page_title: Jeanne Schmahl
section_title: Women's suffrage
hierarchical_section_title: Jeanne Schmahl / Women's suffrage
caption_attribution_description: English: Jeanne Schmal chez Aristide Briand en 1909
context_page_description: Jeanne Elizabeth Schmahl was a French feminist, born in Britain. She married a well-off husband who supported her while she worked as a midwife's assistant in Paris. She decided to avoid politics and religion and to focus on specific and practical feminist goals. She led a successful campaign to change the laws so women could legally bear witness and could control their own earnings. She launched the French Union for Women's Suffrage to campaign for the right of women to vote, but that was not achieved in her lifetime.
context_section_description: The French Union for Women's Suffrage (UFSF: Union française pour le suffrage des femmes) was founded by a group of feminists who had attended a national congress of French feminists in Paris in 1908.
  Most of them were from bourgeois or intellectual backgrounds.
  The leaders were Jeanne Schmahl and Jane Misme.
  Since 1901 Schmahl  had belonged to the Women's Suffrage (Suffrage des femmes) association led by Hubertine Auclert (1848–1914).
  The UFSF provided a less militant and more widely acceptable alternative to Suffrage des femmes.
  The sole objective, as published in La Française early in 1909, was to obtain women's suffrage through legal approaches.
  The founding meeting of 300 women was held in February 1909. Cécile Brunschvicg (1877–1946) was made secretary-general.
  Schmahl was the first president.Eliska Vincent accepted the position of honorary vice-president.
  The UFSF was formally recognized by the International Woman Suffrage Alliance (IWFA) congress in London in April 1909 as representing the French suffrage movement.
  Although national in scope, the UFSF was very much Paris-based.
  Schmahl stated that the campaign would be peaceable, and would start by asking for women to be able to vote in municipal elections and sit on municipal councils.
  Schmahl resigned from the UFSF in 1911 due to disputes with Cécile Brunschvicg, although the reason given was health problems.
  She was succeeded as UFSF president first by Eliska Vincent and then by Marguerite de Witt-Schlumberger,
  Jane Misme stayed with the UFSF, which had 12,000 members by 1914.
  Jeanne Schmahl died in 1915.
  Her obituary said, 
  Mme. Jeanne Schmahl was before her day—a pioneer who did not claim to be a prophetess. She reasoned and persuaded... It was her deliberate intention and in kindness of heart that she wished to improve us [men] by improving the condition of women... She kept her foot on solid earth. She did not forget reality—that was her strength; that and the gentle but firm obstinacy with which she cultivated her garden.
caption: Jeanne Schmahl visiting the French Premier Aristide Briand in 1909
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