Which country was the first to give women the vote, in 1893?

New Zealand, where a petition organised by Kate Sheppard gathered nearly 32,000 signatures - about a quarter of the adult European women in the country - and was unrolled across the floor of parliament on a wooden spool. The bill passed by two votes, partly because opponents in the upper house tried a wrecking amendment that backfired.

It was the vote and not the seat. New Zealand women could vote in 1893 but could not stand for parliament until 1919, and the first woman was elected in 1933 - a forty-year gap between choosing and being chosen that is easy to miss in the anniversary.

The order of countries afterwards is not the one people expect. Australia followed in 1902 but explicitly excluded most Aboriginal people; Finland in 1906 gave both vote and candidacy at once and elected nineteen women immediately; Britain gave the vote to women over 30 with property in 1918 and on equal terms only in 1928; France not until 1944; Switzerland federally in 1971, and in one canton not until 1990, by order of the federal court. Kate Sheppard is on the New Zealand ten-dollar note.