Kate Sheppard

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.