Women in Germany get the vote

On 12 November 1918, the day after the Armistice of Compiègne, Germany’s new government, the Council of People’s Deputies, issued the proclamation “To the German People” (An das deutsche Volk). The Council, made up of three Majority Social Democrats, among them its co-chairman Friedrich Ebert and Philipp Scheidemann, and three Independent Social Democrats led by Hugo Haase, had governed since the revolution of 9 November. The proclamation announced civil liberties and social reforms, and one of its sentences changed the lives of millions of women. All elections to public bodies were henceforth to be held under equal, secret, direct and universal suffrage, by proportional representation, for all men and women aged 20 and over. For the first time in Germany women were granted the vote with legal force.

This was a revolution in the strict sense of the word. In the Empire only men aged 25 and over voted for the Reichstag, and in Prussia, the largest state of the Reich, the state parliament, the Landtag, was elected under the three-class franchise, which favoured the wealthiest. Until 1908 Prussian law even forbade women to belong to political parties. The Social Democratic Party of Germany had demanded votes for women in its programme since 1891, and the socialist Clara Zetkin campaigned for the vote for working women. From 1902 there were also middle-class suffrage associations. On 19 March 1911, the first Women’s Day, more than half a million women took to the streets demanding the vote.

During the war women replaced men in factories, on the railways and in offices, and from 1916 the burden of keeping families alive in a starving country fell on them. Women’s organisations then joined forces, and in December 1917 they addressed a joint demand for the vote to the Reichstag and the state parliaments. The imperial government promised only a reform of the Prussian franchise for men. Only the fall of the monarchy opened the way to change, and the Social Democrats who took power fulfilled one of their oldest demands.

The announcement of 12 November was put into law by the decree on elections to the National Assembly issued on 30 November. Entitled to vote were “all German men and women who have reached the age of 20 on polling day”. On 19 January 1919 women took part in an election throughout Germany for the first time. Turnout was about 82 per cent. Of some 300 women candidates, 37 entered the National Assembly, and later four more, making 41 of 423 members. On 19 February 1919 the Social Democrat Marie Juchacz, born in Landsberg an der Warthe, today’s Gorzów Wielkopolski, became the first woman to speak in a German parliament. She said that the government had given women only what had until then been unjustly withheld from them.