French women voted for the first time on October 21, 1945. The election was for a new constituent assembly, and half the adult population was taking part in a national vote for the first time. France had come to the change very late.
The right had been granted in 1944. The provisional government under de Gaulle, set up after the liberation, had decreed that women could vote, and the long resistance of the Senate, which had blocked the measure before the war, was simply overridden. The war had changed what was possible.
France had been behind the times. Britain had given women the vote in 1918, the United States in 1920, and France had debated it for decades without acting, held back by a Senate that feared women would vote for the Church or the wrong side. The fears proved empty.
The change was immediate. It was total. Women voted in large numbers in that first election, and they have voted in every one since, and the politics of France shifted as a result. The country that had denied half its citizens the vote became one where no party could ignore them.
The delay is hard to explain. It is. A republic that proclaimed liberty and equality so loudly kept women out of the polling booth longer than almost any democracy in the west. October 21, 1945 was the day that contradiction finally ended.