About Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine (BDF)
On March 28, 1894, representatives of thirty-four women’s associations gathered at the ‘Lettehaus’ in Berlin. Chaired by Auguste Schmidt, a school principal from Leipzig, the assembly wanted to found an organization that could unite a wide range of women’s activities in the German Empire. Two main types of associations were present: the few transregional women’s rights organizations with their respective local chapters, and smaller, primarily locally based groups with social welfare agendas such as the ‘Verein zur Unterstützung armer Wöchnerinnen’ (Support Association for Poor Women in Childbirth) and the ‘Verein zur Erziehung minorenner Mädchen’ (Educational Association for Female Minors).1
One model for the coalition was the National Council of Women’s Organizations in the United States, founded in 1891. The newly established analogous federation in the German Empire sought to provide a “united approach”2 for its own women’s movement. The idea was to transcend disparate regional, topic-based, and ideological interests, and to bring groups that concentrated on social welfare activities into the women’s movement as well.
Women’s Rights and Women’s Work
The founding assembly directed the BDF to begin by concentrating on three fields of action: amending the Civil Law Code, combatting prostitution, and protecting female workers.3 FSpecialized commissions drafted positions and laid the preparations for actions.
The BDF’s rights commission attempted to prevent a planned revision to the Civil Law Code that would shift even more rights from women to their husbands, including regarding the raising of children. With mass demonstrations and 100,000 signatures on three petitions to the German parliament, the BDF unleashed a ‘Frauenlandsturm’ (women’s force) in 1896, which received extensive albeit often derisive coverage in the press.4 When these efforts were unsuccessful, the rights commission turned its attention to establishing so-called ‘Rechtsschutzstellen’ (rights protection offices) to advise women and raise their awareness of legal matters.
The BDF’s ‘Kommission zur Hebung der Sittlichkeit’ (commission for the elevation of morals) made prostitution a policy issue. It called for hiring ’police matrons’ to protect and ’improve’ prostitutes, thereby prompting public debate on sexually transmitted diseases and double standards for men and women in sexual mores. Around the turn of the century, a more liberal, abolitionist approach came to the fore in the BDF, with a focus on combatting sexually transmitted diseases and lobbying the government to regulate prostitution instead of trying to prohibit it and punish prostitutes.
The BDF’s ‘Kommission für weibliche Gewerbeinspektion’ (commission for female industry inspectors) aimed to improve working conditions for women. It succeeded in introducing female business and factory inspectors who looked out for the interests of women employed at industrial plants or doing piecework at home. By offering the relevant training programs, it also created a new occupation for women to serve its own clientele.5 In 1898, the BDF renamed it the ‘Kommission für Arbeiterinnenschutz’ (commission for female labor protection). That same year, the BDF created a commission to promote gainful employment and real economic independence for women, which went on to become successful in several ways.
Its information center collected vocational materials for women and provided comprehensive job counseling. It gave rise to the ‘Frauenberufsamt’ (Women’s Vocational Office) in 1916, which professionalized job counseling and supported it with scientific studies. This office was a precursor to the German Empire’s Central Employment Office established after World War I6 In Gertrud Bäumer’s view, it was “one of the most valuable parts of the BDF’s work at the federal level”7.
Radicals and Moderates
Before the overarching ‘Reichsvereinsgesetz’ (National Association Law) was passed in 1908, women were prohibited from joining political associations or becoming politically active in most German states. Concerned about the possibility of being banned, the BDF’s organizers did not invite women’s workers’ associations to the founding event in 1894. Under the leadership of Clara Zetkin, these associations had organized within the ‘Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands’ (Social Democratic Party of Germany, SPD). This radical wing, as it called itself, and its representatives Minna Cauer and Anita Augspurg, repeatedly criticized the moderate majority’s spokeswomen Auguste Schmidt and Helene Lange for the initial decision.
This controversy reveals more about the BDF’s various political currents around 1900 than it does about the actual positions its leading figures held on women’s suffrage. Because of the official prohibition on political activity, the moderates, as they also called themselves, presented the appearance of restricting themselves to social welfare work. At the same time, however, they were bringing vast numbers of women who did welfare work into the women’s movement under the federation umbrella, while also broadening their own understanding of politics. As a result, the divide between public and political work on the one hand and social and personal activities on the other was breaking down under pressure from both sides.
For their part, the oppositional members of the BDF were radical primarily in the sense that they were trying to extricate their – progressive – policies from the – Repressive – context of society at large. In their view, the women’s movement should have been freeing itself from the shackles of traditional welfare-oriented organizations and directing its activities toward the state. At that point in time, those activities could only mean working to achieve political equality.
A prototypical association of this type was the ‘Deutsche Verein für Frauenstimmrecht’ (German Women’s Suffrage Association) founded in Hamburg in 1902 by Anita Augspurg and Lida Gustava Heymann. Augspurg, who called for eliminating the term ‘gemeinnützig’ (public service or social welfare) from the BDF statutes in 1898, ascribed the “outdated association principle” to a “system of patronage”8 She contrasted this older principle with a new form of “organized collaboration” undertaken with the help of “a well-built gearbox with interlocking functions”9. This call, which displayed a fascination with technical progress, unleashed years of debate on redirecting the BDF. A key question had to do with what type of member organization should form its foundation. Until it was disbanded in 1933, the BDF came to embrace ever more large-scale women’s movement organizations and especially women’s professional leagues, while the smaller, usually welfare-focused local associations faded into the background.
Marie Stritt, who was associated with the radical wing, succeeded Auguste Schmidt as head of the BDF in 1899. Under her leadership, the federation passed its first cautious resolution in favor of women’s suffrage in 1902, and invited the International Council of Women (ICW) to its congress in Berlin in 1904. In 1908, the BDF’s rights commission led by Stritt drafted a resolution calling for the elimination of paragraph 218 (prohibiting abortion in German law), which fell only slightly short of a majority in the general assembly. One factor in the result was the comparatively high number of delegates from the ‘Deutsch-Evangelischer Frauenbund’ (DEF, German Protestant Women’s Federation), a conservative organization that had only recently joined the BDF. The ‘Jüdischer Frauenbund’ (Jewish Women’s Federation, JFB) had come on board a year before that, whereas the ‘Katholischer Deutscher Frauenbund’ (German Catholic Women’s Federation, KDFB) was the only denominational women’s organization never to join. The radicals’ own umbrella organization, the ‘Verband Fortschrittlicher Frauenvereine’ (Union of Progressive Women’s Associations, VFF) which had been founded in 1899, joined the BDF in 1907.
Mass Organization and Reorientation
In 1912, when the BDF inaugurated what would become a very successful exhibition entitled Die Frau in Haus und Beruf (Women at Home and Work) in Berlin in conjunction with a seven-day conference, its membership already included thirty-eight federations with 2,200 associations and an estimated 500,000 individuals. It continued to grow and passed the one-million mark by 1928.10
Gertrud Bäumer, who became the director in 1910, played a major role in the BDF becoming a mass organization in which conservative currents at times gained the upper hand. In 1915, for example, the BDF opened its doors to homemakers in the ‘Reichsverband Deutscher Hausfrauenvereine’ (National Federation of German Homemakers’ Associations, RDHV). In 1920, the ‘Reichsverband Landwirtschaftlicher Hausfrauenvereine’ (RLHV, National Federation of Agricultural Housewives' Associations) joined as well. However, the course pursued by the moderates as of 1900, namely that of integrating many nonpolitical women in the women’s movement by “discovering a new sense of social responsibility”11, did not stand the test of time. The agricultural organizations often supported anti-emancipatory and anti-democratic policies or were subject to influences of that type. The BDF leadership realized that the housewives “could not be integrated on the basis of the women’s movement’s concerns”12. The liberal “principles and agenda of the women’s movement” of 1907 endorsed active and passive women’s suffrage”13, but these endorsements were not binding for the member associations. When the DEF joined, the BDF conceded that it was not required to support women’s suffrage, and later did the same for the housewives’ associations.
The heterogeneous nature of the BDF, with all its potential for conflict, took a backseat to nationalization in the women’s movement during World War I. Conceived by Gertrud Bäumer, the ‘Nationaler Frauendienst’ (National Women’s Service, NFD) mobilized German women, including Catholics and Social Democrats, for a wide range of tasks to strengthen the ’home front’ throughout the war. Having taken this initiative, the BDF became an ever more assertive voice in public debate on the role of women beginning in 1916 and continuing after the war. Its 1917 memorandum, Die Stellung der Frau in der politisch-sozialen Neugestaltung Deutschlands (The Position of Women in the Political and Social Restructuring of Germany), called for “full civic equality for women on all levels” in light of their accomplishments and contributions during the war.14 The DEF took this call as a reason to leave the BDF in 1918.
The introduction of universal and equal suffrage in the Weimar Republic led to the dissolution of the VFF, as it considered the aim of the women’s movement to have been thereby achieved. For the BDF, women’s suffrage meant two things: On the one hand, it granted the association greater significance because many of its leading figures were now active in political parties, state parliaments, and the federal parliament. As politicians, they could collaborate on a nonpartisan basis and draw on BDF support to pass legislation that would not have been possible earlier, most notably the ‘Gesetz zur Bekämpfung der Geschlechtskrankheiten’ (Law to Combat Sexually Transmittable Diseases) and the ‘Reichsjugendwohlfahrtsgesetz’ (National Youth Welfare Law). On the other hand, the BDF’s focus on national policy led its elite members to increasingly distance themselves from the membership at large. Younger women, in particular, criticized the BDF’s bureaucratization and shift away from the ideal of ’women’s cultural influence’, accusing the first wave of professional female politicians of conforming largely to the ’policies of men’.15
And finally, the three largest associations left the BDF. The ‘Verband der weiblichen Handels- und Büroangestellten’ (Federation of Female Trade and Office Employees) departed in 1922 because it no longer considered its professional interests to align with the women’s movement. And in 1932, the two national homemakers’ associations left in conjunction with the BDF’s resolute support for international disarmament. The BDF’s steadfast focus on civic equality for women and men, and ultimately its pacifist stance as well, led its major conservative groups to turn away. Reduced in size, the BDF had also acquired rigid bureaucratic structures and taken up partisan politics, causing many an advocate to become disillusioned.
On May 15, 1933, the BDF, which had opposed the National Socialists in its Gelbe Blätter (Yellow Pages) since 1930, formally resolved to disband under its last director, Agnes von Zahn-Harnack. It saw no way to continue its work under the restrictions imposed by the Nazis, including “unconditional subordination to the leader of the NSDAP” and “removal of non-Aryan members from the boards”.16
Network of Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine (BDF)
Footnotes
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1
Bussemer, Herrad-Ulrike: „…ein einzig‘ Volk von Schwestern“. Zur Geschichte des Bundes Deutscher Frauenvereine, Berlin 1987, 2.
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2
Bäumer, Gertrud: Die Geschichte des Bundes Deutscher Frauenvereine, in: Elisabeth Altmann-Gottheiner (Ed.): Jahrbuch des Bundes Deutscher Frauenvereine 1921, Leipzig/Berlin 1921, 15–64, here 17.
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3
Ibid., 16.
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4
Gerhard, Ute: Frauenbewegung und Feminismus. Eine Geschichte seit 1789, München 2009, 71.
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5
Schaser, Angelika: Frauenbewegung in Deutschland 1848–1933, Darmstadt 2006, 62.
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6
Meurer, Bärbel: Marianne Weber. Leben und Werk, Tübingen 2010, 420.
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7
Bäumer: Geschichte, 47 f.
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8
Augspurg, Anita: Die Verfassung des Bundes, in: Die Frauenbewegung, Berlin 1. Oktober 1898, 204.
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9
Ibid.
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10
Schaser: Frauenbewegung, 99.
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11
Bäumer: Geschichte, 38.
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12
Ibid.
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13
Ibid., 31.
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14
Bussemer: „…ein einzig‘ Volk“, 23.
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15
Schaser: Frauenbewegung, 102.
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16
Ibid., 118.