On May 28, 1952, after many decades of fierce struggle, Greek women finally won the right to stand for election to Parliament. Yet, it took more than two decades for the principle of gender equality to be explicitly codified into law under the Constitution of 1975.
Nearly seventy years after that initial legislative victory, history was made when magistrate Katerina Sakellaropoulou became the first-ever female President of Greece in 2020. Sakellaropoulou aptly described her nomination for the five-year term as “honoring both justice and the modern Greek woman.”
Kallirhoe Parren: The Spark of the Movement
The pioneer who initiated this struggle for equal rights was Kallirhoe Parren (1861–1940), widely considered the mother of Greek feminism. By establishing the country’s first women’s newspaper, Efimeris ton Kyrion (Women’s Journal), in 1887, Parren effectively launched the feminist movement in Greece. She worked closely with European and American suffragettes to champion basic civil rights for women, most notably the right to vote.
At the time, the European continent was moving at different speeds; women in Finland granted the right to vote in 1906, followed by Norway in 1917, Germany in 1919, and Great Britain in 1928. In Greece, however, the establishment fought back fiercely.
From Ridicule to Restrictions
Before 1930, the notion of Greek women voting was widely derided. Contemporary newspaper editorials wrote sarcastically about the movement, framing a woman casting a ballot as a dangerous prospect to be avoided at all costs.
The primary argument against women’s suffrage was as bizarre as it was sexist: opponents claimed that women were hysterical, illogical, and unpredictable during their menstrual cycles. As one prominent editor mockingly questioned, since the cycles of all Greek women did not coincide, “what would the election date be?”
In 1930, Greek women were finally granted a conditional right to vote. However, it came with two strict caveats: they had to be at least 30 years old, and they had to have completed elementary school—a level of education that was a rare privilege for women of that era.
The First Polls and Social Backlash
Greek women exercised their right to vote for the first time in the municipal elections of February 11, 1934. Yet, the turnout reflected a deep societal divide. The Athens voter rolls registered only 2,655 women, and a mere 439 actually went to the polls.
Even among women of the upper social classes, voting was often looked down upon as unladylike. The prominent theater actress Marika Kotopouli famously refused to participate, declaring that voting was only “for ugly women and those who did not want to bear children.”
Post-War Triumphs and Political Milestones
It was only after the dual upheavals of World War II and the Greek Civil War that the issue of women’s rights returned to the forefront of national discourse. Full voting and electoral rights in parliamentary elections were finally granted to all women on May 28, 1952. Despite this, women could not participate in the November elections of that year because the state voter rolls had not been updated in time.
The true breakthrough came in a 1953 by-election in Thessaloniki. Eleni Skoura (Hellenic Alert party), running alongside Virginia Zanna (Liberal Party) as the first female parliamentary candidates, won her race to become the first female Member of Parliament in Greece.
Progress accelerated during the general election of February 19, 1956, when Lina Tsaldari (National Radical Union) and Vaso Thanasekou (Democratic Union) were elected to the House. Lina Tsaldari went on to break further ground by becoming the first female minister in Greek history, heading the Ministry of Social Welfare under the Constantine Karamanlis administration. That same year, Maria Desylla was elected on the island of Corfu, becoming Greece’s first female mayor.
The Greek women’s movement ultimately achieved its crowning institutional victory decades later, when the principle of absolute gender equality was permanently enshrined in the landmark 1975 Constitution.
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