1918–1924

By 1918, Bakker-Nort was one of two female board members of the VDB, Mien van Itallie-Van Embden being the other.^[28] In the 1918 general elections, the VDB reserved two spots for women on their candidate list and assigned them to Bakker-Nort and her mentor Jacobs. Both Bakker-Nort and Jacobs failed to be elected. However, Suze Groeneweg of the Social Democratic Workers' Party did succeed and became the first female member of the House of Representatives.^[29][30]

For the 1922 election, the first one in which women could vote, the VDB decided that a woman should be assigned the second position on its list of candidates, behind Marchant, whose bill had given women the vote. Due to serious illness, Jacobs could not take the position. Instead, it was given to Bakker-Nort, whom Jacobs saw as her successor.^[31] The party's election campaign focussed on legal reform, including the abolition of the Senate, the introduction of referendums, and the strengthening of the legal position of women.^[32] The VDB retained its five seats, and Bakker-Nort was elected member of the House of Representatives in July 1922 as the party's first female representative.^[7][33] She was one of seven women elected altogether out of 100 members.^[34][35] In her maiden speech, she introduced parliament to her views of the "scandalous" marriage law.^[12]

In her first year, Bakker-Nort introduced a bill for a so-called "sister-pension", to entitle sisters who had lived with and looked after widowed brothers to the right to their pension once they died. The bill passed in the House but failed in the Senate.^[12][36] Also, in her first year, she tried to amend the Ruijs de Beerenbrouck government's proposed legislation to make minor changes to the marriage law, proposing more comprehensive reform with equal rights for women. However, the three Christian parties of the coalition government rejected her amendment.^[37] Within the VDB, she was a role model for younger female party members Corry Tendeloo and Nancy Zeelenberg.^[36]

1925–1928

In the run-up to the 1925 election, Bakker-Nort argued the case in parliament against a government bill to allow councils to fire female teachers at state schools once they married, but with the majority of the House being members of Christian parties and opposing this, her arguments to stop the bill failed. Moreover, she considered it morally unacceptable that the state forced women into economic dependency on their husbands, adding that the husband and wife themselves should decide, not the state.^[38][39] Nevertheless, Bakker-Nort was re-elected, and the VDB went from holding five to seven parliamentary seats.^[40]

Soon after the First De Geer cabinet was formed, Bakker-Nort planned a new bill to reform marriage law. To that end, she created a broader platform and organised a cross-party committee consisting of members of the Liberal State Party, the Democratic Party, and the VDB. She appointed a male, Samuel van Houten, an 89-year-old veteran of Dutch politics, as the committee's president. Throughout 1927, members of the local chapters of the parties involved made and discussed proposals. However, in 1928, Bakker-Nort again made a plea in parliament to end the legal incompetency of married women, but it was rejected by the Christian majority.^[41]

1929–1933

In the 1929 election, Bakker-Nort kept her seat and was joined by van Itallie-Van Embden as the second female member of the VDB.^[42] At the end of the 1920s, Bakker-Nort was moderately optimistic about the future of women's rights in the Netherlands. While she expressed dismay at the fact that women still were banned from taking up public offices such as judge, notary, or mayor, she observed that women within the Catholic organisations were slowly taking up more feminist viewpoints, and she welcomed the first female member of parliament for any Christian party, Frida Katz. However, her optimism soon disappeared when the Great Depression led to fast-rising unemployment, and married women were fired to make way for male job-seekers.^[43] Nevertheless, she said that for the VDB, the economic downturn did not alter the principle of the individual’s right of self-determination, of equal pay for equal work, and of equal rights generally.^[44]

Bakker-Nort took a leading role in preparing the International Woman Suffrage Alliance's actions for the 1930 League of Nations conference on international law. Women from 35 countries were present at the conference at the Peace Palace in the Hague, though they were not formally invited. The Alliance's main focus was nationality law, as, despite decades-long protests against laws that made married women automatically lose their nationality and take on their husbands, in many countries, little progress had been made towards achieving equality.^[45][46]

The women staged protest marches, carrying their national flags and wearing dresses ranging from white (equality) to black (absolutely unequal). The different dress shades symbolically reflected the gap between the nationality law demanded by the Alliance and the law of the land they represented. Bakker-Nort said the black dresses of the Dutch women amidst colourful ones of other nations created a "rather painful situation" for the hosts and showed how far behind the Netherlands was, as its laws were "still based on the obsolete principle of subjection of women to men".^[45][46] The activists were able to get meetings with the League of Nations delegates but eventually antagonised the conference president so much that he ordered the police to remove the women from the Peace Palace. The Hague Convention resulted in little progress, only preventing women from becoming stateless.^[47] Bakker-Nort continued to fight for the right of a married woman to choose to keep her nationality.^[48]

During parliamentary debates on retracting the ban on women being appointed mayor, Bakker-Nort ridiculed those who said women lacked physical power by suggesting that, if required, the minister should organise boxing or wrestling matches to appoint suitable candidates. She also pointed out how female mayors performed flawlessly in neighboring countries. Following a vote, the ban was lifted.^[49][50] In 1931, she introduced a bill to remove restrictions on women being appointed notaries, a cause she had been arguing for as early as 1917 but was voted down.^[6][7][51]

In 1933 Bakker-Nort accepted an invitation from German communist leader Willi Münzenberg to travel to London and join an international commission of foreign legal experts participating in a counter-trial of the arson case of the Reichstag fire.^[52] Five men, all communists, were about to go on trial in Leipzig, but it was feared the Nazis would not give them a fair trial.^[53] So, for one week, Bakker-Nort and the other acting judges went through the evidence and concluded that the defendants were innocent and the Nazis were behind the fire.^[54]

When the Leipzig judge invited committee members to the proceedings in Germany, Bakker-Nort declined.^[55] She denied allegations of bias by critics of the counter-trial and explained that she had taken part because the defendants lacked legal support in Germany, as many lawyers who had defended communists had been imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps, deterring others.^[56] After the Leipzig trial found one of the defendants, the Dutchman Marinus van der Lubbe, guilty, and the Nazis executed him, Bakker-Nort lamented the unfair trial, particularly the unlawfulness of applying the death penalty based on a law adopted only after the Reichstag fire. She urged the Dutch people to value the freedom and justice that democracy provided and to fight all who aimed to curtail them.^{[57][upper-alpha 2]}

1934–1936

As the economic crisis continued, the government intervened in the labour market. Where city councils previously had been allowed to fire female teachers who married, they were now required to do so. This erosion of women's rights was particularly painful for Bakker-Nort because it happened during the Second Colijn cabinet, of which the VDB was one of the coalition parties. She had tried to make the firing of married teachers temporary, but her amendment failed. According to Klijnsma, the VDB had made a mistake in not negotiating the protection of women's rights during the formation of the coalition.^[59]

At a parliamentary budget review in 1935, Bakker-Nort condemned Germany's new marriage law, called the German Blood Protection Law, which banned Aryans, a now-obsolete historical race concept describing people of Proto-Indo-European heritage as a racial grouping, from marrying Jews.^[60][61] Both the Netherlands and Germany had signed the 1902 Hague Marriage Convention, which laid out the rules for recognising the validity of international marriages. The new German law caused the Dutch parliament to debate how to apply the rules of the convention to marriages involving German nationals. Bakker-Nort argued that because it was impossible to determine who was Jewish and who was Aryan, the rules of the treaty did not apply, and the Dutch would not have to revoke the convention's agreement. However, she asked Minister Josef van Schaik to revoke it anyway as a sign of protest. Van Schaik agreed with her that the German law would not apply to Dutch Jews but decided not to revoke the agreement.^[60]

1937–1940

In 1937 Bakker-Nort wrote a piece about fascism in the election issue of the VDB's monthly magazine entitled "Democracy or Dictatorship", in which she attacked the fascist party the National Socialist Movement in the Netherlands (NSB) in an unusually sarcastic way. For the 1937 election, the NSB used the image of its leader Anton Mussert and the slogan, "Without this man, the Netherlands does not have a future." Bakker-Nort argued it should say, "With this man, the Netherlands does not have a future, especially the women."^[62] The NSB won four seats in parliament, fewer than expected; the VDB retained its six seats and did not return to the new coalition government, the Fourth Colijn cabinet.^[63] The election results did not disappoint Bakker-Nort; she said voters had not punished the VDB and had understood why the party had to allow some women's rights to erode.^[64] In early 1938 Minister Carl Romme prepared a bill to ban paid work for married women altogether. This rejuvenated the feminists inside the VDB, both in parliament and in the local chapters. They were spurred on by the activities of the VVGS, whose youth committee's president Tendeloo and other feminists such as Willemijn Posthumus-van der Goot organised protests across the country.^[65][66] Bakker-Nort said Romme pretended to base his exclusion of married women from the workforce on principle grounds that the husband was the breadwinner and the wife had to look after the family, but illogically did not apply this principle when companies needed the women.^[64][67] The feminists' efforts did not go unrewarded: Romme never introduced his bill.^[66] In a later debate on labour issues, Bakker-Nort asked the government to address the widespread sexual harassment to which female factory workers were subjected.^[68] In 1939 her husband Gerrid died.^[12]

The late 1930s saw a rise in antisemitism in the Netherlands.^[69] The VDB attacked the NSB for condoning the Nazis' aggression toward German Jews during and following the Kristallnacht. They did, however, argue against the formal banning of the NSB, admitting that in a true democracy, even despicable voices should be allowed to be heard.^[70] Bakker-Nort said in 1938, "We can not allow democracy to be murdered by its adversaries."^[71] When in early 1940, fear of a German invasion increased, parliament debated a possible new law for treason. According to her, Bakker-Nort argued against the death penalty; traitors should be deported.^[70] In May 1940, just days before the German invasion of the Netherlands, Bakker-Nort announced she would not stand again in the 1941 election, leaving it to the next generation. Party members suggested Tendeloo would be a good candidate.^[72] Her last day in parliament was 9 May 1940, when she debated the bill for the punishment of treason and espionage.^[73] The next day Germany invaded the Netherlands.^[74] Within a week, the Dutch were defeated, and the German occupation began.^[75] The House and Senate no longer sat, and the occupiers dissolved parliament officially on 25 June 1940.^[12][76] Bakker-Nort had spent eighteen years in the House, addressing parliament mainly on the issues of justice, education, and labour, and for the majority of her stay, was on the Standing Committee for Private and Criminal Law.^[6][7]