We approach the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage in both of our countries while recognizing that we must inspire and help engage women and girls around the world to be full participants.
Our countries’ histories of women’s suffrage are in near parallel. Women achieved the right to vote in parliamentary elections in Denmark in 1915 and in federal elections in the United States in 1920, with passage of the 19th Amendment. Prior to that, more than a dozen of the States, mostly in the Western U.S., had granted women the right to vote. Wyoming was the first in 1869. In 1916, Jeannette Rankin, a highly educated Republican suffragette and pacifist from Montana, became the first woman elected to the U.S. Congress. She entered Congress in 1917, before women’s suffrage was granted nationally.
