Going to polling stations on election day, many modern women do not even think about how long and difficult the path made by millions of their predecessors was. After all, they sometimes sacrificed everything to be given this opportunity - the right to vote. Women traditionally deprived of it, and it is by no means taken for granted.
Like other freedoms, this right went through a long process of formation, until it became universally recognized and enshrined in the constitutions of many developed countries. And this process reached its climax relatively recently: it is scary to think, but back in the 40s of the twentieth century, the Frenchwoman could not open a bank account without the consent of her husband, and only in 1946 she was allowed to the polling station.
In the era of the late Roman Empire, a woman inherited and owned property, and Roman law mentions this . However, the interpretation of Christianity in Catholicism made the “daughter of Eve” guilty of original sin. The opinion began to spread that a woman was naturally emotional, frivolous, stupid and simply could not control herself, but needed a patron - first a father, and then a husband. So from the legal codes of Western European countries, the woman’s right to own and completely dispose of property disappears. About what voting power was in medieval women, the following historical fact testifies. When the Countess de Foix expressed her own arguments at a religious debate in Pamme at the beginning of the 13th century, the French cleric threw her face: "Madam, return to your spinning wheel!"
This disenfranchised position of the "weaker" sex persisted until the Great French Revolution of 1789. Her slogan “Freedom, Equality and Brotherhood” was enthusiastically received by women who actively participated in all political processes. But with the publication of the main document of the revolution "Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen", as well as the adoption of the constitution of the republic, they found that these beautiful-hearted slogans concern not only them, but only men. Olympia de Gouges, writer, drafted the Declaration of the Rights of a Citizen in 1791, the first manifesto of feminism. But the government didn’t meet half the population of the republic, on the contrary, all women's unions were banned, and the “second sex” was not even allowed to attend public events, equating it with children and demented. Olympia de Gouges ended her life on the guillotine. But the French were not alone in their struggle for the right to vote.
Mary Wollstonecraft in 1792 published in London his work “In Defense of the Rights of Women,” which proves the need for equal rights for both sexes. And suffrage - a women's voice movement - originated in the United States. This happened in 1848. In 1870, women in the United Kingdom collected three million signatures for a petition for the right to vote and to be elected. They submitted this paper to Parliament.
But the first country in which women finally got voting right, became New Zealand - in 1893. Later, victory in this matter was achieved in Australia (1902), USA (1920), and Great Britain (1928). In Russia, equality was achieved only by the October Revolution.
The legal documents of many countries of the Muslim world still enshrined the provisions that a woman is not an independent member of society. In some states, she does not have a passport at all, being inscribed before her marriage in her father’s document, and after it in her husband’s passport. This state of affairs in many respects causes problems for migrants who live in closed European communities in the West European countries and the USA.