Women's rights

women's rights refers to freedoms and entitlements of women and girls of all ages. These rights may or may not be institutionalized, ignored or suppressed by law, local custom, and behavior in a particular society. These liberties are grouped together and differentiated from broader notions of human rights because they often differ from the freedoms inherently possessed by or recognized for men and boys, and because activists for this issue claim an inherent historical and traditional bias against the exercise of rights by women and girls.

Issues commonly associated with notions of women's rights include, though are not limited to, '''the right: to bodily integrity and autonomy; to vote (universal suffrage); to hold public office; to work; to fair wages or equal pay'''; to own property; to education; to serve in the military or be conscripted; to enter into legal contracts; and to have marital, parental and religious rights. Women and their supporters have campaigned and in some places continue to campaigned for the same rights as men.

Suffrage, the right to vote:
The term '''women's suffrage refers to the economic and political reform movement aimed at extending suffrage — the right to vote — to women'''. The movement's modern origins lie in France in the 18th century. Of currently existing independent countries, New Zealand was the first to give women the right to vote. However when this happened in 1893, New Zealand was not a "country", in the sense of being an independent nation state, but a mostly self-governing colony. Places with similar status which granted women the vote before New Zealand include Wyoming Territory (1869). Other possible contenders for first "country" to grant female suffrage include the Corsican Republic, the Isle of Man (1881), the Pitcairn Islands, Franceville and Tavolara, but some of these had brief existences as independent states and others were not clearly independent. A contestant for being the first independent nation to grant the right to vote for women would be Sweden, where '''women were in fact allowed to vote during the age of liberty (1718-1771)''', although this right was far from applying to women in general. Voting rights for women were '''introduced into international law in 1948 when the UN adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights'''. Women’s suffrage is also explicitly stated as a right under the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, adopted by the United Nations in 1979.