Items23The creator’s order
  1. 1Belva Ann LockwoodBelva Ann LockwoodBorn 24 Oct 1830Lockwood made a habit of testing whether laws written for men could be read to include women. Refused admission to the Supreme Court bar, she drafted and lobbied through an 1879 act of Congress that let women lawyers practise there, and became the first to do so. In 1884, when almost no American…0i
  2. 2Vida GoldsteinVida GoldsteinBorn 13 Apr 1869Australia's 1902 franchise act gave most white women both the federal vote and the right to stand, a combination almost nowhere else had. Goldstein used the second half at once: in 1903 she ran for the Senate in Victoria, one of the first women anywhere to stand for a national parliament, and won…0i
  3. 3Lucina HagmanLucina HagmanBorn 5 Jun 1853Finland's 1906 parliamentary reform was the first anywhere to give women the vote and the right to stand for a national parliament on the same terms as men, and the effect was immediate: 19 women were elected in March 1907. Hagman, a teacher who had founded the Unioni women's rights association in…0i
  4. 4Chrystal MacmillanChrystal MacmillanBorn 13 Jun 1872Women graduates of Scottish universities had a quirk on their side: those universities elected MPs, and the electorate was defined as "persons" holding degrees. In 1908 Macmillan, a mathematics graduate of Edinburgh, argued that case herself in the House of Lords, the first woman to plead there.…0i
  5. 5Millicent FawcettMillicent FawcettBorn 11 Jun 1847The suffragettes get the films, but Fawcett's National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies was the larger organisation, a federation of hundreds of local societies by 1913. Its most practical move came in 1912: the Election Fighting Fund, which paid for organisers to back Labour candidates against…0i
  6. 6Jeannette RankinJeannette RankinBorn 11 Jun 1880Rankin was elected to the US House from Montana in 1916, four years before the 19th Amendment, because Montana's women had won the vote in 1914 in a state campaign she helped lead. The sequence matters: state-by-state victories created electorates that could send women to Washington before national…0i
  7. 7Elvia Carrillo PuertoElvia Carrillo PuertoBorn 30 Jan 1881In 1923, three decades before Mexican women won the federal vote, Carrillo Puerto and two other women were elected to the state congress of Yucatán, the first women to sit in a Mexican legislature. She had spent years organising peasant women's leagues across the state, and her brother's socialist…0i
  8. 8Emily MurphyEmily MurphyBorn 14 Mar 1868Canada's constitution allowed "qualified persons" to sit in the Senate, and governments argued that women were not persons in law. Murphy, an Alberta magistrate whose own authority had been challenged on those grounds, recruited four other women, the Famous Five, to petition for a ruling. The…0i
  9. 9Eva PerónEva PerónBorn 7 May 1919Argentine feminists had campaigned for the vote for decades, but it was Eva Perón who pushed the 1947 suffrage law through and then built the machine that turned it into seats. Her Peronist Women's Party, founded in 1949, ran thousands of local branches, and in the 1951 elections, the first in…0i
  10. 10Sirimavo BandaranaikeSirimavo BandaranaikeBorn 17 Apr 1916In July 1960 Bandaranaike became the world's first woman prime minister, leading the Sri Lanka Freedom Party to victory a year after her husband's assassination. She entered politics through the route that gave many women in South Asia their first access to top office, family succession, and…0i