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When Elisabeth Schwarzhaupt was born in Frankfurt am Main on January 7, 1901, women in the German Reich were not even allowed to open a bank account, let alone become judges, without the consent of their spouse.
So she had the idea to become a theater critic.
Instead, she became one of the most successful fighters for equality in Germany and became the first woman to head a federal ministry under Chancellor Konrad Adenauer.
The women's movement was often discussed in her parents' house - both of whom were teachers.
They accepted the daughter's delicate wish to study law after graduating from high school; after all, women in most German countries were not yet allowed to take a state examination.
That only changed through an initiative of the 32 female members of the Reichstag.
At the end of 1920 they proposed that women should have equal access to legal exams as men.
Between 1961 and 1966, Elisabeth Schwarzhaupt held the office of Federal Minister of Health
Source: picture-alliance / dpa
After her exam in 1930, Elisabeth Schwarzhaupt worked in a legal information center for women in Frankfurt and as a substitute judge for foreclosure matters in Dortmund.
The engagement to a Jewish doctor was broken off in 1936.
He was able to emigrate to Switzerland;
because she couldn't find a job, she stayed behind.
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Schwarzhaupt received his doctorate and ended up as a legal assistant at the Evangelical Church in Berlin.
Here she was entrusted with issues of divorce law, among other things.
Once again, Schwarzhaupt experienced how strongly discrimination against women was legally enshrined, without the need for tightening by the Nazi regime.
After 1945 she got involved in setting up women's associations and joined the CDU in 1953.
In the same year she moved into the Bundestag for the party, where she was particularly involved in the legal committee.
When Federal President Heinrich Lübke (center) sworn in the Federal Cabinet in November 1961, Elisabeth Schwarzhaupt was alone among men
Source: picture alliance / Kurt Rohwedde
One of Schwarzhaupt's greatest successes was the implementation of equal rights in the German Civil Code (BGB).
Its notorious "obedience paragraph" in 1354 was written in 1900: "The man is entitled to make decisions in all matters relating to conjugal life."
In the reform, Schwarzhaupt had to prevail against her party friends.
Unusually enough, she found allies in the SPD and FDP, and on June 18, 1957, she achieved that the paragraph was deleted without replacement.
It says a lot about the zeitgeist of the 1950s that the introduction to the new equal rights law said: “The most noble task of women is to be the heart of the family.” After all, she was now allowed to “run the household under her own responsibility”.
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In 1961 she was involved in reforming divorce law.
In the same year, Chancellor Adenauer bowed to pressure from women from the CDU, who demanded a federal minister in his cabinet and held sit-ins in front of the negotiating room.
Schwarzhaupt received the newly founded Ministry of Health.
It was her job to deal with the thalidomide scandal, to which she responded with a reform of the Medicines Act.
In the government of the grand coalition under Kurt Georg Kiesinger (CDU), she lost her office to SPD politician Käte Strobel in 1966, but remained active as a member of parliament until the end of her term in 1969.
Elisabeth Schwarzhaupt died on October 29, 1986 in Frankfurt am Main.
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