Jeanne Schmahl

Jeanne-Elizabeth Schmahl
Schmal in September 1911
Born	Jeanne Elizabeth Archer 1846 Great Britain
Died	1915 (aged 68–69)
Nationality	British, French
Occupation	Midwife
Known for	Feminist activism

Jeanne Elizabeth Schmahl (1846–1915) 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.

Jeanne Elizabeth Archer was born in Great Britain in 1846. Her father was English and her mother French. Her father was a lieutenant in the British Navy. She studied medicine in Edinburgh, but was not able to complete her course. Sophia Jex-Blake was trying to open the profession to women but had not yet succeeded. Schmahl was a friend of Jex-Blake, and in contact with the feminist movement in England. She went to France to continue her medical studies, but interrupted them when she married Henri Schmahl, a Frenchman from Alsace, and took the name of Jeanne Schmahl. However, she acted as an assistant to professional midwives until 1893. She became a French citizen in 1873 through her marriage. She was supported by her husband and lived in comfort beside the Parc Montsouris.

By 1878 Jeanne Schmahl had become active in groups led by Maria Deraismes and the pastor Tommy Fallot. She joined the League for Raising Public Morality (Ligue pour le relèvement de la moralité publique), which was mainly concerned with making alcohol and pornography illegal. Schmahl joined Léon Richer's group after she became interested in women's rights. Schmahl also joined the Society for the Amelioration of Woman's Condition which had been created by Maria Deraismes. Schmahl was incensed when she discovered that a woman had been dismissed from her job after she asked her employer not to give her wages to her alcoholic spouse.

Schmahl admired the British Married Women's Property Act 1882 and she believed a similar law would benefit French women. Schmahl thought that the strategy of the groups, led by Richer and Deraismes, of mixing religion and politics with women's issues was a mistake. She thought this was "one of the great reasons for the movement's lack of success in France." She decided to instead direct her efforts at specific issues. In January 1893 Schmahl founded the Avant-Courrière (Forerunner) association, which called for the right of women to be witnesses in public and private acts, and for the right of married women to take the product of their labor and dispose of it freely. As Schmahl wrote in 1896,