bavarikon4UThe Introduction of Women’s Suffrage
In 1919, women were allowed to participate for the first time in the elections for the State Parliament in Bavaria (12 January; in the Bavarian Palatinate only on 2 February) and to the Constituent National Assembly (19 January). This right also included members of religious orders, such as the Sisters of Mercy shown here (photo on the left), on their way to a Munich polling station on 19 January. Although this election was an important event, surprisingly no photographic testimonies of the state elections of 12 January have been preserved. Only for the elections on 19 January 1919, two photographs of Heinrich Hoffmann's photo studio, which was otherwise very active during the revolutionary period, were published. The motif of the nuns on their way to the polling station was repeated in the Landtag (State Parliament) and Reichstag (imperial parliament) elections on 6 June 1920 (photo on the right).
Since 1873, women activists in Germany had demanded women's suffrage. In Bavaria, Anita Augspurg (1857-1943), among others, campaigned for the right of women to vote. The Social Democrats in Bavaria supported this demand. However, this request had not been taken into account in the 1906 electoral reform.
Conditions changed just shortly before the revolution in November 1918. The reform attempts of 2 November 1918, which had not been implemented, already provided for the introduction of the right to vote for women. Kurt Eisner (1867-1919) took up this issue and promised the rapid introduction of the right for women’s suffrage in his proclamation of the Free State of Bavaria on 8 November. However, when it came to the concrete implementation for the coming state elections, the Ministerrat (Council of Ministers) discussed whether it should not be introduced only for subsequent elections. The Mehrheitssozialdemokraten (Majority Social Democrats, MSPD) were afraid that the majority of women, especially in rural areas, would vote in favour of the conservative-Catholic Bayerische Volkspartei (Bavarian People's Party, BVP), the successor party of the Centre in Bavaria. After all, women accounted for 53.4% of those eligible to vote. Nevertheless, women’s suffrage was introduced. As feared by the MSPD, most of the votes of the new female voters went to the BVP.