The revolutionary movement to depose King Louis XVI of France also brought the country its first laws for universal male suffrage. France was technically the first nation to introduce male suffrage without regard to land ownership or social class (even if the revolutionary turmoil made the exercise of those rights practically impossible). Women would have to wait considerably longer to get their turn, struggling through a shifting array of self-serving justifications for their exclusions, until at last the new constitution drawn up at the end of WW II included them.

On this day, October 21, in 1945, six months after they first voted in local municipal elections, French women for the first took took part in a national election.

Initially the reasoning behind restricting the vote to women was the belief that women’s economic dependency on their husbands would cloud their judgement — under such rules, widows with land, and Mother Abesses, the female version of abbots, with their own lands and buildings could still cast votes. Later when women entered the workforce, they were thought too uninformed to make political decisions; and, anyway, it was argued, their duty was in the domestic circle, incompatible with the political one.