Political Cleavages and Opposition to Female Voters in France, 1918-1944

Though early innovators in the rights of man, when it came to the rights of women, France was not among the vanguard. Around 1920, as women all across the globe were entering the ranks of the voting public, the legislature of France's Third Republic refused to follow suit. What is immediately striking about non-reform of suffrage laws in France is that it cuts against intuitions about the ideological bases of support for progressive legislation: in the Chamber of Deputies, many members of the Conservative party were supportive of the measure, while members of the Radical group, which espoused reform and republicanism in other arenas, were against. The counter-intuitive basis of support for women’s suffrage in France reveals the importance of strategic considerations to electoral reform on which the logic of women's suffrage rests.