The European story of the first women lawyers is so far told as a story of the “firsts” attorneys which stand for all female lawyers. The narrative stands and falls with the narrative of the supposed progressive countries that had early women lawyers like France, Italy or Belgium and the supposed successors such like Germany and the new nations in Central and Southeastern Europe. But if one looks at the whole professional context and includes women’s access to all legal professions, the narrative changes, because many of the supposed latecomers simultaneously admitted women to all legal professions, and thus were in fact the first countries in Europe to have women judges. The article follows the known argument of a close connection between suffrage and access to the bench, yet combines it with the observation that countries which followed the German legal education to form “Einheitsjuristen” (uniform lawyers) were the ones granting women access in the interwar time. Thus, it was not necessarily suffrage that automatically granted access, as we can see in Great Britain where women gained suffrage but not the right to judge. Rather, there is a relevant combination of suffrage, attempts to give women full citizenship rights as well as legal education qualifying for the whole range of legal professions, including the bench.