Female Suffrage in France

by [deleted]

I'm in class about WWI, and we're currently discussing its democratizing effect on society and how it was a catalyst for women finally gaining the right to vote in America in 1919. What I don't understand is why women's suffrage took so long in France. At the time, France was was known as very socially progressive, and they were one of the first countries in Europe to introduce universal male suffrage. So why did female suffrage take so much longer than the US or Britain? I know the Napoleonic code stripped women of virtually all rights, but there was a flurry of social change around WWI, and the term "feminism" even started in France. Why also is it that up until the 1990s women had very little representation in French politics?

Edit: 1990s not 1890s.

jerome_circonflexe

There was actually quite some activity towards women's suffrage in interwar France; for example, Léon Blum's government made a proposal for this (Léon Blum had probalby the best feminist pedigree in that time period), which was voted by the (left-wing) Assemblée nationale, but rejected by the (right-wing) upper house (this being one of the few ways it could actively impede government policy). There were other propositions, coming from the far-right, such as giving the vote to war widows (as a compensation for the vote of their defunct husband).

A standard argument against women suffrage was that:

  1. men were better educated than women (this went back to the late XIXth century and had, among other, military reasons),
  2. women were thought to be more church-going than men,
  3. therefore, the Radicals (= anticlerical - but socially conservative - center-left, and in control of a lot of parliamentary majorities) thought that women would at best vote like their husbands - and, at worst, like their priest.