Margarethe Faas-Hardegger

Margarethe Faas - Hardegger ( born February 20, 1882 in Bern, † 23 September 1963 Minusio ) was a Swiss women's rights activist, trade unionist and one of the main protagonists of the workers' movement around the turn of the century. She was the first secretary of the Workers SGB. Under her leadership, the workers' movement in Switzerland won political profile and positioned himself increasingly feminist. Faas - Hardegger brought not only the question of women's suffrage on the table of the trade union movement, but also the maternity insurance and the idea of paid domestic work.

Margarethe Hardegger did an apprenticeship as a phone, just then she took, with the support of her later husband, August Faas, according to the Matura. In 1903 she founded together with other the Bernese Textile Workers' Association. 1905 was the mother of two daughters to the first workers secretary of the Swiss Federation of Trade Unions and gave her Law studies in favor of this point. In this role, which she held until 1909, she launched several trade union sections and consumer cooperatives, along with the women's magazines, the pioneer and L' Exploitée. 1909 were the differences with the management of the SGB ( which convinced Syndikalistin Antimilitaristin was ) too big, and she was dismissed.

In 1908 she had the Socialist Bund and its magazine founded together with Gustav Landauer The socialist. After losing their place in the SGB, she focused primarily on these two things, but they also came with Landauer in dispute. In contrast to this, they openly advocated for free love and women's rights and advocated this line in the " socialist". In 1913 she was convicted of false testimony in favor of Ernst Frick, and Landauer took this as an excuse to expel them from the Socialist Federation. In 1915 it fell again into conflict with the law and was sentenced to one year in prison for aiding and abetting abortion.

Then she turned more and more to the idea of ​​free love. In 1919, she founded in Herrliberg in Zurich a rural commune, 1920 Phalanstère " Villino Graziella " in Minusio, near Locarno, Ascona and the artists' colony Lebensreform Monte Verità. Both projects failed due to lack of capital and disagreements of the other residents.