective beyond its mere fact of existence, nobody should be left voiceless. This shouldn’t take us another century. Let’s accelerate progress.