which country gave women the vote first

New Zealand is widely recognized as the first self‑governing country to give women the right to vote in national (parliamentary) elections, in 1893.

Key point in one glance

• Country: New Zealand

• Year women gained the vote: 1893 (for national parliamentary elections).

• Scope: All adult women could vote in parliamentary elections, though they could not yet stand for Parliament.

Why New Zealand is counted “first”

Historians usually add an important qualifier: “first self‑governing country to give women the vote in national elections.”

Earlier cases either were not fully independent states, applied only locally, or limited the vote to a narrow group of women (for example, property owners).

A few earlier milestones that sometimes cause confusion:

• Isle of Man (1881): Gave voting rights to some women property owners, but it is a Crown dependency, not an independent country.

• Various small entities (like the short‑lived commune of Franceville in the Pacific): experimented with broader suffrage but were not clearly recognized independent states.

What came next

• South Australia (then a self‑governing British colony) followed in 1895, granting women both the vote and the right to stand for election.

• Finland (then an autonomous Grand Duchy) became the first in Europe to grant women full voting and candidacy rights in 1906.

So, when people ask “which country gave women the vote first?” , the standard historically grounded answer is New Zealand in 1893 , with the understanding that this means the first self‑governing country to give (nearly) all adult women the parliamentary vote.

TL;DR: New Zealand was the first self‑governing country to grant women the right to vote in national elections, in 1893; earlier experiments were either local, limited, or not fully independent.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.