Politics. "I was happy and proud": 80 years ago, French women voted for the first time

A long and bitter struggle. Obtaining the right to vote for women in France was the result of a long-standing struggle, leading up to the April 21, 1944, decree of General de Gaulle's Provisional Government, granting women the right to vote and be elected. The first vote took place a year later, on April 29, 1945, for the municipal elections. That was 80 years ago.

Before this first historic bulletin, the demand for women's rights was built on historical milestones. Beginning with the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen, drafted in 1791 by Olympe de Gouges, then during the revolutions of 1830 and 1848 before the suffragette movement, which began to take shape in France, as in Europe, at the beginning of the ^20th century.

Pioneers, New Zealand (1893), then Australia (1901), granted women the right to vote. Finland (1906), Denmark (1915), Uruguay (1917), Germany (1918), the United States (1920) and the United Kingdom (1928) followed. In France, after the First World War, proposals to grant women the vote were presented on numerous occasions to the Assembly, but blocked by the conservative Senate. It was not until the ordinance of April 21, 1944, that women became eligible to vote.

On April 29, 1945, a large number of women turned out to vote. "I was happy and proud," said Marcelle Abadie, 105. "I was being asked my opinion for the first time, and it made an impression on me," she recalls. A minority of women were also among the candidates, and some were elected mayor, as in Les Sables-d'Olonne, Ouessant, Villetaneuse, and Saint-Omer.

While the right to vote was a notable step forward at the time, it did not necessarily mean that women became equal to men. The Civil Code still limited women's autonomy in various areas during this period. It was not until 1965, for example, that a law authorized married women to work and open a bank account without their husband's permission.

Emancipation was gradual and accelerated around the 1970s with the emergence of a new feminism, the control of fertility and the legalization of contraception in 1967, then the decriminalization of abortion in 1975 with the Veil law. The freedom to resort to voluntary termination of pregnancy (IVG) has been enshrined in the French Constitution since March 4, 2024 , a world first.