The study of democracy has been central to political science, but in the seminal accounts of democratization, women, either as political actors who have taken part in the politics of democratization, or as beneficiaries of the fruits of democracy, have rarely been given center stage. Yet as organizers of tea boycotts, white-clad rabble-rousers marching on the Bastille, and invaluable supporters in the supply chains of revolution, women played a role in democracy’s origins; and decisions about the “woman question” were often central to establishing the legitimacy of the male-dominated democratic regime. Almost without exception, the very first petition for women’s inclusion in a given national legislature was rejected. Yet without exception, democratic countries eventually gave women voting rights. What caused this shift? This paper takes a comparative cross-national investigation to this question, examining why male politicians in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Argentina, and Chile agreed to extend the electoral franchise to women.
Pointing to the productive interaction between widespread suffrage mobilization and moments of political realignment, I argue that as electoral competition ebbed and flowed, new political opportunities arose in which suffragists could more effectively press for voting rights reform. If the coalition for suffrage was broad, vulnerable parties with a mass-basis were more likely to support women's enfranchisement. Where the coalition was narrow, vulnerable parties with centrist and conservative leanings had an incentive to extend the franchise, but only if they could exclude large segments of women in the reform. In countries that had already granted manhood suffrage – without regard to property or literacy – leftist support for reform proved crucial. Importantly, if the main lines of political conflict are relatively predictable, the contingent connections between suffragists and politicians reflected and influenced one another, often over a period of many years.
