Sisters In Arms Britain was neither the first country, nor the last, to give women the vote. It was one part of a global movement. Speaking at a meeting of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance in Amsterdam in 1908, the US suffrage and feminist campaigner Carrie Chapman Catt called Britain the ‘storm-centre’ of the women’s movement. In 1908, it may have seemed that Britain was at the centre of the suffrage movement, but the UK was not the first country (by any means) to enfranchise women, nor the first country to have a suffrage movement. Britain was but one part of a worldwide campaign.