• A. United Kingdom
  • B. New Zealand
  • C. Netherlands
  • D. United States

💡 Need a hint?

Don’t look in Europe or North America. This country is on the other side of the world and was surprisingly far ahead in the late nineteenth century when it came to political rights.

✅ View the answer

The correct answer is B. New Zealand.

New Zealand was the first country in the world where women were allowed to vote in national elections, and this happened as early as the nineteenth century. Large and powerful countries such as the United Kingdom and the United States followed only later, largely around the period of the First World War and the years that followed. In the Netherlands, women’s suffrage also did not come until the twentieth century.

📚 More background information

Almost everyone instinctively reaches for the United Kingdom or the United States here, which makes this question a reliable trick question at any pub quiz. The reflex toward large, well-known countries is understandable, but in this case completely wrong.

In many countries, women’s suffrage only gained momentum after the First World War, though the timing varied considerably from country to country. This is illustrated, among other things, by the overview from Atria on women’s suffrage in the Netherlands. The Equal Opportunities Council for Men and Women confirms this broader pattern: voting rights for women spread across the world in waves, with smaller countries on the periphery of the then-dominant political power centres remarkably often being the first to move.

New Zealand fits that picture exactly. Far from London and Washington, but ahead of them both.