Many queued for several hours at segregated polling stations in the suffocating heat, some after being dropped off by chauffeur-driven cars. Candidates’ representatives used parasols to shield voters from the sun.

Twenty women, many of them Western-educated and with prominent roles in society, were among 252 candidates contesting 50 seats after an animated campaign that focused on electoral reform and corruption.

“Even if I get only one vote, it will still be testimony to tell the men and women of my country that I took on the challenge and that I have entered history,” Fatima al-Mutairi, a candidate, proclaimed as she arrived at a polling station sporting a Kuwaiti flag-coloured scarf over her black abaya.

Only a few women were seen as having any realistic chance of winning, given the political inexperience of the candidates, stiff competition from experienced male incumbents and the conservative outlook of many voters, including other women.

Yet even if none is elected, women are now confident of transforming the politics of the conservative, American-backed oil-rich emirate. Since they were enfranchised a year ago, women have gone from being politically voiceless to a political force that cannot be ignored.

Because women comprise 57 per cent of the 340,000 eligible voters, even conservative Muslim deputies who had opposed women’s suffrage found themselves appealing plaintively for their support in recent weeks, and were left fielding awkward questions from well-informed women voters. Women’s issues will now finally be on the table.

Some women were expected to echo their husband’s vote. But many were also thought likely to follow an independent path as their counterparts did in Bahrain, where women were allowed to vote and run for office in 2002, although no women candidates were elected.

Because many Kuwaitis travel abroad in the summer when temperatures soar to nearly 50C, Kuwait’s private, no-frills Jazeera Airways recently offered to fly women home for free under a “Come Home to Vote” initiative.

However, some reactionary elements had not reconciled themselves to women voting was clear from the defacement of campaign posters where female features were scrawled over with whiskery additions. Some candidates also said they had faced intimidation, with one claiming that death threats had forced her to withdraw.

While some women candidates appeared at rallies in Western clothes and heads uncovered, others sported more conservative dress and chose not to print their picture on campaign posters.

The elections followed the liveliest campaign in the 44 years of Kuwait’s parliamentary history, with the opposition striving to boost its reformist agenda, including cutting the number of constituencies as a means of curbing corruption.

Opposition candidates alleged during the campaign that vote-buying by their pro-Government rivals was rife. It was claimed that designer handbags brimming with cash and even air-conditioning units were offered to secure votes.

Women can vote and stand for election in four of the six countries in the largely patriarchal Arab states of the Persian Gulf region. They are banned in Saudi Arabia, where women’s rights remain limited.

Kuwait’s parliament is considered to be the feistiest, with the assembly often disagreeing in robust fashion with the Cabinet, where most posts are held by members of the ruling family.

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