Ronna from Jackson, Wyoming, asks about the word suffrage, meaning “the right to vote.” It goes back to the Latin word suffragium, which in ancient Rome meant a “voting tablet,” but beyond that, this word’s origins are murky. In the U.S., women pushing for the right to vote a century ago were known as suffragists; in Britain, they were derisively referred to with the diminutive, suffragette. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Origin of Suffrage”
Hello, welcome to A Way with Words.
Hey, Grant. Hey, Martha. This is Rana.
Hi, Rana. Welcome to the show.
Hello, Rana. Where are you calling us from?
I’m calling from Jackson, Wyoming.
Excellent.
Welcome. What’s up?
Hey, I have a question for you about the word suffrage.
Suffrage.
Wanted to know where it came from, what its origins were.
And this came up because living in Wyoming, we celebrated the 150th anniversary of women’s suffrage here last year.
We’re the equality state, the first state or territory that offered women the right to vote of all the other states.
So that came up quite a bit last year, and I’m just curious about that word.
Well, suffrage is a really interesting word, a couple of surprises with it.
It’s had several different meanings over the years.
But the biggest surprise for me was that it doesn’t have anything to do with suffering.
For the longest time, I thought it had to do with suffering.
Yeah, that was what I was thinking.
And I thought, no, that can’t be right.
And then I was thinking maybe it had to do with allowing, you know, like Jesus said, suffer the little children to come to me.
So suffer the women to write the vote.
There you go.
Right.
And I looked it up in my unabridged dictionary, which is pretty old.
Yeah.
And it said, like, from the Latin suffrageum, a voting tablet or something?
Yeah, yeah, suffragium.
Yeah, which back in ancient Rome could mean a ballot or a voting tablet, as you said.
It may come from an even older word that means a broken piece of tile used as a ballot, which is how you did it in antiquity.
That’s actually where we get the word ostracism in English, because it comes from the Greek word ostraca for tile pieces that were used to vote somebody out of the city.
Anyway, in terms of suffrage, the Latin word suffragium eventually gave us the term for this right to vote.
You see that in the 18th century. You see suffrage being used with various adjectives to describe different systems of voting.
Like working class suffrage and universal suffrage and that kind of thing, and eventually women’s suffrage.
And another thing that surprised me about this term is the difference between a suffragist and a suffragette.
Yes.
Which is super interesting.
Did you ever think about that?
No, I didn’t.
There’s a difference?
Yeah, yeah.
You may remember the old Mary Poppins movie in, what was it, the early 1960s?
There was a little subplot about family members being part of the suffragettes.
And there was a song that went, well done, sister suffragette, which seems really positive.
But the original term suffragist was somebody who simply advocated for voting rights.
And then a sarcastic journalist in Britain started using the term suffragette to make fun of women who were trying to get the right to vote.
And some women adopted that term suffragette as, you know, the way that groups adopted derogatory term.
They embraced it to control it, right?
Yeah, yeah.
But generally, it was a negative term, sort of, you know, making fun of women trying to get the right to vote with this sort of diminutive suffix.
And so in the United States, suffragist was the term that was only ever widely used, and suffragette was more common in the UK.
Oh, so the word suffrage does go back to that old Latin term?
Yeah, suffragium.
And we don’t really know the origin, but yeah, that’s it.
Okay.
Wow.
Well, thank you both very much. And I will try to keep suffragist in my mind for the U.S., for those people that wanted the right to vote.
And that’s for people of color as well.
It really got associated specifically with women. The whole notion of suffrage now, I think, is associated with that women’s movement.
Right. Everything else was just voting rights. When it started referring to other disenfranchised communities, it just was voting rights.
Mm—
Okay.
Well, thank you very much.
I enjoy the show so much, and you two are delightful.
Oh, thank you very much.
Thanks for calling.
It’s a great question, and congratulations again to Wyoming.
And we love hearing from Wyoming, so call us again sometime, all right?
You bet.
Take care.
All right.
Thanks, Ronald.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
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