a noble family, donated 30,000 marks to the party in 1923; and Helene Bechstein, who had an estate on the Obersalzberg, facilitated Hitler's acquisition of the property Wachenfeld. In regards to the role played by women voters in Hitler's rise to power, Helen Boak notes that the "NSDAP had been gaining proportionately more support from women than from men from 1928 onwards, not because of any concerted effort on its part nor because of its leader's charisma nor because of one specific element of its propaganda. Women chose to vote NSDAP for the same reasons men voted for the party - out of self-interest, out of a belief that the party best represented their own idea of what German society should be, even if they may have disagreed with the party's stand on individual issues. The larger increase in the share of women's votes than in that of men's votes cast for the NSDAP from 1928 owes much to the party's growing prominence and respectability, as the party's dynamism, the contrast of its young leadership with the elder statesmen of the other parties, its growing strength, the disintegration of the liberal and local, conservative parties and the general disillusionment and dissatisfaction with what the [Weimar] Republic had brought or failed to bring all contributed to the reasons why German men and women turned to the NSDAP...Because of the preponderance of women in the electorate, the NSDAP received more votes from women than from men in some areas before 1932 and throughout the Reich in 1932. Claims that Hitler and his party held no attraction from women voters and that the NSDAP benefitted little from female suffrage cannot, therefore, be maintained. Historian Wendy Lower makes it clear that while "Women were not a majority of those who voted for Hitler...In the presidential election of March 1932...26.5% [of German women voted] for Hitler. In the 1931 September elections, 3 million women voted for NSDAP candidates, almost half of the total of 6.5 million votes cast for the NSDAP." In terms of voting patterns however, a higher proportion of male voters supported the Nazi party compared to female voters. In 1935, during a speech to the National-Socialist Women's Congress, Hitler declared, with regard to women's rights: The fact that Hitler was unmarried and that he represented a masculine ideal for many Germans led to his erotisation in the public imagination. In April 1923,