Denmark Grants Women Voting Rights in New Constitution

Context

Denmark’s 1849 constitution had established a limited parliamentary system but restricted the franchise to men meeting property and tax qualifications, leaving women and many lower-income groups outside formal political participation. By the late nineteenth century, a growing women’s movement began pressing for change through petitions, public meetings, and organized pressure on candidates. The Danish Women’s Society, founded in 1871, and later groups such as the National Association for Women’s Suffrage became central to these efforts, drawing thousands of members by the 1910s.

What Happened

Parliamentary proposals for women’s suffrage had been introduced repeatedly since 1886, when Liberal politician and activist Fredrik Bajer first raised the issue in the Folketing. The lower house repeatedly approved modest measures, only for the conservative-dominated Landsting to block them. Momentum built after the 1901 shift toward parliamentary government and the 1908 grant of municipal suffrage. In 1915 the Rigsdag finally passed a comprehensive constitutional revision that extended national voting rights to women and certain categories of servants on the same terms as men.

Aftermath

On the day of the signing, more than thirty women’s organizations staged a procession of 10,000 to 20,000 participants through Copenhagen to Amalienborg Palace, where King Christian X signed the amended Constitutional Act. The event received widespread press coverage and was framed by organizers as a public affirmation of the new rights rather than a gesture of thanks to authorities. Women first exercised the national franchise in the 1918 general election, more than doubling the electorate.

Legacy

The 1915 reform completed a major step in Denmark’s democratization by incorporating roughly half the adult population into the electorate and served as a precedent for the other Nordic countries. It also helped legitimize broader social and labor legislation in subsequent decades. Historians view the amendment as the decisive break with the male-only political order established in 1849, even though some economic qualifications on voting persisted until the mid-twentieth century.