Women's Lives and Struggles

French women in 1914 occupied a peculiar position—excluded from voting yet essential to the economy, celebrated as Republican mothers yet denied basic rights. Middle-class women, educated in lycées since the 1880s, increasingly entered professions as teachers, nurses, and shop assistants. Working-class women labored in textile mills, domestic service, and sweatshops, earning half of men's wages for similar work.

The feminist movement, though smaller than its British counterpart, grew increasingly vocal. Marguerite Durand's newspaper La Fronde advocated for suffrage, while Madeleine Pelletier, one of France's first female doctors, scandalized society by wearing men's clothes and demanding complete equality. The Union Française pour le Suffrage des Femmes, founded in 1909, organized peaceful demonstrations that authorities largely ignored.

Louise Saumoneau, a socialist feminist, argued: "They ask us to bear soldiers for France yet deny us a voice in whether those sons march to war. This hypocrisy cannot endure."