French Women’s Suffrage, Women Counting Ballots During the 1935 Campaign for Political Rights

Women’s Suffrage in France

Broadside

Women counting ballots, 1935, documents women’s visible participation in French electoral culture during a year of intensified campaigning for female suffrage, nearly a decade before French women acquired equal voting rights. Women remained legally excluded from the electorate in 1935, despite repeated approval of suffrage measures by the Chamber of Deputies and sustained organizing by feminist associations. On March 1, 1935, the Chamber endorsed women’s suffrage for the fifth time, by 453 votes to 124, while the Union Française pour le Suffrage des Femmes had grown to approximately 100,000 members and suffrage organizations were campaigning around that year’s municipal elections. The image consequently belongs to a particularly active phase of interwar French suffrage agitation, when activists increasingly used elections themselves as occasions to demonstrate women’s political competence and expose their continuing exclusion from formal citizenship.

Gelatin silver press photograph. France, June 24, 1935. Approximately 7 x 9 inches. Original French press caption pasted to verso includes the heading “Women’s Voting in France.” More than a dozen women sit closely together around a long table examining and counting ballots or papers, while additional women stand behind them observing the proceedings; a prominent sign in the background reads “Elections.” The supplied caption excerpt does not establish whether the scene records an official ballot count, an unofficial suffrage poll, or another election related demonstration, and the women should therefore not be identified as legal female voters. Such caution is especially important in the context of 1935: that year suffrage activists deliberately inserted women into electoral rituals from which they remained legally excluded. Louise Weiss, for example, presented herself symbolically during the May municipal elections in Montmartre, using improvised ballot boxes and attracting thousands of symbolic votes as part of her campaign with La Femme nouvelle.

The photograph dates from the final decade of the French Third Republic, during which the Chamber of Deputies repeatedly supported female suffrage while legislative resistance prevented enactment. French parliamentary history records successive attempts to establish women’s political rights before the eventual ordinance of April 21, 1944 declared women electors and candidates under the same conditions as men; French women first exercised that right in the municipal elections of April 29, 1945. Against that chronology, the women gathered around ballots in this 1935 image offer a particularly suggestive visual record of women occupying the procedures and imagery of electoral politics while they themselves remained formally disenfranchised. Original caption affixed to verso; minor handling wear consistent with press use; very good condition. A contemporary press image documenting the conspicuous presence of women within French electoral culture during a pivotal period of organized agitation for equal political citizenship.

Item #16534

Price: $100.00