Finland Elects the World’s First Women Members of Parliament

On 15 and 16 March 1907, voters across the Grand Duchy of Finland cast ballots in an unprecedented legislative election. The contest established a modern unicameral assembly of two hundred members chosen through universal and equal suffrage for citizens over twenty-four years of age. Under this new framework, Finland became the first territory in Europe to extend both voting privileges and the right to stand for public office to women. In earlier years, universal female voting rights had been introduced only in New Zealand and South Australia, and Finland's reform was the first anywhere to give all women the right to stand for a national parliament.

The creation of this legislature originated from the parliamentary reform agreed upon in 1906, which superseded the ancient Diet of the Estates. That older institution, rooted in the centuries of Swedish reign, had limited political participation to four estates comprising the nobility, the clergy, the burghers, and the peasantry. Following the widespread unrest of the 1905 general strike in Finland, which mirrored concurrent turmoil and the creation of the Duma in the Russian Empire after the Russo-Japanese War, Emperor Nicholas II sanctioned sweeping political concessions. The reform, agreed upon by all Finnish political factions, ended the first period of Russification that had begun in 1899.