SUFFRAGE.

Although women had campaigned for suffrage since the mid-nineteenth century, voting rights remained a controversial question well into the twentieth. By the outbreak of World War I in 1914 only two European countries, Finland (1906) and Norway (1913), had introduced legislative measures in favor of women's suffrage. And yet during and immediately after World War I women gained the right to vote in a variety of European countries, including Britain, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and the Republic of Ireland. Why did so many women achieve the vote in this period? What was the impact of war? What role did the suffrage movement play and to what extent was the political context of individual countries responsible for the timing and nature of women's enfranchisement?

IDEOLOGICAL DEBATES

During the early twentieth century women's enfranchisement was the subject of passionate debate. Opposition to it remained strong: it was suggested, for example, that their role within the family made women ill-suited to take part in national politics, in particular foreign affairs, and also that activity in the public world "unsexed" women, made them less feminine. Suffragists, however, argued on the grounds of individual rights, natural justice, and women's common humanity with men that women should be allowed to vote. At the same time, in particular after 1900, they also used women's difference from men as a basis for their claim to the franchise. It was argued that women, as nurturers and moral guardians of the family, would bring new qualities into political life and would work for peace, social reforms, and a moral regeneration of society.

These ideological debates were entangled with pragmatic political strategies that proved to be among the main barriers to women's enfranchisement before 1914. As Gisela Bock has argued, it was difficult for women to make a breakthrough in their demands when in most countries not all men had the vote and when democratization was associated with manhood suffrage. In Austria, for example, socialists refused to put their weight behind women's claims for the vote until manhood suffrage had been achieved in 1907. In Britain only two thirds of adult males were entitled to vote even after the franchise was extended in 1884. Thus, when women called for suffrage on the same terms as men, groups that might have been expected to support them on principle—socialists, liberals, and radicals—were suspicious that propertied, middle-class women would be the ones to gain the vote and that they would support conservative groups. For male-dominated parties of the Center and Left, therefore, the needs of class were seen to override those of gender.

WAR, THE CONTEXT FOR CHANGE

The upheavals caused by "total war" did provide the context for change in political, social, and gender structures and relationships. Women were encouraged to support the war effort through employment in nursing, munitions, and other essential war industries as well as through voluntary welfare work. This has led to the common assumption that women subsequently gained the vote as a reward for their war service. Indeed, many prewar suffrage activists believed that women's cooperation in the war effort would demonstrate that they could be as "patriotic" as men and that they were worthy of exercising the franchise. Nonetheless, the notion of reward for war service does not provide a sufficient or convincing explanation for women's enfranchisement. In Britain, for example, only women over the age of thirty were enfranchised in 1918, and yet it was younger women who had been most involved in war work. Frenchwomen, who had played a role similar to that of their counterparts in Britain, did not gain the right to vote until 1944. Indeed, war raised arguments that tended toward the exclusion, rather than the inclusion, of women since patriotic duty was sometimes equated with fighting for one's country. In Britain, for example, it was suggested that military service should be the basis for the franchise, an argument that alarmed male conscientious objectors as well as women suffragists. In France a measure was put forward in 1916 that would have enabled a woman who had lost a close male relative in the war to vote in his place, but it was never adopted. In Belgium, however, the mothers and widows of soldiers were enfranchised in 1919.

WOMEN'S SUFFRAGE IN SELECTED COUNTRIES IN EUROPE

1906 Finland

1913 Norway

1915 Denmark, Iceland

1917 Russia

1918 Austria, Germany, Hungary (restricted 1921), Czechoslovakia, Britain (women over thirty), Republic of Ireland

1919 The Netherlands

1921 Sweden

1928 Britain (all women over twenty-one)

1931 Portugal (restricted to women with secondary or higher education); Spain (lost in 1936)

1944 Bulgaria, France

1945 Italy, Hungary

1948 Belgium

1971 Switzerland

1976 Portugal, Spain

What does seem to be crucial is the extent to which the disruption of war led to the introduction of more democratic political systems or opened up wider franchise debates. New spaces were created for women to be included as full citizens. Women gained the vote in states that were created after the war when the old European empires were dismantled, including Hungary, Poland, Estonia, and Czechoslovakia. They were also enfranchised in Germany and Austria, where democratic republics replaced more authoritarian systems of government. Here pragmatic rather than idealistic reasons were at play. The new governments felt threatened by Bolshevik revolutionaries on the left and conservative, nationalist groups on the right, and "moderate" political parties assumed that women would prove to be a force for stability. In Britain the government's decision to introduce a new franchise reform act to ensure that returning soldiers and sailors would be able to vote provided the occasion for the inclusion of women over thirty. The government was reluctant to accept equal voting rights in a context in which women would have outnumbered men and thought that the enfranchisement of "mothers" would pose far fewer risks. Suffrage campaigners accepted this compromise—even though it undermined their long-standing demand for voting rights for women on the same terms as for men—on the grounds that it was crucial that the principle of women's right, and ability, to vote be acknowledged.

THE ROLE OF THE SUFFRAGE MOVEMENT

Although it was difficult for women to gain the vote when the political context was unfavorable, it is important not to lose sight of the role played by the suffrage movement in contributing toward women's enfranchisement. By itself a strong suffrage movement could not ensure success; for instance, there was an active suffrage campaign in the republics of France and Switzerland, but in both countries women had to wait several decades before they were enfranchised. Conversely, in many countries women had managed to push the suffrage question to the forefront of the political agenda before the war. The campaign had gained momentum in the immediate prewar years as new suffrage organizations were formed and the basis of support widened. In Britain in particular, the development of militant methods attracted publicity to the cause, and the willingness of suffragettes to flout conventions inspired women from across the world to challenge their unequal status. Thus, by the outbreak of war it was claimed by many contemporaries that the argument for women's suffrage had been won—all that was needed was a changed political context in which it could be implemented. Indeed, in the countries noted above there was little opposition when women's suffrage was finally introduced. In Czechoslovakia, for example, women had taken part in the prewar nationalist movement and gained support for women's suffrage from a wide range of political groups, including the liberal nationalist leader Tomáš Masaryk, who was to become president of the postwar republic. In Britain there is no guarantee that women would have been included in the Franchise Bill of 1918 if they had not continued to lobby the government after 1916. It then took sustained pressure from the women's movement before an equal franchise was finally achieved in 1928.

WOMEN'S DIFFERENCE AND
POLITICAL SYSTEMS

Throughout all the franchise debates, political parties constantly raised the issue of women's difference from men to suggest that suffrage could pose a risk. On the one hand, women were viewed by conservatives as likely to be a radical force in politics, and it was feared that a greater public role would disrupt "traditional" family relationships. These fears were fueled by suffragists who had joined the peace movement during the war, since they argued that women needed the vote to have an influence on foreign affairs and that they would work to ensure a peaceful solution to national conflicts. On the other hand, radicals, liberals, and socialists feared that women, largely because of their domestic role, would be a force for conservatism. This was a key issue in France, which alone among the Allied nations failed to enfranchise women at the end of World War I. Although the Chamber of Deputies debated the question and passed a measure of support in 1919, the Senate procrastinated and in 1922 voted against women's suffrage. Many radicals and socialists feared that women would vote for the monarchy, conservatism, and the Catholic Church, and a significant proportion of women suffragists also thought that female voters might endanger the Republic. Again, Bock argues that in France and Switzerland, where all men had enjoyed the vote since the nineteenth century, there was little interest in forming alliances with women to extend the franchise and therefore this also set back the women's cause.

The disruption of gender roles during wartime led to fears that the "traditional" family would be undermined, and it was widely believed that male authority needed to be consolidated in the face of the modern woman, who sought an active role in the public sphere. At the same time, anxieties about population decline and its impact on the state led to a new focus on the importance of motherhood and domesticity. In the interwar years, mass unemployment, the development of conservative and fascist regimes, and the threat of war made it difficult for women who were not enfranchised to achieve the vote, and for others to hold on to, and to extend, the gains that had already been made. Indeed, the right to vote enjoyed by both sexes sometimes disappeared with the introduction of totalitarian political systems. In Russia, for example, women who had been enfranchised during the first revolution of 1917 lost this right when the Bolsheviks seized power later in the year. Women were also disenfranchised in Germany when National Socialism replaced the Weimar Republic. In Italy women's suffrage had been discussed during the war and Benito Mussolini was initially sympathetic to the demand, but by 1925 he had dissolved Parliament and all elections were suspended.

In some cases, however, women were able to hold on to voting rights, or even to acquire them for the first time, but under very restrictive circumstances designed to ensure that they would exert a conservative influence. In Hungary, for example, women received the vote on the same terms as men after the war when a new liberal constitution was established, though the suffrage movement itself had always been weak. Yet the successful counterrevolution by the conservative wing of the nationalist movement disenfranchised women in 1920. Voting rights were reestablished in 1921, but only for women over the age of thirty who met educational and economic qualifications. Similarly, in Portugal the authoritarian regime of Antonio Salazar granted women the vote in 1931 but they had to have completed secondary or higher education, whereas male voters had only to be able to read and write. This, however, was in the context of a single-party system where there was no real choice.

Women stood a greater chance of gaining the franchise when more constitutional governments were formed, if only for brief periods. In Spain women's groups and socialist feminists debated women's emancipation during the 1920s when the military dictator General Miguel Primo de Rivera was in power. The introduction of the Second Republic in 1931 stimulated women to demand political rights. During discussions of the new constitution, two women, Victoria Kent and Clara Campoamor, who were both attorneys and had been elected deputies in 1931, debated the question of women's suffrage. Kent opposed the measure on the grounds that women were not yet ready and might endanger the Republic, whereas Campoamor claimed that it was a matter of principle and that the criticisms raised could also apply to men. In the event, the new constitution of 1931 did enfranchise all men and women over the age of twenty-three, but after the civil war of 1936–1939 and the introduction of General Franco's dictatorship, universal suffrage was suppressed.

THE IMPACT OF WORLD WAR II

It was after World War II that women in a number of the participant countries achieved the vote, most notably in France and Italy. In France women's enfranchisement was part of the ordinance of 21 April 1944, issued by General Charles de Gaulle as leader of the Free French in Algiers. This ordinance proposed constitutional arrangements for France once the country had been liberated. The short-term reasons for this included de Gaulle's need to reassure the Resistance within France, and also his British and American allies, that he was committed to restoring republican democracy in France. It is also likely that he assumed that women would vote for conservative and clerical parties. Within the Resistance itself there were divisions between socialists and communists who favored women's suffrage and radicals who opposed it. The National Resistance Council, which commented on the constitutional proposals, was interested in the idea, put forward ironically by the Vichy government, that heads of household should have extra votes to reflect the number of children in the family. This was, however, rejected in favor of the principle of one person, one vote. Nonetheless, it is important to note that these changes were not introduced in a vacuum. Women's suffrage had been widely debated for many decades, and during the interwar years the campaign for the vote continued to attract support; the French Union for Women's Suffrage, for example, extended its organization beyond Paris and into the provinces and had ten thousand members in 1929. It is significant that when the decision to enfranchise women was taken, it was broadly welcomed in the popular press and encountered little opposition.

By the end of World War II, therefore, most European women living in countries with some form of democratic government were enfranchised. (Many others, living under authoritarian or military governments, had to wait until representative political systems were introduced, as in Portugal and Spain in 1976, or until the Soviet Union and Communist regimes collapsed in the late twentieth century.) The main exception was Switzerland, which had a well-established republican government and yet did not grant women the vote until 1971. Here again, men had little incentive to support women's suffrage since they had long enjoyed the right to vote. There was a complex political system that required a referendum on proposed constitutional changes, while the local autonomy of cantons limited the power of the bicameral National Assembly. It was not until 1957, in the context of growing international pressure, that a national referendum was held on the subject of women's suffrage. Despite support from both chambers of the Assembly, male voters still opposed it. Women continued to campaign for the vote, but it was Switzerland's membership in the Council of Europe in 1963 that exposed the anomalies in its constitutional position. It was unable, for example, to sign the European Convention on Human Rights in 1968 and, when its petition for an exemption was turned down, a referendum on women's suffrage at last received the necessary majority in 1971.

THE VOTE AS AN AGENT OF POWER

The controversies and passions roused by the demand for women's suffrage indicate the importance attached to the vote as an agent of power in political democracies from the mid-nineteenth century onward. Women believed that their inclusion in the franchise would enable them to exert an influence on government policies, in particular social reforms. They also saw the vote as having considerable symbolic importance. Without voting rights, women could not be full citizens and therefore their inferior social status would be confirmed. Since the nature and timing of women's enfranchisement was linked to political developments in individual countries and also to terms on which men had the vote, class was always an important factor in the debates. Conversely, women's own agency played an important part in bringing women's suffrage to the forefront of politics and in creating a climate in which it became an acceptable measure to adopt.

The achievement of the vote, however, certainly did not mark the end of women's long struggle for emancipation. Only a small proportion of women were elected to representative assemblies, and in the context of the interwar years it was difficult for women to gain, or hold onto, equal rights. Feminists themselves were divided about what they hoped to achieve, with some emphasizing equal rights and others focusing on the welfare needs of mothers and women's social duties to the state. Once the suffrage struggle was over, the women's movement became more fragmented and less visible, making it difficult to exert pressure for change in gender relations. It was recognized that deep-seated structural issues around women's position in the family and the workforce needed to be tackled alongside formal equal rights. At the beginning of the twenty-first century there was greater skepticism among both men and women about the extent to which the vote enables any group to exercise real political influence. Nonetheless, inclusion in the franchise was a vital first step for women in their campaign to be treated as full citizens with an equal right to take part in all areas of public life alongside men.

See alsoCitizenship; Feminism; Suffrage Movements.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bartley, Paula. Votes for Women. London, 1998. A useful overview of the British suffrage campaign and a guide to further reading.

Bock, Gisela. Women in European History. Translated by Allison Brown. Malden, Mass., 2001.

Evans, Richard J. The Feminists: Women's Emancipation Movements in Europe, America, and Australasia, 1840–1920. London, 1977. An early comparative study that emphasizes the importance of liberal nationalism in Europe.

Foley, Susan K. Women in France since 1789: The Meanings of Difference. New York, 2004.

Frevert, Ute. Women in German History: From Bourgeois Emancipation to Sexual Liberation. Translated by Stuart McKinnon-Evans in association with Terry Bond and Barbara Norden. Oxford, U.K., 1990.

Griffin, Gabriele, and Rosi Braidotti, eds. Thinking Differently: A Reader in European Women's Studies. London, 2002. Brief articles on individual countries.

Holton, Sandra Stanley. Feminism and Democracy: Women's Suffrage and Reform Politics in Britain, 1900–1918. Cambridge, U.K., 1986. Contains a detailed analysis of the impact of war on the British suffrage movement.

Keene, Judith. "'Into the Clean Air of the Plaza': Spanish Women Achieve the Vote in 1931." In Constructing Spanish Womanhood: Female Identity in Modern Spain, edited by Victoria Lorée Enders and Pamela Beth Radcliff, 325–347. Albany, N.Y., 1999.

Law, Cheryl. Suffrage and Power: The Women's Movement, 1918–1928. London, 1997. A detailed account of the struggle for an equal franchise in Britain after World War I.

Legates, Marlene. In Their Time: A History of Feminism in Western Society. London, 2001. A clear discussion of the interwar context and debates around women's suffrage across Europe.

Offen, Karen M. European Feminisms, 1700–1950: A Political History. Stanford, Calif., 2000. A key text that explores the suffrage campaign in a range of European countries.

Reynolds, Siân. France between the Wars: Gender and Politics. London, 1996. Stimulating discussion of why women gained the vote in 1944.

Smith, Harold L., ed. British Feminism in the Twentieth Century. Amherst, Mass., 1990. Focuses on the complex arguments around equality and difference among British feminists.

Summerfield, Penny. "Women and War in the Twentieth Century." In Women's History: Britain, 1850–1945: An Introduction, edited by June Purvis, 307–322. London, 1995.

Thane, Pat. "What Difference Did the Vote Make?" In Women, Privilege, and Power: British Politics, 1750 to the Present, edited by Amanda Vickery, 253–288. Stanford, Calif., 2001.

Ward, Margaret. "'Suffrage First—Above All Else!' An Account of the Irish Suffrage Movement." Feminist Review 10 (1982): 21–36.

June Hannam