One hundred years of
women’s voting rights
voting
rights
The 100
th
anniversary of uni-
versal female suffrage in Norway was in 2013. It
is being celebrated, discussed and highlighted,
notably at the national women’s conference
that was arranged by UiT at the end of August,
where women’s participation in the national
and international political scene was the theme.
One of the speakers at the conference was a
professor of history and leader of the Norwegian
Historical Data Centre (NHDC), Gunnar
Thorvaldsen. NHDC is one of the university’s
great treasure troves and home to a number of
digitised historical censuses. These censuses
tell us not only when women gained the right
to vote, but also who and where – whose great
grandmother and great-great grandmother
actually got to send in their ballot in Tromsø
and Vardø in 1907 and in 1913. Well, almost.
“There are no complete records of who had
the right to vote, and the records of those who
actually did vote are even less comprehensive.
However, we have developed a method that
brings us closer to the truth when we evaluate
the information found in old censuses,” says
Thorvaldsen.
Unmarried and indigent women excluded
In 1907, women over 25 were given limited
national suffrage, after having gained limited
municipal suffrage in 1901. Married women
with a certain income – 400 kroner in urban
areas and 300 kroner in rural areas – were given
the right to vote. This was also true of women
whose husbands met these requirements. This
means that unmarried women and women
of limited means were still excluded, with the
thought behind this limitation being that one
had to earn civil rights.
“The 1910 census includes information
about the profession of every person who was
registered. In 1911, Statistics Norway sent out
questionnaires to tax offices across the nation,
and received additional data about incomes for
different professions for both men and women
in towns and in rural areas,” Thorvaldsen
explains.
“Based on the information on professions
from 1910 and the average income for different
professions from 1911, we can figure out who
should have been able to vote in 1907. Some
would naturally have been in a different living
situation in 1907, but with this method we can
get fairly close to the truth about potential suf-
fragettes in 1907,” he says.
“For example, we can see that Elen Dorthea
Bang would have had the right to vote when
she died in 1911. She lived on Rektor Steens
Street number 13 in Tromsø and was married
to shipmaster Karl Bang. In 1911, mates had a
minimum wage of 600 kroner and earned on
average 1759 kroner, so she was well within the
limits of a suffragette. However, Marte Sofie
Isaksen from Nordreisa, who also died in 1911,
may not have been able to vote. Her husband,
Jørgen Danielsen, was a miner in Salangen, and
Marte didn’t have the opportunity to document
his income where she lived in Nordreisa.
The system was faulty
One of the reasons for collecting income data
in 1911 was civil suffrage – the government
wanted to see how the income requirement
affected the voting population. They found
that the average income for female servants in
rural areas was 206 kroner and 395 kroner in
urban areas, meaning that the systemworked as
intended. The political rationale for the income
requirement was that you shouldn’t be able to
vote if you were financially dependent on some-
one else, because this might have an unwanted
influence on how you voted.
“But the system didn’t work very well in
practice,” says Thorvaldsen. “There were unrea-
sonable differences.”
“First of all, incomes varied greatly from
place to place – because of the seasonal fishing
industry, the average income was higher in
the north than in fishing districts on the west
coast, meaning that the north had more voters.
Three hundred kroner in Austlandet (in East-
ern Norway) didn’t mean the same thing as 300
kroner in Tromsø,” he said.
“And imagine a city like Tromsø, where the
city limits followed city streets. If you lived on
one side of the street and earned 380 kroner,
you couldn’t vote, but living around the corner,
outside the city limits, you could earn 330 kro-
ner and vote. In other words, you could move
across the street and lose your right to vote,”
Thorvaldsen said.
“This was impossible to enforce, some-
thing women’s rights activists knew and used
actively. They went along with the 1907 deci-
sion as a compromise, and came to realise that
the system was like a ripe fruit, ready to fall,”
says Thorvaldsen.
A huge split between classes
The struggle for women’s suffrage began as
part of a general struggle for liberation in the
1800s. The first women’s rights activists came
from the United States, the UK and France, and
the international effort quickly struck a chord
with women in Norway. Several different asso-
ciations were founded around the turn of the
century, but it was the
Landskvindestemmerets
foreningen
(LKSF, the National Women’s
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