Käthe Schirmacher

Käthe Schirmacher ( born August 6, 1865 in Gdansk, † November 18, 1930 in Meran ) was a German women's rights activist. In the 1890s, Schirmacher was one of the leaders of the left wing of the bourgeois women's movement.

Life

Käthe Schirmacher was the daughter of a wealthy businessman and one of the first German women, who earned a PhD. From autumn 1893 to spring 1895, she studied in Zurich, where she was in 1895 a doctorate in Romance languages ​​. During her student years in Zurich was her partner Margaret Boehm.

In 1899 she was one of the founders of the Association of progressive women's organizations in 1904 to those of the World Federation for Women's Suffrage (English International Woman Suffrage Alliance, IWSA ). From 1904, however, she turned to conservative and nationalist circles. In the board of the " World Federation for Women's Suffrage ", she was not re-elected in 1909, especially since she refused to stand up for the democratic right to vote. This led in 1913 to a break with the women's movement. In the years 1919 and 1920 Schirmacher sat as a Member of the German National People's Party ( DNVP ) in the Weimar National Assembly, where she belonged to the nationalist wing of the party. In their speeches, there are many racist remarks, for example, they spoke of the " verne siege to France " and the " animal Moscow ". They, too, came from a " Jewish conspiracy " against Germany.

The national conservative political camp, but also right circles of the women's movement, formed in screen Aher last years, its main field of activity. Her writings and lectures from this period testify to the difficulty of their cause to win a conservative environment for women's equality. The huge estate Aher screen is in the library of the University of Rostock.

Your last companion, to which she moved to Marlow in Mecklenburg from 1910, Klara Schleker was the first woman to age as President opened a German parliament in 1920. Käthe Schirmacher was also a publicist and a writer, among other things, she wrote the novel Half (1893 ), in which she attacked Mr morality and prostitution. Belletristic she created there and in the Libertad ( 1891), a wealth of material that was rooted in their Parisian period of study; Protagonists were both students and academics She died in Merano.

Publications (selection)

• Voltaire. O. R. rice land, Leipzig 1898.
• The Suffragettes. 1st edition. . Duncker, Weimar 1912 [ About the English women's movement. ] Edition: Jassmann, Frankfurt 1988, ISBN 3-926975-00-8. .
• The woman working at home, their economic, legal and social standings. Felix Dietrich, Gautzsch at Leipzig in 1912.