On September 19, 1893, Governor Lord Glasgow gave royal assent to the Electoral Act 1893, and every adult woman in New Zealand, Maori and Pakeha alike, became entitled to vote in parliamentary elections. New Zealand was a self-governing colony within the British Empire, and no self-governing country had done this before. Corsica, the Isle of Man and Pitcairn had enfranchised women earlier, and none of them was a country.
The campaign ran twenty years. It began with the Married Women's Property Acts of the 1860s and 1870s, which let married women own property, and it was driven by the Women's Christian Temperance Union, which came to New Zealand in 1885 and treated suffrage as the way to get prohibition. Kate Sheppard, who had been born in Liverpool and emigrated as a child, became the franchise superintendent in 1887 and was the best organiser in the country. She ran petitions, wrote pamphlets, and taught herself enough about the machinery of Parliament to know which members to work on.
Three big petitions went in: 9,000 signatures in 1891, 20,000 in 1892, and nearly 32,000 in 1893, which was about a quarter of the adult European population. Each time the bill passed the lower house and was thrown out in the upper, or was amended to death. In 1893 opponents tried a new amendment and it carried in the upper house by two votes, and in response two members who had voted for it changed sides to wreck their own victory, which let the bill pass 20 to 18.
The temperance connection is what made it winnable and what had been holding it back. Women's suffrage in New Zealand was sold partly as a way to get the liquor trade regulated, and the liquor interest financed opposition petitions in reply. It was also opposed by many who thought women would not use the vote, and by liberal members who feared that women voters would be conservative.
They were used. About 85 per cent of eligible women registered and about 90,000 voted in the election of 1893, out of an electorate of roughly 300,000. Sheppard came home. Women could not stand for the House of Representatives until 1919, and Elizabeth McCombs became the first woman elected, in 1933. Suffrage spread from here: Australia followed in 1902, Finland in 1906, Norway in 1913.