Julie Puaux was born on 13 February 1848 in Luneray, a small town couple of miles inland from Dieppe in Normandy, France.

The Puaux family was Protestant, moderately prosperous and, at a time when the political and social reverberations of the French Revolution were still very much alive, anti-monarchist and passionately anti-catholic.

Initially the focus of her energies was on education provision for girls in Le Havre, the major port city of which her husband served as the mayor (1870-1873 and 1878-1886).

[5] Soon after her husband was elected to the Chambre des députés (parliament) in 1885 the couple moved to Paris, setting up home initially in a centrally positioned apartment at 6 rond-point des Champs-Elyses and moving after ten years, to what became the family home at 226 boulevard Saint-Germain in the city's fashionable Left Bank district.

[7] She worked with the Union française pour le suffrage des femmes(UFSF / "French Union for Women's Suffrage") and, most prominently, with the Conseil National des femmes françaises (CNFF/ literally, "National Council of French Women") of which she served as president between January 1913[8] and her death in 1922, in succession to Sarah Monod, the CNFF's first president.