Suffrage, the Democratic Project, and the French Exception

My analysis of the French response to the international women’s suffrage movement of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is part of a larger project that explores the roles of French men and women as public intellectuals who engaged in heated debates over contemporary feminist reforms.  Where women in countries as various as England, the United States, Germany, Russia, and Sweden all received the right to vote in the short period from 1917 to 1920, women in France only voted in national elections for the first time in 1945. 

Historians, political scientists, and feminist cultural critics have attempted many alternative national, transnational, and comparative international explanations for the phenomenon that Steven Hause has highlighted as “an unusual case,” Karen Offen has explored as “the French twist,” Pierre Rosanvallon has labelled as “the French enigma,” Paul Smith has described as “the French singularity,” and Siân Reynolds has characterized as “the famous ‘French delay’.” 

Where these scholars have usually sought solutions to the problem of the “French delay” by analyzing the ways in which French men and women thought about women and gender, my own approach reconsiders the significance of the French debates over women’s suffrage by placing them in a new context to compare them to the simultaneous French debates over a series of equally controversial electoral reforms that included proportional representation, professional representation, and father-centered family voting.  The resulting analysis illuminates not only the ways in which French feminists and anti-feminists thought about women and gender, but also the ways in which French suffragists, anti-suffragists, liberal and conservative social reformers, and republican and anti-republican parliamentary politicians thought about a range of additional key topics that included the history of revolution and reform, the state of national and international affairs, and the positive or negative nature of the democratic political project itself.