ABSTRACT
In “old” Europe, on the eve of World War I, only the women of Norway and Finland had the right to vote in both local and national elections. We should qualify this by noting that even so, Norway imposed certain fiscal conditions on women's suffrage, while Finland, strangely, was more liberal on the national than on the local level, where women had the right to vote but not to run for office. These peculiarities were more exceptional in Europe than in North America, where women at that time were already voting in municipal elections in many states but not yet in federal elections. For Norway and Finland, furthermore, this voting privilege was linked to incidents in recent history, a history in which the movement for women's emancipation, working alongside men, had been very active in achieving national independence. Indeed, at the turn of the century, united around the Lutheran Church, which had a long-established practice of elections to clerical councils, the Finnish nation had succeeded in asserting its autonomy against czarist Russia, just as Norway had regained its independence from Sweden, its old enemy.
