Organizations and Individuals in the Women’s Movement in Imperial Germany

The German Empire of 1871 lasted almost forty years. During that time, a complex women’s movement emerged. It was borne by numerous activists, but only the ’big names’ of the women ’on the frontlines’ are well known. In the meantime, a number of laudable local and biographical studies have greatly expanded our knowledge. In the scope of this paper, I can name only those spheres of activity, organizations, and activists that I deem most important. 

I would like to begin with a look at the formative phase of the women’s movement between 1865 and the early 1890s. The main focus at the time was on improving women’s access to education and employment. Two key organizations that operated across the country, with many local chapters, were the ‘Allgemeine Deutsche Frauenverein’ (General Women’s Association, ADF), initiated by the ‘Leipziger Frauenbildungsverein’ (Association for the Education of Women) in October 1865, and the ‘Verband deutscher Frauenbildungs- und Erwerbsvereine’ (Federation of German Associations for Women’s Education and Employment), known as the ‘Lette-Verband’ (Lette Association). The latter grew out of the ‘Berlin Lette-Verein’ or Association for the Encouragement of Women’s Employment, founded in February 1866. 

Gradually, the ADF and the ‘Lette-Verband’ began to work together closely; they wrote joint petitions and from 1876 held alternating congresses at which delegates from the non-hosting organization were eligible to vote. Both associations reflected the organizational principle that were typical of the women’s movement at the time: self-help and self-organization for women—autonomy in today’s discourse—while opening membership to men as well, and collaborating with them. Many women clearly wanted to bolster female autonomy but not forgo the support of men on the local level and so became members of both the ADF and the ‘Lette-Verband’. This is true, for example, of Louise Büchner from Darmstadt, as Cordelia Scharpf has shown, as well as of Johanna Goldschmidt and Emilie Wüstenfeld from Hamburg, Marie Mindermann from Bremen, and Jenny Hirsch and Lina Morgenstern from Berlin.  

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The ‘Frauenverein Reform’ (women’s association Reform) was founded in 1888 with the sole aim of achieving university access for women—something that the ADF had been the first women’s organization to demand at its founding meeting in 1865. Hedwig Kettler was the director of Reform (and Hedwig Dohm a founding member), which was later renamed the ‘Verein Frauenbildung-Frauenstudium’ (Association for [University] Education for Women). The organization demanded equal educational opportunities for girls and boys—a radical idea at the time. Members of the ‘Verein Frauenwohl’ (Women’s Welfare Association) , founded in 1888 in Berlin by Minna Cauer, also called for opening universities and academic careers to women, and along with the ADF, petitioned to this effect. From 1990, other organizations with specific aims for certain occupational groups arose, including the ‘Allgemeine Deutsche Lehrerinnenverein’ (General German Association of Women Teachers, ADLV), of which Helene Lange was president, Marie Loeper-Housselle vice-president, and Auguste Schmidt honorary president, and the ‘Kaufmännische Verband für weibliche Angestellte’ (Mercantile Union of Female Workers), founded in 1903, in which Cauer was also active. 

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Without having reached the goal of women’s education and employment—one could say that women were instead focusing narrowly on certain occupations—the German women’s movement entered into a new phase in the 1890s, characterized by a large increase in politicization and differentiation. 

The Struggle for Women’s Suffrage

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In the 1890s, calls for women’s suffrage became louder in many countries. The motor for this campaign in Germany was the ‘Verein Frauenwohl’ (Women’s Welfare Association). In 1894, the association organized the first public people’s assembly in Berlin on the topic ‘Woman’s Duty as Citizen’, where Lily von Gizycki (later Lily Braun) gave a rousing speech in favor of women’s suffrage. That same year, Helene Lange also demanded women’s suffrage in many public speeches. In 1902, Minna Cauer, Anita Augspurg, Lida Gustava Heymann, and others founded the ‘Deutschen Verein für Frauenstimmrecht’, after 1904 the ‘Deutscher Verband für Frauenstimmrecht’ (German Association for Women’s Suffrage), with Hedwig Dohm as its honorary president. The organization was situated in Hamburg, because a loophole made it one of the only cities in which women were allowed to form organizations before the reform of the Imperial Associations Act (Reichvereinsgesetz) in 1908. In 1902, the ‘Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine’ (Union of German Women’s Associations, BDF) also came out publicly in favor of women’s suffrage. Gisela Bock and Angelika Schaser have rightly noted that in the case of women’s suffrage, the supposed divide between ‘radicals’ and ‘reformers’ was nonexistent.  

Against Prostitution and Trafficking

In the 1890s, as large cities began to establish themselves, there was a worrying growth in metropolitan prostitution and the trafficking of girls, as well as an increase of sexually transmitted diseases. Hence issues of (sexual) morality—which had always played a role—became more important in the women’s movement. These issues often led to very controversial discussions. I would like to mention Hanna Bieber-Böhm and the ‘Verein für Jugendschutz’ (Association for the Protection of Youth) founded in 1889 in Berlin, which sent petitions to the emperor and to the Reichstag, demanding an end to regimented prostitution and harsh penalties for ‘commercial fornication’. The BDF supported her proposals in 1895. However, they were countered by the German chapters of the ‘Internationalen Abolitionistischen Föderation’ (International Abolitionist Federation), founded in 1875 in England by Josephine Butler, including the Hamburg chapter, led by Lida Gustava Heymann, the Berlin chapter under Anna Pappritz’s directorship, and Katharina Scheven’s chapter in Dresden. These banded together in 1902 under the direction of Scheven and joined the BDF. They were against the penalization of ‘commercial fornication’, which was difficult to prove and instead focused on fighting sexually transmitted diseases through educational work and generally working to improve morals and strengthen the institution of marriage. The abolitionists believed that there was only one set of morals that was the same for both sexes.

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An idea considered much more radical was the ‘new ethics’ propagated by the ‘Bund für Mutterschutz’ (League for the Protection of Mothers), initiated by Helene Stöcker in 1905, renamed ‘Bund für Mutterschutz und Sexualreform’ (League for the Protection of Mothers and Sexual Reform, BfMS) in 1908. Prominent men were also members of the BfMS, including Sigmund Freud, Werner Sombart, Max Weber, Ernst Haeckel, and August Bebel. Central to the League’s convictions was women’s right to self-determination over their bodies and their sexuality, as well as the belief that love, not marriage, could be a legitimate basis for sexual relations. The BfMS aimed to fight prejudice against unmarried women and their children and to improve their legal and social status. It also advocated for sexual education, a right to contraceptives, and the decriminalization of abortion. Such policies were so controversial that the BDF denied the BfMS membership—in part to placate the ‘Deutsch-Evangelische Frauenbund’ (German-Protestant League of Women, DEF), a conservative member of the BDF. Under its director Paula Mueller-Otfried, the DEF also worked against women’s suffrage until 1918. 

In 1903, the ‘Katholischer Frauenbund’ (League of Catholic Women), co-founded by Elisabeth Gnauck-Kühne, and in 1904 the ‘Jüdische Frauenbund’ (League of Jewish Women),which Bertha Pappenheim directed for many years, were founded. The League of Catholic Women did not, however, join the BDF. 

In 1899, some BDF members joined together in the ‘Verband fortschrittlicher Frauenvereine’ (League of Progressive Women’s Associations, VfFV) led by Cauer and Augspurg. They had been unhappy with the BDF kowtowing to its conservative members on moral or legal issues. In 1907, almost all members of the VfFV joined the BDF en bloc, to challenge the movement.

Conservatism and Nationalism

With nationalism, militarism, and imperialist colonial ambitions on the rise in Germany, women’s organizations that shared those leanings were also formed, some of which joined the BDF, for example, the ‘Flottenbund Deutscher Frauen’ (Naval Union of German Women), founded in 1905. Accordingly, divergences within the BDF increased at the turn of the century, and it began to zigzag between liberal emancipatory visions, conservative views, and imperialist and racist ideas. Outside of the BDF, the number of large philanthropic and patriotic women’s associations also grew, for example, the Vaterländische Frauenvereine (Patriotic Women’s Leagues), formed against the background of the German Wars of Unification (Deutsche Einigungskriege) in 1866. These groups cared for the wounded during wartime and in times of peace were active in the areas of private healthcare and aid for the poor, but did not work for the equality of the sexes. 

Proletarian Women’s Movement

The proletarian or socialist/Social Democratic women’s movement also acted outside the structure of the BDF. Founded in the 1870s, it was not able to truly establish itself until after the anti-Socialist laws were revoked in the 1880s. It is, however, not quite correct to subsume socialist groups under the ’women’s movement’, because they were less interested in creating independent organizations of working women to fight for their particular interests, and more focused on incorporation into the labor movement. At first, the ‘Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands’ (Social Democratic Party of Germany, SPD) allowed independent organizations of women workers, but the 1905 party convention in Jena put a stop to this practice. There, it was decided that all separate women’s organizations must be disbanded. Their members should instead join party associations, to build a stronger, centralized organizational structure. Luise Zietz (1865–1922) then became the first woman on the executive board of the SPD in 1908. Women’s conferences held during SPD party conventions were nevertheless central to creating an awareness of women’s issues within the party. 
Clara Zetkin (1857–1933), whose theories had a strong influence on socialist ideas of women’s emancipation, rejected cooperation with the bourgeois women’s movement.  She believed that each class had its own women’s question. The struggle of social democratic women should, in her opinion, be against capitalism and not, as it was for bourgeois women, against men of their own class. Zetkin’s aim was the reign of the proletariat. She did not expect a solution to the women’s question until a socialist or communist society was in place that did away with the exploitation of people by people. August Bebel (1840–1913) had already described such a vision of the future in detail in 1879 in his book Die Frau und der Sozialismus (Woman and Socialism). It became a bestseller and was reprinted fifty-three times in his lifetime alone. But even if socialists believed that only the future would bring a solution to the so-called women’s question, they still fought for the introduction of women’s suffrage. Bebel, a member of the very first Reichstag of the German Empire, had already called for women’s right to vote in 1893. In 1910, Zetkin initiated International Women’s Day at the International Socialist Women’s Conference in Copenhagen as a day of struggle for women’s suffrage. There was therefore no lack of opportunities for women from different camps to work together on certain issues.

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If we look at the entire era of the German Empire, we can see that women, irrespective of their background, religion, or ideology, continuously worked in varying ways to support girls and women in need and to reform marriage and family laws. In the first area, Jeanette Schwerin, who established social welfare groups for women and girls in the 1890s in Berlin, deserves special recognition, as does Alice Salomon, who founded the ‘Soziale Frauenschule’ (Social Women’s School) to train welfare workers in 1908. These schools were a key element in establishing social work as a professional occupation. 

World War I

The First World War once again created new social conditions for the women’s movement and forced women to take a position. Most of the women in the movement, whether bourgeois or social democratic, believed the country had been forced into war and wanted to strengthen the home front. They often crossed political lines and worked together with the ‘Nationale Frauendienst’ (National Women’s Service, NFD). In a concept developed by Hedwig Heyl, these women hoped that in return they would be recognized for their civic engagement and offered political equality in the form of the right to vote. Only a small minority held fast to pacifist positions and, like Augspurg and Lida Gustava, participated in the International Women’s Peace Conference in The Hague in 1915 or, like Clara Zetkin that same year in Bern, joined a group of socialist women against the war at the International Socialist Women’s Conference.   

Ideas about ‘The Nature of the Sexes’

Across all political differences and associations, members of the first or old women’s movement, whether they identified as ’liberal’, ‘radical’, ’progressive’, ’bourgeois’, ’socialist’, ’pacifist’, ’nationalist’, or something else, were all firm believers in the fundamental difference between men and women. Usually, specific male or female traits and abilities were explained by the anatomy of the sexual act and by women’s ability to bear children. These widespread beliefs influenced thinking and actions; they were anchored deeply in the general population through constant propagation of bourgeois ideals of men and women and the family, and through a social and legal order that followed that ideal. In this concept, woman, as the supposedly weaker and more emotional sex, was by nature best suited to work as a wife, housewife, and mother, with the home as her sphere of influence, while man, the supposedly stronger and more rational sex, was better suited to the outside world of paid labor, public life, science, and politics. This ideology of the polarization of gender characteristics, as Karin Hausen has aptly called it, was well-suited to deny women the rights accorded to men.

It is worth noting that most of the women active in the women’s movement were convinced that men and women had different natures, and so were in line with the gender ideology of their day, but at the same time were able to break through the confines of these ideas. They modified them by demanding recognition of the equal value of women and men. Some, like Henriette Goldschmidt, believed that these differences predestined women for work in certain areas such as the education of children and girls, caring for the sick, and social welfare. Others, like Louise Otto-Peters, were convinced that the specific feminine qualities were in the public’s best interest in all areas, whether in marriage and the family, economics, law, politics, science, art, or volunteer work. Hedwig Dohm was one of very few early feminists who believed that the dual model of genders was a construct. In her essays, she employed biting ridicule and nuanced irony to point out inconsistencies and contradictions in biologistic argumentation.