A suffragette was a member of early 20th-century militant women's organizations, primarily in the UK, who advocated for the right to vote in public elections. Distinct from peaceful "suffragists," they used direct action, including civil disobedience and property destruction, to demand political equality. 

The term was originally coined as a diminutive slur by a British journalist in 1906 to mock female activists. However, the activists embraced and reclaimed the label, using it proudly to define their radical wing.

Women were excluded from voting in ancient Greece and republican Rome, as well as in the few democracies that had emerged in Europe by the end of the 18th century. When the franchise was widened, as it was in the United Kingdom in 1832, women continued to be denied all voting rights. The question of women’s voting rights finally became an issue in the 19th century, and the struggle was particularly intense in Great Britain and the United States, but those countries were not the first to grant women the right to vote, at least not on a national basis. By the early years of the 20th century, women had won the right to vote in national elections in New Zealand (1893), Australia (1902), Finland (1906), and Norway (1913). In Sweden and the United States they had voting rights in some local elections. 

USA

The State of New York was ground zero for the women’s suffragette movement. In 1848, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott and other like-minded women convened the first Woman’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York.

“That it is the duty of the women of this country to secure to themselves their sacred right to the elective franchise.” — Woman’s Rights Convention