A French worker, Joséphine Pencalet (1886 – 1972) was elected municipal councilor in Douarnenez in May 1925, when at the time women were neither voters nor eligible.
Young widow
Joséphine Pencalet was born on August 18, 1886 into a large family of fishermen in Brittany. She studied in Quimperlé, in a Catholic boarding school.
In 1908, at the age of twenty-two, Joséphine married the locomotive driver Léon Leray, with whom she settled in Île-de-France. The couple had two children before Leon died after the war. Young widow, Joséphine returned to settle in Brittany and took a job as a worker at the Chancerelle sardine oil cannery, in Douarnenez in Finistère.
The great strike of Douarnenez
At the end of 1924, the "great strike" of the workers of Douarnenez broke out. Twenty years earlier, the Penn Sardins (nickname of the workers literally meaning "sardine head") had already obtained by the strike to be paid by the hour and no longer by the performance. In 1924, female workers campaigned for their working conditions and an increase in their wages. They are badly paid, so they work ten hours a day, despite the law of 1919, without overtime pay or night work in theory forbidden to women. Their demands relate to all of these points.
From November 1924, the strike is general in all the factories of the port and the women, representing the majority of the strikers, demonstrate in the front line with the slogan "Pemp real a vo!" ("Five reals will be", or 1.25 francs). The strike escalates with the call for strikebreakers, the dismissal of the communist mayor, violence and scandals. It ended in January 1925, after 46 days, with an agreement validating part of the strikers' demands. Involved in the Douarnenez Metals Union, Joséphine Pencalet participated in the strike movement to the end.
One of the first elected women
The same year, the Communist Party presented candidates for municipal elections, although women could neither vote nor be elected. In fourth position on the list of deposed communist mayor Daniel Le Flanchec, Joséphine is one of these candidates. In May, she was elected municipal councilor in the first round, which made her one of the first women elected in France. Elected in the first round in Bobigny, Marthe Tesson becomes deputy mayor. Others will be elected in the second round.
Joséphine Pencalet sits on the municipal council of Douarnenez for a few months. In November 1925, the Council of State invalidated her election on the grounds that a woman did not have the right to vote, and therefore could not sit in a voting assembly. The Communist Party did not react to this decision and Josephine returned to her life as a worker, bitter and with the feeling of having been used.
Despite the brevity of her mandate, Joséphine Pencalet contributed to changing the vision of the role of women in politics.