100 years of women's suffrage: "Girls and women, out of the darkness!"

Democracy is sometimes a sweaty drudgery. For many kilometers, three women trudge through the Bavarian snow in the winter of 1918/19, from Dorfgasthaus to Dorfgasthaus. In their rucksacks they carry leaflets and informational material, as well as a big bell to ring the female rural population to the gathering.

Wherever the trio appears, the village chaplain rushes in and warns: These man-women destroy your marriages! What impressed Anita Augsburg, Lida Gustava Heymann and Gertrud Baer in the least. Time is pressing, restlessly enlightening women about a novelty: the right to vote - and to be elected. For on November 12, 1918, the Council of People's Deputies had announced:

"All elections to public corporations will henceforth be conducted under the same, secret, direct, universal suffrage, based on the proportional electoral system for all male and female persons at least 20 years old."

A good two months later, on January 19, 1919, the elections for the Constituent National Assembly took place. A revolution: after Finland (1906), Norway (1913), Denmark and Iceland (1915) were finally allowed to German women to the urn.

They got louder and louder

"This is undoubtedly the most sweeping success ever achieved for our cause," cheered "Ius Suffragii," the international magazine for women's suffrage. A dream came true. For this, many feminists had fought for decades and were spit on, laughed at, defamed.

The heroines of yore are long forgotten. Because they did not make a ruckus like the British suffragettes, did not fire bombs, did not go on hunger strike. The German feminists put on what Clara Zetkin, icon of the proletarian women's movement, referred to mockingly as "petition heroism".

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They founded associations and magazines, organized congresses and demonstrated - again and again, ever louder. One of the most persistent of them: Anita Theodora Johanna Sophie Augspurg, the first doctor of law in Germany, a pacifist and champion of the bourgeois-radical women's movement.

When Augsburg was born in Verden on the Aller in 1857, women in Germany were not allowed to vote or study, and they were denied well-paid occupations. In most German states, they were not allowed to organize themselves politically and, as wives, were socially and economically dependent entirely on their husbands. Augspurg's consequence: not marrying at all, studying abroad, breaking the bourgeois corset.

Call for a marriage boycott

"For a woman of self-esteem (...), I believe it is impossible to have a legitimate marriage," she wrote. Augspurg cut off her hair, wore flowing reform dresses, and lived with women. An inheritance enabled her to become a teacher, actress and photographer.

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"Where are the rights of the woman?" - Anita Augsburg around 1903

In 1893 she went to Zurich to study law - back in Germany she fought bitterly for a reform of the Civil Code. "Where are the rights of the woman?" Exclaimed the lawyer's daughter with the aquiline nose in 1896 at the first International Congress for Women's Work and Women's Aspirations in Berlin. And conquered with their appearance the heart of ten years younger Hamburg businessman daughter Lida Gustava Heymann.

For almost half a century, the "most dazzling couple in the women's movement" (according to the authors Anna Dünnebier and Ursula Scheu) remained together. The two provoked by their lifestyle as well as by the commitment to gender justice and peace. Augspurg founded Germany's first girls' gymnasium and called for a marriage boycott. Heymann opened in Hamburg, the first women's center in the empire, in protest against state-sponsored brothels, they sued the Senate of the Hanseatic city for pimping.

Women's suffrage? National suicide!

In 1902, "Anilid" (as their common journalistic abbreviation) founded the German Association for Women's Voting Rights: the first organization in Germany that dedicated itself exclusively to the fight for women's suffrage. "We are not of a minor kind," wrote Augspurg - and published a "national anthem for women":

In order to prevent this new time, the anti-feminists in the German Confederation organized themselves in 1912 to combat women's emancipation; the proportion of women in this club was an amazing 25 percent. Excessive brain activity makes the "woman not only wrong, but also sick," wrote the neurologist Paul Julius Möbius in his tract "About the physiological stupidity of women" - a bestseller of the pre-war period.

The women's suffrage would be equivalent to a "national suicide," upper anti-feminist Werner Heinemann in 1913. When the First World War broke out the year after, came the (in Germany hopelessly fractious) suffrage movement to a standstill.

Most feminists now put themselves at the service of the national cause. Those who, like Augspurg and Heymann, openly opposed the war, were spied on, denied or expelled. The two went on anyway - and camouflaged their pacifist circles as private teatime.

It was not until 1917 that the fight for women's suffrage regained momentum - thanks to Emperor Wilhelm II. In his "Easter Message" he promised a reform of electoral law, without responding to women's demands. Enraged feminists of all stripes published a joint statement on the electoral issue, organized demonstrations, spoke in October 1918 before Chancellor Max von Baden.

Nine percent of female MPs

When the women's suffrage was finally proclaimed with the November overthrow, the activists cheered. "Now a new life began!" Wrote Augspurg and Heymann in their joint memoirs.

"Thinking back, the following months seemed like a beautiful dream, so unlikely they were glorious." The heavy burden of the war years had given way, one swaggered, future-oriented! (...) One did not need sleep, only a living flame burned: helping oneself to build a better community. "

From then on, the feminists put all their energy into the mobilization of the new voters. With success: A good 82 percent of the women streamed to the polls on 19 January 1919. Almost nine percent of the members of parliament in the first democratic parliament were female - this proportion was not significantly exceeded until 1983, when the Greens moved into the Bundestag. On February 19, 1919, the Social Democrat Marie Juchacz was the first woman at the lectern of the German National Assembly in Weimar and made with the salutation "Gentlemen and Ladies" for joy.

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"Polonaise of voters and voters": women in 1919 in front of a polling station in Berlin

Unlike Juchachz, the candidates Augspurg and Heymann did not make the leap into active politics. The "old Reichstag and the new National Assembly have a damnably similar appearance," they said disillusioned.

In public performances for peace and equal rights, the couple saw themselves exposed to increasingly brutal hostility. "In Germany more and more terror rules," wrote "Anilid" in her magazine "Woman in the State".

"Frozen corpse feeling"

When Nazi sturgeon groups blew up their event in January 1923 and smashed the eye of a pacifist with a brass ring, Augspurg and Heymann spoke to Bavaria's interior minister - demanding Adolf Hitler's expulsion to Austria. What catapulted the two at the top of the list of Nazi deaths.

After the seizure of power, the Brownshirts de facto deprived women of their right to vote and pushed judges out of office. In the "ABC of National Socialism" it said: "The German women want (...) in the main wife and mother, they do not want to be comrades."

Augspurg and Heymann emigrated to Switzerland and persecuted fainting the expansion of the inhumane Nazi dictatorship, which trampled everything that they had fought for so long. One of the last entries in her memoirs is:

"The purpose and purpose of our lives was: to work for freedom, justice and equality in public, the basis was lost! Often the feeling came over us, as if we had survived ourselves, as if we had already died alive, it seems: horrible condition! Spiritual: frozen corpse feeling! "

In 1943, probably the bravest couple in the German women's movement died in Zurich within a few months.

To read more: Anna Dünnebier / Ursula Scheu: The rebellion is a woman. Anita Augspurg and Lida G. Heymann, Munich 2002.