In Germany these days, groundbreaking historical events are celebrating their 100th anniversary. They still shape our social and political life today, which the vast majority of us can not or do not want to imagine differently. And rightly so, because democracy, peace and equal rights are essential pillars of a humane society. It has with them are not always the best everything, but without it I can not.
For November 1918, the following three events should be mentioned:
1. the proclamation of the first German republic on 9.11.1918 by the SPD politician Philipp Scheidemann. It went hand in hand with the abdication of the German Kaiser Wilhelm II, the many princes and the kings of Prussia and Bavaria in the German Empire, and at the same time with the establishment of the first parliamentary democracy on German soil. 2. ended a murderous fatal war, the First World War on 11.11.1918 by a truce. 3. the general right to vote and stand for women was announced on 12.11.2018, which is self-evident today as well as parliamentary democracy.
The accumulation of these historical commemoration days does not come by any chance. This time, about 100 years ago, was a troubled, revolutionary time, not only in Germany but throughout Europe, and indeed in other parts of the world. Industrialization with its new technologies made mass production and thus an initially booming global economy possible. These developments set deep political, social and emancipatory upheavals in motion. The bourgeoisie and the newly emerged working class, the proletariat in the cities, but also in the countryside demanded participation in power over aristocracy and the empire in order to claim their legitimate interests in fair pay, social security, education, codetermination etc.
Women desire their participation in state life
Women, too, increasingly demanded their participation in state life, and thus more rights, which they enjoyed far less than the male population. In the general liberal and revolutionary discourses, their freedom was not automatically meant. Already since the 19th century had women in Germany and in other industrialized countries, citizens as workers fought tenaciously for their independence and autonomy and demanded equal rights. As late as 1848, only male owners aged 25 and over were represented in the election for the National Assembly in the Paulskirche in Frankfurt. This was the current state of affairs in ancient Greek democracy more than 2,000 years ago, in which the right to vote was also only available to free men aged 25 years and over. For a long time nothing had changed, as we can assume :-(
For women there was not only no right to vote, but also no right to possession or gainful employment and in many German countries was until 1908 even a policy ban. The married bourgeois women were virtually forbidden from public life outside the home. Many of the active women lived in Berlin, as well as the writer Hedwig Dohm (1831-1919), who was the first woman in the German Empire finally proclaimed that the right to vote for women must be called. Since 1872 she published pamphlets, with demands for bourgeois women as well as workers and rural women.
Women organized in Germany and internationally. In the more liberal Hamburg, three women founded the first association for women's voting rights with its own club newspaper "The Women's Movement", which also published a monthly supplement "Zeitschrift für Frauen-Stimmrecht" (Magazin for women's suffrage). In March 1911, women's suffrage was again loudly demanded on the first International Women's Day. There were women from Denmark, Austria, Switzerland and the USA. In the following years, women from France, Sweden, the Netherlands and Russia joined. In Germany and some neighboring countries, however, it should take another 7 years until the time had come. In others like France and Switzerland, it took much longer.