Polish women get the vote

On 28 November 1918 Józef Piłsudski, as Provisional Chief of State, signed a decree on the electoral law for the Legislative Sejm and a decree setting the election for 26 January 1919. The first article of the electoral law stated that a voter for the Sejm was “every citizen of the State without distinction of sex” who had reached the age of 21. Women could also stand as candidates. Polish women received full voting rights, to vote and to be elected, on the same terms as men, earlier than women in many of Europe’s long-established democracies. The elections were to be universal, equal, direct, secret and proportional.

The electoral law was drafted by the government of the socialist Jędrzej Moraczewski, and the prime minister himself announced its principles in the press on 20 November. The independence-minded left had long promised the vote to women. The Lublin government of Ignacy Daszyński had promised it in its manifesto of 7 November, and Moraczewski’s cabinet, made up largely of the same people, kept its word. The law provided for one deputy for about every 50,000 inhabitants. Soldiers on active service had no vote, though they could stand for election. The decrees were published in the “Dziennik Praw Państwa Polskiego (PL)” (Journal of Laws of the Polish State) on 6 December.

The vote did not, however, fall into women’s laps. Polish women activists had been demanding it since the turn of the century, and during the war, as they took over men’s duties at home, at work and in social organisations, and some of them served in the independence underground, their voice became hard to ignore. When, after Piłsudski’s return to Warsaw, the fate of the new state hung in the balance, women’s organisations sent delegations to him. On behalf of a committee for women’s equal rights, Zofia Moraczewska, the wife of the future prime minister, demanded political rights from him. According to an anecdote told later, the doctor and feminist Justyna Budzińska-Tylicka and her companions invited themselves in to see the Chief of State by tapping on his window with their umbrellas. The women argued that restricting civil rights on grounds of sex was an anachronism in a democratic Poland. Piłsudski accepted their arguments, though he reportedly asked, half jokingly, whether women in the Sejm would not vote for prohibition.

In the January election turnout exceeded 70 per cent, and in some constituencies 90 per cent. In the Legislative Sejm, including after by-elections in the former Prussian partition, eight women sat in all, among them the chemist Gabriela Balicka of the National Democrats, the peasant-party activist Irena Kosmowska of PSL “Wyzwolenie” and the socialist Zofia Moraczewska, who in March 1919 became the first woman to speak from the Sejm rostrum. They made up less than 2 per cent of the deputies. Polish women voted in the first elections of the reborn state, and women’s suffrage was confirmed by the March Constitution of 1921.