| A Game of Queens: Women in Politics |

"A truly equal world would be one where women ran half our countries and companies and men ran half our homes."

Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead

Innumerable women all over the world have sacrificed their homes and lives to achieve equality between men and women. They struggled to accomplish this feat by first earning the distinction of being acknowledged as people, then progressed to gaining the right to vote, and continue on fighting to be given an equal chance to participate in politics.

War of any kind is a horrific and miserable event to happen to an individual. However, for women war came as the stepping stone, which could be used to help them gain their individual rights. It was the female populace who abandoned their skirts and aprons and donned pants and hard helmets to help their fellow men fighting overseas. It were women who created the bullets, packaged their food and water and became their backbone when the men became overwhelmed with despair.

After tasting the newly found liberation, to expect women to go back into the domestic life was highly unreasonable.

Thus, began the Women's Suffrage Movement.

United Kingdom: The campaign for suffrage in the U.K. began in the 1800s. At the time the right to vote was dependent upon an individual's income and the value of their property. Because women were not allowed to inherit or lay claim to property of any kind, voting was a matter far out of their hands. However, through a series of reform movements, they won the battle. In1918, a coalition government passed the Representation of the People Act 1918, enfranchising women over the age of 30 who met minimum property qualifications. Ten years later, in 1928, the Conservative government passed the Representation of the People (Equal Franchise) Act giving the vote to all women over the age of 21.

The vote did not immediately change social circumstances. With the economic recession during the World Wars, women were the most vulnerable sector of the workforce. Some women who held jobs prior to the war were obliged to forfeit them to returning soldiers, and others were excessed.

But the fire had been ignited and reforms had the backing of that female crowd which was eager to rule like a matriarch. After all, a Queen was ruling this nation to begin with.

The women of pre-Revolutionary France were considered passive citizens, their personhood a myth and like a herd of cattle their course was determined by men.

United States of America: The Women's Suffrage Movement has been a long and arduous battle in the U.S. Founded in 1848 by Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the right to vote will not be granted for at least another century.

In earlier times, women's legal standing was fundamentally governed by their marital status. A married woman had no separate legal identity from that of her husband. Women could not vote, serve on juries, or hold public office. According to the Supreme Court, they were not "persons" under the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which in words guarantees equal protection under the law.

In the first decade and a half of the 20thcentury, the women's suffrage campaign gained momentum in the United States.

Women participating in both World Wars helped them to increase their potentialities in the public sphere and prove to the world that when put to proper use, they too can be just as fierce and powerful as their male counterparts. The time had come for them to stand by their fellow men and look them straight in the eye.

Even the possibility of a woman president was being widely discussed, something that would have been unthinkable in 1900.

The age old custom of foot binding in China was a farce in the name of welfare. Their feet were caged, their selves curbed and their progression was a far-fetched fiction.

India: Women in India had faced many hardships under the patriarchal rule. Being burned alive as a religious custom when one becomes a widow, to becoming a victim of female infanticide for families who are looking for sons to carry lineages, to women having to sacrifice their education and food rations so that their male counterparts could succeed. Women are continuing to fight to be treated equally but they gained a crucial right to their persons in 1947, when upon being separated from the U.K., all persons living India were granted the right to vote.

Prior to universal suffrage, provincial legislatures had granted women the right to vote. Madras was the first to grant women's suffrage in 1921, but only to those men and women who owned land property.

But in a country whose woman prime minister was dubbed as The Iron Lady, it was hard to keep female populace away from the life of running the nation.

Trivia to Think Over

In as late as December 2015, women in Saudi Arabia finally achieved the right to vote. The only country in the world which still does not offer universal suffrage remains Vatican City. Not even all men have the right to vote in Vatican City, as the only people who have voting rights are cardinals (and the only voting is for a new Pope). Because only men can become cardinals, this effectively means that no woman has a say in the election of a new Pope.

What the Numbers Say

According to recent UN Women Statistics:

As of June 2016, only 22.8 per cent of national parliamentarians were women. A slow increase from 11.3 per cent in 1995.

As of September 2016, ten women are serving as Head of State and nine are serving as Head of Government.

Rwanda had the highest number of women parliamentarians worldwide. Women there have won 63.8 per cent of seats in the lower house.

Globally, there are 38 States in which women account for less than 10 per cent of parliamentarians in single or lower houses. As of June 2016, including 4 chambers with there were no women at all.

As is evident, through the course of history, women have been considered a backward, weak and marginalized social group, not as one half of humankind.

It can, therefore, be concluded that, whether a woman wants to break free of the role of homemaker and nurturer thrust upon her or not, women have been striving to show up in the public domains, forever searching for a medium to express their presence as first an individual, and then, as women.

The political arena was, has been, and continues to be the game-changer for the dynamic game that is women's struggle for equal rights.

|| 18shabbo |||| ..Ramya.. || asmaanixx |||| thegameison || Artist_Forever || verisimilitude || .Lonewalker. ||

"For me, a better democracy is a democracy where women do not only have the right to vote & to elect but to be elected."

- Michele Bachelet, president of Chile

Michele Bachelet successfully depicts the picture of an ideal democracy in the above quote. It is an unpleasant surprise though that in spite of comprising over 50 percent of the World population, women are more than often underrepresented as voters, political leaders and elected officials.

Democracy cannot truly deliver for all of its citizens if half of the population remains underrepresented in the political arena. Although the number of women government ministers has risen, it is a slow and sluggish progress.

Women's suffrage, in earliest days, produced neither the upending of the social order nor a wave of new legislation. Gender norms proved stubborn. Though the picture changed in later years through revived feminist movements that were fresh & could successfully break the concept of "gender suitability".

A new dimension of women in politics emerged in recent years all over the world as more and more women have now understood their rights.

The fight in United Kingdom:

How It Happened

One of the most important aspects of women's suffrage in Britain was the sheer number of organisations established in favour of women's suffrage and the factionalised nature of the movement.

Both Parliament UK and the British Library state that there were seventeen societies in favour of suffrage for women that came together in the late 19th century to form the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies, most probably in 1897. According to Parliament UK, by 1913 nearly five hundred regional suffrage societies had joined, making the NUWSS a most influential alliance.

The 1960s saw dramatic shifts in attitudes and values led by youth. It was a worldwide phenomenon, in which British rock musicians, especially The Beatles, played an international role. Sexual morals changed & there was a rise in the incidence of divorce and abortion, and a resurgence of the women's liberation movement, whose campaigning helped secure the Equal Pay Act and the Sex Discrimination Act in 1975. 21st century so far has been proved to be a brighter period for women politics in Britain. Since 2007, Harriet Harman has been Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, the UK's current opposition party.

Theresa May is the current Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

Women in American Politics:

How It Went

This was a country where women were burnt pertaining their Witchy side and the term housewife was used to represent that section which was never seen, only used.

Over the course of the nineteenth century, however, women had pushed at the boundaries of their domestic assignment, both by choice and necessity. They invented forms of politics outside the electoral arena by establishing voluntary associations and building other institutions in response to unmet social needs. In the 1830s, when women like Sarah and Angelina Grimk began to speak publicly against slavery, the mere appearance of a woman as a public speaker was considered scandalous. By 1900, however, women appeared in all manner of public settings.

Following their victory when the 19th Amendmentwas passed, leaders of the National American Woman Suffrage Association joyfully dismantledtheir organization and reassembled as the newly formed League of Women Voters.

By mid-century the conditions that would stimulate another surge of activism had emerged. During the Second World War women joined the labour force in unprecedented numbers. Perhaps most significant, by1950 it was normative for married women and women over thirty-five to be in the workforce. In the 1960s and 1970s, women's activism was part of a wider "rights revolution" that eliminated most legally sanctioned discrimination based on race and gender. The slogan "the personal is political" became the ideological pivot of the second wave of American feminism.

In 1984, for the first time a major political party nominated a woman (Representative Geraldine Ferraro) to run for vice president. By the end of the century, women not only enjoyed a wide range of civic rights, but had also made serious advances in electoral politics at local and state levels.

Hilary Clinton created history, almost a hundred years later, by becoming theDemocratic Party's nominee for President of the United States in the 2016 elections.

Women's progression to Parliament:

How It Happened In India

From being treated like dirt to respected as a fellow human, the women of India came a long way. The likes of Sarojini Naidu gave their blood to ripe fruit of the Independent Nation.

After India's independence from Britain, the Indian Constitution in 1950 officially granted all women and men universal suffrage.

This is enshrined in Article 326 in our constitution. India is a parliamentary system with two houses Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha and women consistently held 4-5 percent of the seats in the Lok Sabha until the 1980s when their numbers increased to 7-8 percent.

In the less powerful Rajya Sabha, women have held between 7 percent and 10 percent of the places. The number of elected women compares favourably with other countries.

From Union Health Minister to Education Minister and from the President of a leading party to the President of the country the female politicians in India have had a success rate higher than many powerful nations.

However, it is not remarkable from a historical perspective. The politics of agitation brought women into all aspects of the freedom movement where they demonstrated their bravery. Following Independence these women found it difficult to make the transition from the politics of agitation to electoral politics.

Slowly, but surely, women has embarked upon the way to victory!

Nazar na lage tum logon ko. :') *puts nimbu mirchhi* :* <3

as usual amazing thread girls. The write ups are top notch and informative without being too complex. Congrats!🤗