Feminism and the Third Republic

Why did women in France not win the right to vote until 1945, three-quarters of a century after universal male suffrage had been established? The 1789 Déclaration des Droits de l'Homme et du Citoyen had aspired to provide the French people with lasting guarantees of their political and civil rights, whilst the constitutional laws of the Third Republic, established in the 1870s, consolidated a regime based on universal suffrage. For the unenfranchised women of France, however, civil rights had barely advanced since the Napoleonic code in 1904. Frenchwomen were not second-class citizens - they were not citizens at all, although this did not prevent Republicans from demanding sacrifices from women. In this fascinating and ground-breaking study, Paul Smith assesses why Frenchwomen were repeatedly refused the rights of citizenship, while their sisters elsewhere were gradually beginning to enjoy those rights. He examines how feminists in France set about staking a claim for the rights of all women to the vote, to their property, and to their bodies, and how they responded to republican and Catholic discourses on gender roles in the 1920s and 1930s. Finally, he analyses the political relationships established by French feminists in order to achieve their goal.