*King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia on Sunday granted women the right to vote and run in future municipal elections, the biggest change in a decade for women in a puritanical kingdom that practices strict gender separation, including banning women from driving.
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From nytimes.
Yay! Catching up to the nineteenth century! 
I wouldn’t sell life insurance to women who are among the first to run for office.
Does anyone know how voting is conducted in Saudi Arabia? Are votes counted electronically or on paper? Do you suppose women will be intimidated into not registering to vote?
Strange choice. I figured he’d make it so that a woman counts as three-fifths of a person for voting purposes or something.
Actually, it was only New Zealand that gave women the vote in the 19th century.
Australia was the second country to grant full female suffrage, in 1902, at the start of the 20th century.
Canada: 1919
USA: 1920
UK: 1927
I don’t know if I would use the word ‘puritanical.’
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Even people here do not know. We have only had one election for city councils. THe Saudis are very new at this.
Would singing Hossanas count as a provocation?
Remember that it was only in 1990 that Switzerland achieved universalsuffrage, although I’ll give them that they did try to get it together in 1971.
Obviously the restrictions on women in Saudi Arabia are completely absurd, but this whole “Women? Voting?!” thing is embarrassingly new for most of the planet.
Native people in Canada didn’t get the right to vote without forfeiting their treaty rights until the 1960’s; I’m not entirely sure what my point is, but it seemed germane when I started this post.
Of course you are right but the whole voting thing is pretty new for everybody. One hundred years ago women couldn’t vote. Three hundred years ago nobody got a vote except for a very few of the most powerful people in a nation. Other than a few attempts at republics in history, the notion that the people should have a say in what their betters did was absurd.
It is interesting that they granted suffrage so quickly then. One election to see how it went, not too bad…give women the right to vote. Seems down right progressive of them.
The link was broken, but I am curious about this since I was living in Switzerland in 1971 when women were given voting rights for federal elections. I think most of the cantons already allowed women to vote but a few of the Neanderthal cantons (I think that included both Appenzells) did not. I assume that what happened in 1990 was the troglodyte cantons were forced to go along.
What I find more upsetting – besides the notion that a King “grants” a natural right to one half of the population – is the idea that saying “vote” and “Saudi Arabia” in one sentence implies some notion of “democratic” when, the fact is, it could not be further from the truth.
And truth is that so called “municipal votes” are totally inconsequential and irrelevant side shows to a dog taking a piss.
So, just like one could go on and flatten the Kingdom and bury it in sand (volunteering for a driver of some big machinery in case this goes through) and nothing would change in the immediate region and the world (except maybe less demand for underage sex, slave labour from other MUSLIM countries and oversized yachts) so will life go on in SA all the same as it did before “granting” a vote to women.
That a travesty for a country such as this exists as a “dignified” UN member may alleviate some of the desperation Palestinians feel these days.
Great. They can now vote, run for public office but they’re going to still need a ride to work.
My WAG would be that they tell their husbands how they want to vote and the husbands vote for them. 
Australia as a country and voting jurisdiction did not exist in the nineteeth century. However two of the colonies that went on to become Australian states did grant voting rights to woman in the nineteenth century: South Australia in 1894 and Western Australia in 1899.
I’d think it’d be the other way around: the husbands tell their wives how they will vote.
Some of the individual states of the USA like Wyoming and Colorado had women’s suffrage in the late 1800s
Yes that’s all very nice.
You got my sammich yet?