Caught in the Crossfire: WWI and the Failure of Women’s Suffrage in France

• In Event: Historical Causes and Consequences of Women’s Political Inclusion and Exclusion

Abstract

In 1925, of the 22 countries that could be classified as democracies, only four —France, Belgium, Portugal and Switzerland— had yet to extend suffrage to women. France is an intriguing exception: as a co-belligerent in WWI, the country experienced the type of social upheavals most commonly associated with the extension of women's rights, most importantly a rapid increase in female labor force participation. What explains this French exception? Why did the French political elite fail to translate post-war calls for suffrage extension into policy?

Mass warfare, we argue, has implications for rights expansion only to the extent that it disrupts the pre-war political equilibrium that had kept expansion off the docket. We tie the pre-war exclusionary equilibrium to the Third Republic’s bicameralism and severely malapportioned Senate. We hypothesize that, in the French case, a large death toll (16 percent of working age men, the largest of all belligerents), and its uneven distribution across the territory, ultimately re-enforced the exclusionary pre-war equilibrium instead of undermining it. We test our argument using a unique dataset combining election returns with constituency-level military death rate matched to pre- and post-war data on elected officials' position on women's suffrage.

This study makes at least three contributions. First, it documents how the Third Republic’s political institutions, combined with WWI death toll, ultimately delayed the extension of suffrage to women. Second, it contributes to debates about the role of conflict in shaping women’s social position. We argue that in the case of rights expansion, imbalanced gender ratios resulting from mass warfare can hinder reform when women are viewed as undermining the electoral interests of veto players. Third, we add to the growing evidence that suffrage extension follows an electoral logic. Finally, the French case highlights the simple but often overlooked fact that not all wars are generative of new rights. We discuss implications for research on war and rights extension more generally.

Authors

• Charlotte Cavaille, For School of Public Policy

• Victor Jean Gay, Toulouse School of Economics and Quantitative Social Sciences

• Dawn L. Teele, Johns Hopkins University