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Henry Hunt (politician)
"Orator" Hunt was the main speaker at St Peter's Field in Manchester on 16 August 1819, where around 60,000 people gathered to demand parliamentary reform at a time when most adult men, and all women, had no vote and industrial towns had no MPs. Yeomanry charged the crowd, killing at least 15 people. Hunt was jailed for two and a half years; the Peterloo Massacre became the founding grievance of British democratic reform.
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William Lovett
Born
A cabinetmaker, Lovett drafted the People's Charter of 1838 for the London Working Men's Association after the 1832 Reform Act left most working men voteless. Its six points, votes for all men, secret ballot, no property qualification for MPs, payment of MPs, equal constituencies and annual parliaments, were dismissed by Parliament despite petitions with millions of signatures. All but the last became law over the next eighty years. Lovett favoured "moral force" education over Feargus O'Connor's mass confrontation.
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Kate Sheppard
Born
Sheppard organised the petitions that made New Zealand, in 1893, the first self-governing country to give all adult women the vote in national elections. Working through the Women's Christian Temperance Union, she and her colleagues gathered nearly 32,000 signatures, about a quarter of the adult female population, on a petition glued into a roll some 270 metres long. Māori women voted under the same law, though they could not stand for Parliament until 1919.
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Ida B. Wells
Born
Better known for exposing lynching, Wells also built Black women's voting power from the ground up. In 1913 she founded Chicago's Alpha Suffrage Club, which canvassed wards after Illinois gave women a partial vote and helped elect Oscar De Priest as the city's first Black alderman in 1915. That same spring of 1913 she refused to march at the back of the national suffrage parade in Washington, as white organisers had asked, and joined the Illinois delegation mid-route.
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Mary Church Terrell
Terrell, one of the first Black American women to earn a college degree, founded the National Association of Colored Women in 1896 under the motto "Lifting as we climb" and argued at suffrage conventions that white suffragists must not trade away Black women to win Southern support. After 1920 she pressed on against the barriers that still kept Black women from voting in the South, and in her late eighties led the sit-ins that desegregated Washington's restaurants.
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Selina Cooper
Cooper started work in a Lancashire cotton mill as a child and became one of the "radical suffragists" who rooted the women's vote in trade unions rather than drawing rooms. In 1901 she was among the mill workers who carried a petition signed by nearly 30,000 Lancashire textile women to Westminster, and she spent years persuading the labour movement to back votes for women. She shows the working-class campaign that the suffragette story tends to leave out.
More about Selina Cooper7
Sophia Duleep Singh
A goddaughter of Queen Victoria and daughter of the last Sikh ruler of the Punjab, Duleep Singh used her title as a weapon. She sold suffrage newspapers outside her grace-and-favour home at Hampton Court, marched on Black Friday in 1910 and, as a leader of the Women's Tax Resistance League, refused to pay taxes on the principle of no taxation without representation; her jewellery was seized and auctioned. Her case links the British suffrage campaign to empire.
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Clara Campoamor
Born
Elected to Spain's constituent assembly in 1931, before women could vote, Campoamor argued the case for women's suffrage against most of her own allies on the left, who feared women would vote as priests told them. Her speeches carried Article 36 of the Republic's constitution by 161 votes to 121. When the right won the 1933 election she was blamed by her own side and lost her seat; she died in exile, and Spain now honours her as the woman who won the vote.
More about Clara Campoamor9
Bertha Lutz
Born
A zoologist at Rio de Janeiro's National Museum, Lutz founded the Brazilian Federation for the Advancement of Women in 1922 and ran a patient lobbying campaign of petitions, press work and contacts with legislators rather than street protest. Brazil's 1932 electoral code gave women the vote, among the first in Latin America, and Lutz helped draft the 1934 constitution's equality provisions before Vargas's dictatorship suspended elections altogether in 1937.
More about Bertha Lutz10
Ichikawa Fusae
Born
Ichikawa co-founded the Women's Suffrage League of Japan in 1924 and campaigned for two decades against laws that barred women not only from voting but from joining political parties or attending political meetings. Women voted in Japan for the first time in April 1946; Ichikawa herself was briefly purged by the occupation for wartime collaboration, then sat in the House of Councillors for 25 years, running clean, low-budget campaigns as a rebuke to money politics.
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Harry T. Moore
Born
A Florida schoolteacher, Moore moved fast once the Supreme Court outlawed the white primary in 1944: he founded the Florida Progressive Voters' League and toured the state registering Black voters, and by 1950 Florida had over 100,000 Black registered Democrats, a far higher share than any other Deep South state. He was fired from teaching for his activism, and on Christmas night 1951 a bomb under his house killed him and his wife Harriette; no one was ever tried.
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Miguel Trujillo
Native Americans became US citizens in 1924, but New Mexico's constitution still barred "Indians not taxed" from voting. Trujillo, an Isleta Pueblo schoolteacher and Marine veteran of the Second World War, was refused registration and sued. In August 1948, in Trujillo v. Garley, a federal court struck the ban down, weeks after Arizona's courts ended a similar exclusion in a separate case, opening the vote to thousands of Pueblo and Navajo citizens.
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Doria Shafik
In February 1951 Shafik led around 1,500 women into Egypt's parliament building, interrupting the session for three hours to demand the vote and equal pay. Her Bint al-Nil union kept up the pressure, and in 1954 she went on hunger strike when the new constitutional committee included no women. The 1956 constitution granted women the vote, with conditions men did not face. When she later protested Nasser's dictatorship she was placed under house arrest for years, and her role was officially erased.
More about Doria Shafik14
Septima Poinsette Clark
Literacy tests were the barrier, so Clark taught literacy. Starting on Johns Island, South Carolina, in 1957 with Esau Jenkins, her Citizenship Schools used local teachers and real materials, the state constitution, mail-order catalogues, to teach adults to read and pass the registration test. Taken up by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the programme trained thousands of teachers across the South and registered tens of thousands of voters, groundwork that rarely makes the documentaries.
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Iris von Roten
Switzerland's barrier was unusual: women's suffrage needed the approval of male voters in a referendum. Von Roten, a Basel lawyer, attacked the whole system of women's legal dependence in Frauen im Laufgitter ("Women in the Playpen", 1958), a book so fiercely denounced that some blamed it for the 1959 referendum defeat. Opinion shifted over the next decade, and men voted in federal women's suffrage in 1971; the last canton, Appenzell Innerrhoden, had to be ordered to comply by the federal court in 1990.
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Fred Gray (attorney)
Born
When Alabama redrew Tuskegee's city limits in 1957 into a 28-sided shape that removed almost every Black voter, Gray, a young Montgomery lawyer who had already represented Rosa Parks, sued on behalf of Charles Gomillion and the Tuskegee Civic Association. In Gomillion v. Lightfoot (1960) the Supreme Court unanimously ruled the redrawing a violation of the 15th Amendment, the first major blow against racial gerrymandering and a precedent for later redistricting cases.
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Amelia Boynton Robinson
Selma's campaign did not begin with the famous marchers. Boynton and her husband had been running voter registration classes in Dallas County, Alabama, since the 1930s, when barely a few hundred of its Black residents could vote, and her home and office became the base for SNCC and then Martin Luther King's arrival in 1965. On Bloody Sunday she was beaten unconscious on the Edmund Pettus Bridge; the photograph of her body went round the world and helped carry the Voting Rights Act.
More about Amelia Boynton Robinson18
Bob Moses (activist)
Born
Moses went to McComb, Mississippi, in 1961 as a SNCC field secretary in a state where about 5 per cent of eligible Black adults were registered, and was beaten and jailed for escorting applicants to the courthouse. He then directed the Council of Federated Organizations and the 1964 Freedom Summer, bringing in student volunteers and running a parallel "Freedom Vote" to prove that disenfranchised Mississippians wanted to vote. His style was deliberately low-key: local people, not leaders, at the front.
More about Bob Moses (activist)19
Vernon Dahmer
Born
A farmer and grocer in Forrest County, Mississippi, Dahmer led the local NAACP and spent years challenging a circuit clerk who simply refused to register Black applicants, with help from Justice Department lawsuits. After the Voting Rights Act he offered to collect poll tax payments at his own store so people would not have to face the courthouse. The Ku Klux Klan firebombed his home in January 1966 and he died of his burns; it took until 1998 to convict the Klan leader who ordered it.
More about Vernon Dahmer20
Patricia McCluskey
In Northern Ireland the barrier was local: council votes went to ratepayers, with extra votes for company directors, and boundaries such as Derry's kept Catholic majorities in a minority of seats. In Dungannon, Patricia McCluskey and her husband Conn, a local GP, founded the Campaign for Social Justice in 1964 and simply published the evidence, in pamphlets and briefings for Westminster MPs. Their work fed the civil rights movement's "one man, one vote" demand, and universal suffrage in local elections was legislated in 1969.
More about Patricia McCluskey21
Lani Guinier
Born
As an NAACP Legal Defense Fund lawyer in the 1980s, Guinier litigated Voting Rights Act cases against at-large elections that let white majorities win every seat. Her scholarship asked a harder question: even with fair districts, a permanent minority can be outvoted on everything, so she proposed remedies such as cumulative voting. Clinton nominated her to lead the Justice Department's civil rights division in 1993 and withdrew the nomination after critics branded her a "quota queen", a fight worth reading her own account of.
More about Lani Guinier22
Rola Dashti
Kuwait's parliament rejected women's suffrage repeatedly, including a 1999 decree by the emir that the National Assembly voted down. Dashti, an economist, was among the activists who kept up demonstrations outside the Assembly and lobbying of individual MPs until it passed in May 2005. She stood in the 2006 election, the first in which women could run, and in 2009 was one of the first four women elected to the Assembly. A reminder that some of these battles are recent.
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