oteOn April 22, 1944 General Charles de Gaulle announced that women would receive the right to vote in the government that was to be organized after the war. Senators who had fought against female suffrage were mostly found to be collaborators of the Vichy regime, and their voices were stilled. Woman's suffrage was formally written into the Fourth Republic's constitution adopted in 1946. The preamble stated, "the law guarantees to women equal rights with men in all spheres," (Scott 161).What was the reason behind de Gaulle's granting the vote to women? There are several possible reasons. First of all, WWII was a war fought to defend democracy. France needed true universal suffrage in order to legitimize its stance in the world as a true democracy. Other explanations suggest that de Gaulle wanted the votes of conservative-leaning women in order to counter the powers of communism mounting in France. Most importantly, declaring true universal suffrage separated the Fourth Republic from the old regime and Vichy government. "Citizenship for women was one of the ways of signaling the end of an outdated republic and the advent of a more modern one," (Scott 162). Granting women the right to vote gave the Fourth Republic the ability to align itself with other Western democracies and establish its legitimacy in France and the worldConclusionFrom the Revolution and onward, the male-dominated French government gave little respect to the feminist movement in France and did all it could to surpress it as a revolutionary movement. Women also followed suit by never forming a substantive collective organization being separated along political and class lines. Being a weak movement, it was easy for the patriarchal society of France to keep women in their role as the submissive "second sex." When the question of female suffrage finally passed the Chamber of Deputies in 1919, the Third Republic procrastinated and, eventually, voted it down due t...
