french women want to vote

Turkish women will vote

- This time, that's it, my prediction has completely come true.
- How ? Are you competing with Madame de Thebes?
- But no, be serious. It's not about jokes, it's about Turkish women!
- Well, what? Turkish women? They take off their veils! We have known this for a long time. Believe me, however, that from this very special point of view they are still far from having caught up with their Western sisters.
- It's possible; only, on another ground they will certainly be ahead of the French.
- Which one, please?
- Hey quite simply on the political level. I see you don't read the newspapers very carefully. A piece of news in recent days has not caught your attention! A dispatch from Constantinople, transmitted by the Radio agency, announced that the Ottoman Parliament, in proceeding with the revision of the Constitution. had granted women the right to suffrage.

- ! ? ! ?

- Oh please, no exclamations, and don't raise your arms to heaven like that. The gods will remain deaf to your lamentations, because what seems so extraordinary to you is not something new to them. Of course, the women of Islam are far from all being liberated from male yoke, but the emancipation movement has already begun. In India, many women have the right to vote in municipal elections in certain cities; no distinction is made between practitioners of Hinduism and Muslims.

- Do you follow the work of the assemblies of the League of Nations? Oh ! pardon! my question is awkward. YOU. you are a conscious voter, an enlightened citizen, and nothing that concerns domestic politics or foreign policy can be foreign to you. So you remember that a few years ago a state detached from the former empire of the tsars, Azerbeidjan, sent a delegate to Geneva who was responsible for requesting the admission of his country into the League of Nations. To a journalist who interviewed him, this delegate declared: “Azerbeidjan is a state which has not feared putting into practice the democratic principles of the great Western nations. This is how we have established universal suffrage without distinction of religion, race or sex.”

- However, Azerbeidjan is essentially a Muslim country. What would his representative have said if he had heard the pitiful arguments of our adversaries in the Senate? He would have thought, either that French women are not superior to their bad reputation and that we are right to keep them out of business serious, or that the men of our country are unjust and selfish and that they are wrong to always repeat that they are the born defenders of law and justice.

And now in Turkey women will exercise the right to suffrage. while we are still waiting for the Senate to finally decide to discuss the articles of the law passed in 1919 by the Chamber, and granting us political rights. Thus my prediction, which I only considered as a joke, will undoubtedly come true: Turkish women will vote "before us."

French women, will you bear being the last to vote? Could it be true, as one of our colleagues constantly repeats, that you prefer silk stockings or a coypu coat to the ballot? Is it true to say that you are completely disinterested in anything that has anything to do with politics? that in newspapers the only thing that excites you is the soap opera? Will you continue to let yourself be ridiculed, slandered, without protesting?

If everything that is said and written about you does not move you, if you find it good that life increases every day, if it is indifferent to you that your daughters, while working, can only with great difficulty live honestly and your sons risk death in new wars, then demand nothing and say that everything is for the best in the best of Republics.

If, on the contrary, you believe that it is your duty to work to prepare for your children a future of peace and happiness, come and swell the ranks of our feminist groups, and let elected officials and new candidates know that in all In the corners of France there are women who loudly claim the title of citizen.

Maria Vérone President of the French League for Women's Rights