At the end of the 18th century, women in Europe began to demand more rights for themselves. Even then, they participated in revolutionary actions, especially in France, where after the revolution of 1789, the way for human rights and equality was opened. In Germany, women became politically active and vocal some fifty years later. Some were more active and louder.
Louise Otto-Peters – the initial spark
Louise Otto-Peters appeared in public in 1843. She believed that women's participation in state affairs was "not a right, but a duty." She was only 24 years old then.
She was already an orphan at the age of 16, but after the death of her parents, she inherited a large fortune. She realized her career dream and became a writer, writing poems, essays, social-critical novels and journalistic articles that she published under the male pseudonym Otto Štern. Njima drew the attention of the government, which tried to silence her.
Despite this, Otto-Peters founded the "Leipzig Women's Educational Association" in 1865. In the same year, a large women's conference was held in Leipzig. The newspapers mocked them, they wrote about the "Leipzig women's battle", but the 120 participants did not pay attention to it. They founded the General German Women's Association (ADF), which Louise Otto-Peters chaired for almost 30 years. It was the initial spark that led to the founding of numerous women's associations throughout Germany.
Helena Lang - Education for Girls
The first and most important goal was – education for women and girls. Because, while school education for boys was quite normal, girls from the working class had to earn money early, and daughters in the middle class were prepared for married life. Girls who could read and write were rare.
The teacher Helene Lange therefore wrote a petition to the Prussian Minister of Education in 1877, together with five other women active in the women's civil movement, demanding: better education for girls, greater influence of female teachers on the education of female students, better education for female teachers. The petition was rejected.
Women were allowed to study at German universities in 1899 and 1900, and in 1908 the school system for girls was declared a state affair.
Klara Cetkin – politically aware
Young Klara Eisner attended a seminar for teachers in Leipzig, met the General German Women's Association there and began to get involved. Her way of life was scandalous for that time: she lived with the Russian Osip Cetkin in a "wild" marriage, took his surname and had two sons with him.
She joined the Socialist Workers' Party, later the SPD, and began to fight for full professional and social equality for women. She founded the women's magazine "Jednakost". Klara Cetkin is a representative of the proletarian women's movement in which, unlike the bourgeois women's movement, it was primarily about the rights of workers.
Cetkin was the one who started International Women's Day in 1910, a day of struggle for equality, democracy, peace and socialism. It was celebrated for the first time in 1911 under the motto: "Here with the right to vote for women!"
Anita Augspurg and Lida Gustava Heyman - the right to make a political statement
Anita Augspurg and her partner Lida Gustava Heimann were also involved in women's suffrage in Germany. In 1902, they founded the German "Association for Women's Suffrage".
Augspurg studied law in Switzerland - something like that was unthinkable in Germany at the end of the 19th century. She received her doctorate and had the legal knowledge necessary to fight for reforms in the German Reichstag.
Augspurg and Hyman were less peaceful than their German "sisters": they fought for their rights with the same brutal means as the suffragettes in England, hunger strikes, vandalism and large-scale demonstrations.
The suffragette movement in England had grown so strong that no one could ignore it. They also cooperated with associations from other European countries.
German women get the right to vote in the Weimar Republic
Women in Germany, Austria, Poland and England fought for their right to vote until 1918, and in other countries even longer, while women in the Netherlands and Scandinavia had been able to vote for years.
After the end of the First World War, on November 30, 1918, the new German government announced: "All elections will henceforth be held according to the same, secret, direct, universal suffrage, based on the proportional electoral system, for all men and women over 20 years old."
That new law was applied shortly after: in January 1919.
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