Maria Scharnetzki was born in Bochum, then a booming industrial town located between Düsseldorf and Dortmund, and after marrying a man named Backenecker, spent her early adulthood as a working class housewife. During the turbulence that followed the First World War she joined the &lt;a href="Independent%20Social%20Democratic%20Party%20of%20Germany"&gt;Independent Social Democratic Party ("Unabhängige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands" / USPD)&lt;/a&gt; which had split away from the mainstream Social Democratic Party a couple of years earlier, primarily on account of differences over whether or not to continue with support for the country's participation in the war. The USPD itself split in 1920. Maria Backenecker was an active participant in the process whereby the larger part of the USPD merged with the recently formed German Communist Party. In the years that followed she engaged in the Communist Feminist movement in the economically and politically important Ruhr region, which came under foreign military occupation a couple of years later. In 1924 she was elected Reichstag (national parliament) as a Communist Party member representing the eighteenth electoral district (Westpahlia South). However, the continuing economic pressures meant that 1924 was another year of acute austerity, and a second general election was triggered at the end of the year, which saw the Communist share of the vote falling back, with a corresponding reduction in the number of people on the party list gaining seats in the new legislature: Maria Backenecker was too low down on the party's list of candidates for her to retain her place in the Reichstag after the election of December 1924.