In spring 1945, voters including women lined up outside a Paris polling station. Musée Carnavalet photograph PH14988 is catalogued as a queue at the first elections in which women were invited to participate and dated to the municipal-election period from 29 April to 13 May. French women’s first nationwide opportunity to vote arrived while the war in Europe was only just ending.
The right had been established by a 1944 ordinance, but exercising it required registers, polling places, ballot papers and private voting spaces. The people in the photograph were not contemplating an abstract constitutional gain. They were entering the institution one person at a time. Their clothing and expressions cannot tell us their votes or allow a single emotion to be assigned to them.
The novelty of the line was not a special procedure for women. It was the ability to enter the same ordinary sequence and perform the same simple acts as male citizens. A major expansion of rights became real through mundane movements: waiting at a door, folding a ballot and placing it in a box.