Women’s Rights Beyond the Vote

Feb 1839 – 31 Dec 202553 items

rightswomen
A women’s liberation march from Farragut Square to Lafayette Park, Washington, 26 August 1970. Photo: Warren K. Leffler, U.S. News & World Report collection, Library of Congress. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
A women’s liberation march from Farragut Square to Lafayette Park, Washington, 26 August 1970. Photo: Warren K. Leffler, U.S. News & World Report collection, Library of Congress. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Property, divorce, school, work and the body, 1839 to today

In 1839 a married woman in Mississippi could not own the property she brought to her marriage; her husband did. The vote, which Votes for Women follows, was one right among many. This timeline follows the others, country by country: who could own and inherit, who could leave a marriage, who could study and work and on what pay, and who decided about pregnancy.

Rights were not won once. Soviet Russia, Iran, Romania, Poland, Afghanistan and the United States each took back something it had granted, and those reversals are here too, in the same plain terms.

How to read it

  • Laws are dated to the day they were enacted: for most, the day they were signed, given assent or promulgated; for Turkey’s civil code, the Assembly’s vote. Each note says which, and when the law came into force. Court rulings are dated to the judgment.

  • Places: a law sits at the parliament that passed it, or in the city where it was decreed, so the map runs from Jackson and Reykjavík to Kigali and Kabul. More than half the entries are outside Europe and North America.

  • Bands frame a reform and its fate: Soviet family law from free divorce to the 1944 edict, India’s Hindu Code Bills, Iran’s Family Protection Law, the UN Decade for Women, the half-century of Roe v. Wade and the Taliban’s return.

Threads

  • property: owning, earning, inheriting and managing money in one’s own name

  • divorce: marriage, divorce, custody and polygamy

  • education: schools, colleges and degrees

  • labour: the right to work, equal pay and strikes

  • body: contraception, abortion, marital rape and violence at home

  • reversals: rights narrowed or taken away

Suffrage is left to Votes for Women. For the world today, the World Bank’s Women, Business and the Law scores every country on most of these threads.

Items

  1. Mississippi’s Married Women’s Property Act

    Old Capitol, Jackson, Mississippi

  2. Oberlin’s first women graduates

    Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio

  3. ≈ 16 years

  4. Britain’s Matrimonial Causes Act

    Palace of Westminster, London

  5. Nadezhda Suslova’s doctorate in Zurich

    Polytechnikum building, Zurich

  6. Britain’s Married Women’s Property Act

    Palace of Westminster, London

  7. India’s first women graduates

    University of Calcutta, College Street, Kolkata

  8. Ewha school opens in Seoul

    Jeong-dong, Seoul

  9. ≈ 30 years, 4 months

  10. Margaret Sanger’s Brownsville clinic

    46 Amboy Street, Brownsville, Brooklyn

  11. Soviet family law, from free divorce to the 1944 edict

    ≈ 26 years, 6 months

  12. Soviet Russia legalises abortion

    Kremlin, Moscow

  13. Turkey’s Civil Code

    Grand National Assembly, Ulus, Ankara

  14. The Soviet Union bans abortion

    Kremlin, Moscow

  15. Japan’s constitution: Article 24

    Tokyo

  16. China’s Marriage Law

    Zhongnanhai, Beijing

  17. ILO Equal Remuneration Convention

    Geneva

  18. India’s Hindu Code Bills

    ≈ 5 years, 2 months · Parliament House, New Delhi

  19. The Hindu Marriage Act

    Parliament House, New Delhi

  20. The Hindu Succession Act

    Parliament House, New Delhi

  21. Tunisia’s Code of Personal Status

    Tunis

  22. The United States approves the pill

  23. Pakistan’s Muslim Family Laws Ordinance

  24. France: wives may work and bank without consent

    Palais Bourbon, Paris

  25. Australia lifts its public service marriage bar

    Old Parliament House, Canberra

  26. Romania’s Decree 770

    Bucharest

  27. Iran’s Family Protection Law

    ≈ 11 years, 7 months · Tehran

  28. The Dagenham machinists’ strike

    21 days · Ford Dagenham plant, Essex

  29. California’s no-fault divorce

    California State Capitol, Sacramento

  30. Under Roe v. Wade

    ≈ 49 years · Supreme Court of the United States, Washington

  31. France’s Veil law

    Palais Bourbon, Paris

  32. From Mexico City to Nairobi: the UN Decade for Women

    ≈ 10 years

  33. Iceland’s Women’s Day Off

    Lækjartorg, Reykjavík

  34. Iran suspends the Family Protection Law

    Tehran

  35. The UN adopts CEDAW

    United Nations Headquarters, New York

  36. Japan’s Equal Employment Opportunity Law

    National Diet Building, Tokyo

  37. R v R: marital rape is rape

    Palace of Westminster, London

  38. Beijing World Conference on Women

    11 days · Beijing International Convention Center

  39. South Africa’s Choice on Termination of Pregnancy Act

    Houses of Parliament, Cape Town

  40. Rwanda’s inheritance law

    Parliament, Kimihurura, Kigali

  41. Egypt opens khul’ divorce to wives

    Parliament, Cairo

  42. The Maputo Protocol

    Maputo

  43. Morocco’s new family code

    Parliament, Rabat

  44. Chile legalises divorce

    Palacio de La Moneda, Santiago

  45. India: daughters become coparceners

    Parliament House, New Delhi

  46. Brazil’s Maria da Penha Law

    Palácio do Planalto, Brasília

  47. Ireland votes to repeal the Eighth Amendment

    Dublin Castle

  48. Saudi women take the wheel

  49. Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal narrows abortion

    Constitutional Tribunal, al. Szucha, Warsaw

  50. Argentina’s Senate passes legal abortion

    Palace of the National Congress, Buenos Aires

  51. The Taliban’s return

    ≈ 4 years, 4 months · Kabul

  52. Afghan girls sent home from secondary school

    Kabul

  53. Dobbs overturns Roe

    Supreme Court of the United States, Washington

  54. Afghanistan bars women from university

    Kabul

  55. France writes abortion into its constitution

    Place Vendôme, Paris