Broken Promises of the French Revolution and Why French Women Did Not Get the Vote Until 1944
Because of the discontinuity of French political history, the strength of the Patriarchal culture, and the inability of the French feminist movement to form a cohesive unit, French women could not obtain the right to vote until 1944.
To answer the question of why French women did not receive the right to vote until April 21, 1944, one only needs to look at the paradoxical nature of the French Revolution of 1789 for the answer. The Revolution that promised "liberté, égalité, et fraternité," for all delivered on its promise by giving to history the Reign of Terror 1793-1794, led by the Jacobins and characterized by hasty and tyrannical justice. Though the French had thrown off the shackles of the monarchy, it adopted the murderous treachery of the Jacobins and nearly crowned Napoleon king (Wolf 36). French history is plagued with this kind of paradox and incongruency, and it is in this political atmosphere that French feminism tried to grow. The legacy of the French Revolution seemed to include a fear of revolutionary violence that resulted in the government periodically repressing those who espoused new ideas (Moses 6). Feminism, being a revolutionary movement, was often subject to these repressions. From the Revolution to the end of World War Two, women would be subject to being the "second sex." Therefore, because of the discontinuity of French political history, the strength of the Patriarchal culture, and the inability of the French feminist movement to form a cohesive unit, French women could not obtain the right to vote until 1944.
Before treading further into the history of French politics and its affects upon women,...
... middle of paper ...
... Feminism in France From May '68 to Mitterand. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul: 1986.
Guilbert, Madeleine. Les Femmes et l'Oragnisation syndicale avant 1914. Paris: Editions du Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique: 1966.
McMillan, James F. Housewife or Harlot: The Place of Women in French Society 1870-1940. New York: St. Martin's Press: 1981.
Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary. New York: Random House: 1992.
Moses, Claire Goldberg. French Feminism in the 19th Century. Albany: State University of New York Press: 1984.
Scott, Joan Wallach. Only Paradoxes to Offer French Feminists and the Rights of Man. Cambridge: Harvard Universoty Press: 1996.
Wolf, John B. France 1814-1919 The Rise of a Liberal Democratic Society. New York: Harper and Row: 1963.
Zeldin, Theodore. Conflicts in French Morality. London: George Allen and Unwim: 1970.
the French Revolution. Hunt, Lynn & Censer, Jack. University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press (2001)
Another, broader approach to the study of women during the French Revolution is the examination of the everyday woman. One example of this type of scholarship is Dominique Godineau’s groundbreaking The Women of Paris and their French Revolution, which she originally published in 1988 as Citoyennes tricoteuses: Les Femmes du peuple à Paris pendant la Révolution française. In this work, Godineau ambitiously attempts to merge women’s history with political history; through examination of the common woman, she argues that one can return the women’s revolutionary movement to its proper context, reminding readers that “women too have a political past that is often ignored and crushed under the weight of representations inherited from the nineteenth century.” She claims that “studying women during the Revolution allows us to enrich our comprehension of the revolutionary phenomenon.” She utilizes police records to find traces of the ordinary, working-class women, who Godineau argues
Many changes occurred in France during 1789 until 1799. This ten-year span, not only brought major upheaval to the government, but to social aspects within the country as well. Both, Edmund Burke’s, Reflections on the Revolution in France and Mary Wollstonecraft’s, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman’, were published during this revolutionary time period. Although Burke and Wollstonecraft possess contradicting views, their works both include opinions about justice, equality and tradition. Burke’s conservative views persuade the reader to understand that the government follows a natural and cyclical path just as nature does.
As the world has grown throughout the centuries, females have generally been under the domination of males. This remained culturally entrenched until the late nineteenth century, when women began to appear in public more often and also began to join alongside men in the work force. In the network of employees and employers in the emerging institution of the Parisian department store, men and women depended on each other for survival in the workplace. Such interdependence is a microcosm of the bourgeois French society during that time, which Emile Zola wrote of in The Ladies’ Paradise, the eleventh book of the Rougon-Macquart series detailing middle-class life. According to Professor Brian Nelson, “The department store in The Ladies’ Paradise is a symbol of capitalism, the experience of the city, and the bourgeois family” (Zola x). Through his usage of characterization, Zola uses the development of the Parisian department store as a microcosm of the economical and societal changes taking place in the larger bourgeois culture of France. In Zola’s book as in life, female characters tipped the balance scale of power in their own direction, robbing men of the power they had previously used to manipulate women to their advantage.
Mainly because women weren’t fully exposed to the happenings outside of the home, which led to the male figure believing that it was impossible for women to vote if they didn’t know the facts. Men thought that if women were able to vote, that they would reach a power, that they could not take away and they didn’t want that. Men wanted to be the head of the household and everything else in between. There were many women, who thought the fact of not being able to vote was outrageous. They wanted the same rights as men, and nothing was going to stop them.
Women used many methods to gain their rights to vote and evidently they faced a lot of obstacles while trying to gain
...hnson, Levy. Women in Revolutionary Paris, 1789–1795. “Police Reports on Disturbances over Food Supplies (February 1793)”. University of Illinois Press, 1979.
In the article, Cult of True Womanhood, the underlying theme is of what society thought was the ideal woman. Women of that time where thought of as homemakers “deeply shaped by the so called “cult of womanhood” a collection of attitudes that associated “true” womanhood with home and family.” Women were supposed to stay home and clean and take care of the children while men worked and provided for their families. The misconception that housework was not hard and that even these women didn’t work as hard as paid labors was a strong opinion of the time. “With economic value calculated more and more exclusively in terms of cash and men increasingly basing their claims to “manhood” on their role as “breadwinners,” women’s unpaid household labor went largely unacknowledged.” Many married women ran their households and took on extra work to support their families and many in underpaid positions. Many of these were even in the service of other’s houses working in “true womanhood”
Throughout the 1800s, women across the world began establishing organizations to demand women’s suffrage in their countries. Today, there are still women in countries fighting for their right to vote. Some countries who’ve succeeded in the mid to late 1800s were Sweden and New Zealand. Once they expanded women’s suffrage, many other countries followed. Like Sweden, countries first granted limited suffrage to women and other countries approved to the full national level. Additionally, there were quite a few countries who had taken over a century to give women the right to vote, Qatar being a prime example. Although the fight for women’s suffrage varied in the United States, France, and Cuba in terms of length and process, each effort ultimately
The French Revolution was a period of time in which France underwent many changes, many which could be considered revolutionary. France’s whole system and way of being was completely changed. New ideas were proposed everyday. An idea is revolutionary when it is a new idea, when it is something that has never been thought of before. The Declaration of the Rights of Women written by Olympe de Gouges on September 1791, was one of the ideas proposed to the National Assembly (Hunt, Web 1). The document proposed that since the French Revolution was all about finding equality for all people, women should be equal to men and therefore, should have the same rights as men did. Women at the time live in terrible conditions. They had little access to education, and therefore could not enter professional occupations that required advanced education, were legally deprived of the right to vote, and were not considered citizens (Class Discussion Notes). If equal rights were not given to women, the French Revolution had not reached its full potential, according to Gouges. She expressed this idea in her document, saying, “This revolution will only take effect when all women become fully aware of their deplorable condition, and of the rights they have lost in society” (Gouges, Web). Anyone that questioned the Revolution was immediately put to death (Class Discussion Notes). If Gouges’ document and ideas were important enough to catch the attention of the National Assembly and for her to be put to death, her ideas could be considered important and revolutionary (Britannica, Web 1) But, the document was not revolutionary. The Declaration of the Rights of Women was not a revolutionary document because its ideas were taken from other people and were no...
Women were trying to get the vote for many years before 1900, however this was not a serious concern and they were not doing much to achieve this. However in 1900 this all changed. The NUWSS (Suffragists) and the WSPU (Suffragettes) were set up in the early years of 1900; their goal was to allow women to get the vote. Their reason was that women were already allowed to work on city councils and become doctors, some notable ones too such as Florence Nightingale. The NUWSS believed that if women were house owners and had respectable jobs they should be allowed to vote. This is because men who were allowed to vote could be white slave owners and lunatics so why could these men vote and women could not? Notably however Queen Elizabeth herself proclaimed that women should not get muddled up with the world of politics.
Moran, Mickey. “1930s, America- Feminist Void?” Loyno. Department of History, 1988. Web. 11 May. 2014.
Nardo, Don. A. The French Revolution. San Diego, California: Greenhaven Press, Inc., 1999. Print.
Friedan frustratingly explains how women’s choices to revert back to domestic roles after World War II compromised women’s independence and identity. Friedan uses this frustration to revive modern feminism and extinguish the prison that gender roles had imprisoned women in. In The Feminine Mystique, Friedan illustrates how women fell into the common portrayal of a housewife just fifteen years after the war and how “millions of women lived their lives in the image of those pretty pictures of the American suburban housewife, kissing their husbands goodbye in front of the picture window, depositing their stationwagonsful of children at school…their only dream was to be perfect wives and mothers…”(Friedan 61) and other description that fit the occupation of “housewife”.
Bordo, S. 1993. "Feminism, Foucault, and the Politics of the Body." In C. Ramazanoglu, (Ed.): Up Against Foucault. Explorations of some Tensions between Foucault and Feminism. London and New York: Routledge.181 -202.