Suffrage

In almost all European and North American democracies, women obtained suffrage after men. In France the gap is considerable—almost a century. This denial of civil rights, justified for such a long time by the difference between the sexes and the complementarities of their roles (the public sphere reserved to men, the private one the realm of women) is no doubt the most eloquent example of the social inferiorization of women at the very moment when modern nation states were being constituted with democratic institutions.

REVOLUTIONARY FRANCE AND THE PRECEDENT OF THE DENIAL OF CITIZENSHIP

During the French Revolution, some women did indeed vote at the Estates General of 1789 and a few lone voices—Condorcet ("Sur l'admission des femmes au droit de cité") in 1790, then Olympe de Gouges with her Déclaration des droits de la femme and de la citoyenne, in 1791, argued for women's suffrage. Endowed with reason, like men, and constituting half of the human race, women, they claimed, should enjoy natural rights. The Convention, which raised men to the level of citizens, nevertheless decided in 1792 the political exclusion of women. Assimilating women to the abuses of the Ancien Régime and to clerical conservatism was a convenient pretext. Yet such exclusion already contradicted social and political reality: the existence of female citizens passionately engaged in the battles of the French Revolution (1789–1799). In 1793 women's clubs were dissolved, and women were excluded from the army. Two years later their presence in political assemblies was banned, as well as assemblies of more than five women in the street. In 1804 Napoleon (1769–1821) imposed the civil inferiority of married women through the Civil Code, which became a model for the rest of Europe. This dependent status in the family made political emancipation even more difficult. It entrenched the idea that the male citizen represented his family, a notion in complete contradiction with the theory of natural individual right.

During the 1848 Revolution in France, proposals were made in favor of women's suffrage, in particular by Jeanne Deroin (1805–1894), but the press met them with guffaws, and politicians remained indifferent (Riot-Sarcey 1994). The Second Republic did not even bother to specify that universal suffrage was exclusively male. But electoral laws were more cautious in Great Britain (1832), in the Netherlands (1885) and in Italy (1888) and clearly indicated the exclusion of women (Rochefort 1998).

THE BATTLE FOR SUFFRAGE

The right to vote only became compelling as a priority common to all feminist movements at the beginning of the twentieth century. Public figures and groups that defended the rights of women previously privileged access to education, the equality of civil rights, the struggle against government-controlled prostitution and bettering the conditions of working women. Suffragism affirmed itself at the very moment when political institutions were becoming more democratic (Klejman and Rochefort 1989). It symbolized the hope for emancipation in a society where socially privileged women were asserting themselves in the public sphere as students, teachers, lawyers, doctors, artists, journalists, philanthropists, and athletes. From mostly economically comfortable classes, urban and educated, feminists did not represent the majority of women. The workers' movement challenged their right to speak for working women and suffrage as a bourgeois demand. In 1907 the Second International, while recognizing the political equality of the sexes as legitimate (including it in its program as early as 1893), insisted on the priority of class struggle and condemned autonomous action by feminists (Gruber 1998).

As with the workers' movement, the feminist movement organized on an international basis. The United States played a key role as the feminist movement—stimulated by the engagement of many women in the struggles for the abolition of slavery, in the Temperance Movement, in moral reform societies, and in philanthropic associations—became entrenched earlier than in Europe. It was in Washington DC in 1888 that the International Council of Women was created. The National Council of French Women was founded only in 1901, and the International Association for Women's Suffrage was founded in Berlin in 1904. English women, with unequaled boldness, called the most attention to themselves. They defied the authorities by practicing direct action and by taking over the streets through spectacular demonstrations. Galvanized by their mystical fervor, the suffragettes—a belittling label in contrast to suffragist—captivated public opinion, at first hostile then sympathetic when the conflict hardened and more than 1,000 women were jailed, went on hunger strike, and were fed by force.

Feminists demanded suffrage at once on the basis of the universalism of natural right and the recognition of feminine specificity. This polarity marked their demands since the Revolution and crossed all tendencies, from the most radical to the most moderate. Most suffragists inscribed themselves in the discourse of sexual difference, valorizing the natural qualities and the opinions attributed to women or the roles they played, drawing up an ideal of complementarity of the sexes in governing the public sphere. This latter argument became dominant over the years and was sometimes associated with a true mystique, idealizing the mothering, pacifist, and altruistic nature of women. In part it overlapped with the dominant discourse on gender. It was also typical of the suffragist associations that were the most influenced by religion, in particular in North America (Basch 1994). In the United States, where the echoes of Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) and John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) were not negligible, the morality of evangelical Protestantism also inspired the majority of activists who wanted to fight with modern means—citizenship—against sin (prostitution, slavery, alcoholism, male profligacy).

A third line of argumentation arose strongly during World War I (1914–1919) (Bard 1995). The majority of feminists, renouncing vague pacifism, joined the war effort, a reaction comparable to that of the workers' movement. In both cases only a minority resisted the lure of nationalism and the Sacred Union. As war heroines, nurses, godmothers, munitions workers, workers and volunteers of all types, wives, and mothers, women experienced an exceptional moment when their social usefulness and patriotic sentiments were being recognized. They were then clearly included in the nation. And feminists saw in this a decisive step towards suffrage. This female patriotism, expressing the desire of citizenship, endured between the two world wars (Thalmann 1990) and was exemplified by the natalist and familist engagement of many moderate feminists. Motherhood, the patriotism of women, was sometimes compared with military service: exercising citizens' duties, women deserved the rights of citizens. The presence of women in all political parties was also a manifestation of a push for political integration.

Women's suffrage tended to become a means of realizing a program at once specific (the extension of the rights of women) and general (social progress and the construction of a durable peace). In the 1930s the fight against fascism was added but did not necessarily imply renouncing pacifism. More than suffragist/feminist political action, it was women's involvement in political formations, from the left to the right, including the far right, that marked the period before World War II (1939–1945) (Kandel 1997) in those countries that had implemented universal suffrage, as well as in those that were delaying it, such as France.

OPPOSITIONS, DIVERSIONS, HALF-MEASURES, RESTRICTIONS, AND CONDITIONS

At the end of the nineteenth century, antifeminist discourse masked the defense of masculine privileges by invoking the superior interests of the family, institutions, and the nation. It justified inequality in the name of nature, unequal herself, which has made women physically weak and psychologically fragile beings, yet protected by the existence of the patriarchal family and of a social order in which each must keep her or his place. To these arguments, imbued with a scientific weight, accrued fantasmic fears of the devirilisation of men and the excessive power of women, fantasies that were not the monopoly of any political camp (Bard 1999).

Although conjectures on the suffrage of future female voters diverged, with each camp foreseeing a risk of reinforcing the opposing one, both sides at least agreed on the fear of an irrational vote that would only benefit the political extremes. The lack of political maturity of women, often invoked, was one of the justifications for voting in stages, a learning process to begin at the municipal level. This conditional suffrage was thus adopted at first in Canada (1917), in Ireland (1918), in Great Britain (1918), in Georgia (1918), in Belgium (1919), in Rumania (1929), and in Turkey (1930), sometimes with a very long delay between this limited suffrage and civil equality, as in Portugal (1931–1976). In Belgium women participated in municipal elections as early as 1919 but had to wait until 1949 to cast their first legislative ballot.

Following World War I, proposals for the vote of the dead were glaring proof that women were still not recognized as individuals: In 1918 Belgium instituted, at the same time as male universal suffrage, voting rights for widows who had not remarried and for mothers of combatants killed by the enemy (as well as for war heroines). In several countries voting was at first restricted to certain categories of women. In the United Kingdom the 1918 law introduced an age differential (only women over 30 could vote) that allowed men to keep the majority of the voting body until 1929, when voting majority age became the same for both sexes. In Portugal, where Roman Catholic influence on the dictatorial regime established in 1926 was strong, voting rights were first given to graduates of secondary or higher education, then in 1946 to married women, and finally in 1968 to all women, except in municipal elections, which were reserved for male heads of families (Cova 1997).

Proposals for a familial vote, attributing one or several extra votes to the male head of the family, according to the number of his children, also limited women's suffrage (Talmy 1962). The Vichy government included this familial voting, put forward by the Roman Catholic right in France between the two wars, in its proposed Constitution (whose promulgation would be denied by the German occupying forces). The contemporary extreme right remains attached to this modification of suffrage (Lesselier 1997).

Is it easier, then, to envisage the access of women to governing towns and cities than their access to national representation? The nomination or, in some cases, the election of female municipal councilors with only consultative power in 1930s France was favorably received. The Vichy regime then decided to name a qualified woman on social issues to the municipal councils of large cities. It was easier to give in on eligibility than on suffrage proper. In March 1944, at the Algiers Assembly, eligibility alone was considered by the commission on reforming the State. In several other countries, the right to be eligible preceded the right to vote: in the United States (1788 and 1920), in Norway (1907 and 1913), in the Netherlands (1917 and 1919), in Belgium (1921 and 1948), in Spain (six months apart 1931), except in Canada (1920—with restrictions—1960 and 1918) and in Turkey (1934 and 1930).

NATIONAL DISPARITIES: DEBATES AND INTERPRETATIONS

The various analyses of national differences regarding the access of women to suffrage vary according to whether they privilege philosophical reasons, political or politically minded ones, or conjuncture. Much has been made, for instance, of the French delay. According to Pierre Rosanvallon (1992), the utilitarian English model allows an easier inclusion of women as a specific group, whereas French-style universalism resists this type of differential-ism. This thesis is, however, lacking in nuance. Not only does France not have the monopoly of the ideas of 1789 and of universalism, but such monocausal explanations cannot be resorted to. The comparative study of the access of women to suffrage in European and North American countries reveals other obstacles or accelerators in the process.

In Europe the gap between northern and southern countries is very clear. The Scandinavian advance is remarkable. Before 1914 women were voting in Norway and in Finland. Such precocity suggests that a broadening of censitary suffrage and a late implementation of male suffrage facilitate the inclusion of women by giving suffragists historical moments to weigh in on the debate. On the contrary, in France, the early date of universal male suffrage in 1848 and the lessons on the dangers it posed to democracy that Republicans drew from it explain in part the long delay in granting women's suffrage. In France women became electors with greater ease when the political vote was not particularly sacralized and where other forms of voting were well established in social, professional, educational, and religious practices. In contrast the reformist method favored by Anglo-Saxons facilitated the political inclusion of women, as well as the proportional ballot list, whereas the revolutionary method and the uninominal ballot had the contours of a more brutal masculine world (Rudelle 1997).

Changes in regime also seemed to provide circumstances favorable to the political inclusion of women: in Russia (1917), in Germany (1918), or in Spain (1931), nascent republics marked the authenticity of their democracy with the suffrage of women.

Another favorable circumstance was the participation of women in the constitution or defense of a nation, as in Finland or in Norway, that allowed "them to transgress the traditional separation of roles but also to acquire a collective identity and a place in that imaginary community constituted by the nation" (Rochefort 1998, p. 39). Later, the examples of Ireland and Poland show that "the political freedom of women is tied into the freedom of nations" (Rudelle 1997, p. 577). In Europe after World War I women in Germany, Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Estonia, and Lithuania obtained the right to vote. In Turkey the young secular republic recognized the equality of political rights. But Romania and the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes remained indifferent to suffragist demands.

Spain was the first Latin country to implement universal suffrage in 1931. It would be tempting to invoke a contrast with Protestant cultures to explain that lateness were it not that Catholic countries such as Ireland (1928) or Poland (1918) also granted the right to vote to women relatively early. The fact that Pope Benedict XV (1845–1922) approved women's suffrage in 1919 removed obstacles: Catholic suffragist movements developed, and conservative parties rallied to their side, among other reasons because they saw in it a useful rampart against bolshevism. In 1924 Italian and Spanish women obtained a partial right to vote: These authoritarian regimes allowed no more than a moderate suffrage. In Italy, Spain, and Portugal the era of truly universal suffrage only opened with the end of dictatorship.

Finally, one has to take into account the rapport between the sexes. The sex ratio is one such element: women's access to the vote was faster in immigrant countries where women are a minority in the electoral body, as in New Zealand, in Australia (where Aborigines of both sexes remain deprived of citizenship until 1967), and in certain states of the American West, such as Wyoming where (white) men and women had the same political rights since 1869. Finland and Norway, pioneering countries in Europe, were also little affected by demographical unbalances linked to male emigration. In contrast there was strong reticence in Great Britain where women were a majority (1.5 million more than men among a population of 45 million). In France, during the last debate of March 1944 on this very question, many anxieties were still voiced concerning an electorate dominated by women and even more so due to the absence of prisoners of war.

The judicial status of women is another important element. Wherever the Napoleonic Civil Code persists, women reach citizenship more slowly, which is not the case in common law countries where the rights of married women were recognized already in the nineteenth century. In France this emancipation was late: A law of 1938 gave wives certain civil rights, but the need to secure the husband's authorization to exercise a profession was only abolished in 1965, and parental equality did not come to pass before 1970.

Finally, the relation between the emancipation of women and the emancipation of populations deprived of civil rights (ethnic minorities and colonized people) would call for further study. For instance, some French women suffragists found it illogical that a minority of Senegalese would have the right to vote at the end of the nineteenth century. The question of priorities reappeared in 1936 regarding the civil rights of Algerians. The law of 7 May 1946 that confirmed citizenship within personal status in Algeria only concerned men, and women had to await the law of 29 September 1947 to obtain identical rights (article 4), which only became effective in 1958 in the midst of the Algerian war.

Thus, in half of the countries in world women only acquired the right to vote in the second half of the twentieth century. In non-European and non-North American countries, the suffrage of women has a recent history, linked to national independence and to the nature of the ruling regimes (Seager 1998). Universal suffrage, for that matter, still does not exist everywhere.

see also Hierarchy; Sex, Race, and Power: An Intersectional Study.

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                                          Christine Bard

                 Translated by Francesca Canadé Sautman