The Emir of Kuwait has backed female suffrage in the face of strong opposition from tribal and Islamist factions in parliament, the BBC's Gulf correspondent Julia Wheeler reports.

BBC: NEWS | Middle East | Women appointed to Kuwait council

Yet Australians are proud of their democratic inheritance: the world's first parliamentary elections by secret ballot (in Victoria in 1856), female suffrage (in South Australia in 1894) and so on.

ECONOMIST: God��s own republic?

The era was indeed marked by an unbuttoning of Victorian sexual mores, by the activities of some brave if marginal feminists (such as the British campaigners for women's suffrage), by increasing female employment and by a decline in the importance of male muscular strength.

ECONOMIST: Europe 1900-14

It was considered impolite for women to play an instrument in public, and yet in the teens around the time of the suffrage movement, women formed in America all-female, all-saxophone bands of four, eight, 12, 20 saxophones.

NPR: Saxophone's History as 'The Devil's Horn'