New Zealand became the first self-governing nation to grant women the right to vote in national elections, in 1893.
The Electoral Act 1893 was signed on 19 September by Governor Lord Glasgow. It followed decades of campaigning led by the Women’s Christian Temperance Union of New Zealand and its prominent organizer, Kate Sheppard. Around enfranchised women participated in the general election held later that year.
New Zealand’s reform gave women voting rights but did not initially allow women to stand for Parliament. Women gained the right to be elected to the New Zealand House of Representatives in 1919, and Elizabeth McCombs became the first woman elected to Parliament in 1933.
The phrase “first country” can be misleading because New Zealand was then a self-governing colony within the British Empire, not yet an independent state. The achievement is nevertheless conventionally recognized as the first nationwide parliamentary suffrage for women.