Ricarda Huch was a pioneering German intellectual. Trained as a historian, and the author of many works of European history, she also wrote novels, poems, and a play. Asteroid 879 Ricarda is named in her honour.
Helene Stöcker was a German feminist, pacifist and gender activist. She successfully campaigned to keep same sex relationships between women legal, but she was unsuccessful in her campaign to legalise abortion. She was a pacifist in Germany and joined the Deutsche Friedensgesellschaft. As war emerged, she fled to Norway. As Norway was invaded, she moved to Japan and emigrated to America in 1942.
Gertrud Bäumer was a German politician who actively participated in the German civil rights feminist movement. She was also a writer, and contributed to Friedrich Naumann's paper Die Hilfe. From 1898, Bäumer lived and worked together with the German feminist and politician Helene Lange.
Auguste Schmidt, full name, Friederike Wilhelmine Auguste Schmidt, (3 August 1833, Breslau, then Germany now Poland – 10 June 1902, Leipzig, Germany) was a pioneering German feminist, educator, journalist and women's rights activist.
The World's Congress of Representative Women was a week-long convention for the voicing of women's concerns, held within the World's Congress Auxiliary Building in conjunction with the World's Columbian Exposition. At 81 meetings, organized by women from each of the United States, 150,000 people came to the World's Congress Auxiliary Building and listened to speeches given by almost 500 women from 27 countries.
Auguste Fickert was a pioneering Austrian feminist and social reformer. Her politics were on the left wing of Austrian feminism and she allied with proletarian organizations in campaigns around education and legal protection for working-class women.
The Militant League for German Culture, was a nationalistic anti-Semitic political society during the Weimar Republic and the Nazi era. It was founded in 1928 as the Nationalsozialistische Gesellschaft für deutsche Kultur by Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg and remained under his leadership until it was reorganized and renamed to the National Socialist Culture Community in 1934.
Women in Nazi Germany were subject to doctrines of Nazism by the Nazi Party (NSDAP), which promoted exclusion of women from the political and academic life of Germany as well as its executive body and executive committees. On the other hand, whether through sheer numbers, lack of local organization, or both, many German women did indeed become Nazi Party members. In spite of this, the Nazi regime officially encouraged and pressured women to fill the roles of mother and wife only. Women were excluded from all other positions of responsibility, including political and academic spheres.
Feminism in Germany as a modern movement began during the Wilhelmine period (1888–1918) with individual women and women's rights groups pressuring a range of traditional institutions, from universities to government, to open their doors to women. This movement culminated in women's suffrage in 1919. Later waves of feminist activists pushed to expand women's rights.
Maternal feminism is the belief of many early feminists that women as mothers and caregivers had an important but distinctive role to play in society and in politics. It incorporates reform ideas from social feminism, and combines the concepts of maternalism and feminism. It was a widespread philosophy among well-to-do women in the British Empire, particularly Canada, from the late 19th century until after World War I (1914–18). The concept was attacked by later feminists as accepting the paternalist view of society and providing an excuse for inequality.
Anna Pappritz was a German writer and suffragist. She was one of the leaders of the German branch of the International Abolitionist Federation, which sought to abolish regulations and criminal laws directed against prostitutes, and proposed instead to eliminate prostitution through moral education of young men and women, and through providing alternative ways by which young women could earn a living. Pappritz became one of the most prominent members of the women's movement in Germany.
Gertrude Guillaume-Schack was a German women's rights activist who pioneered the fight against state-regulated prostitution in Germany, where she was born. She met considerable resistance due to the prevailing belief that such matters should not be discussed by respectable people, especially women. She also became active in organizing workers associations for German women, and was linked to the Social Democratic Party (SPD). Her activities and political views caused her to be exiled by the German authorities. She moved to England in 1886, where she became involved in Socialist organizations, but fell out with Friedrich Engels. After leaving the English Socialist League she became involved in theosophy. Refusal to accept medical treatment may have contributed to her early death of untreated breast cancer.
Hanna Bieber-Böhm was a German feminist and pioneer of social work. She established an organization to assist young women seeking work in Berlin and help protect them from becoming prostitutes, and founded a recreation home for women where they could also be trained in housework and gardening. She was in favor of combating prostitution through strong laws penalizing the clients of prostitutes.
Katharina Scheven was a German feminist who was a leader of the campaign against state-regulated prostitution.
The history of German women covers gender roles, personalities and movements from medieval times to the present in German-speaking lands.
The emergence of second-wave feminism was a key component of feminism in Germany. The second wave was heavily influenced by the policies of the Third Reich and its attitudes towards gender roles, and those of the postwar era.
Auguste Förster was a German educationalist and activist in the bourgeois women's movement. She was founder of the Kassel Organization of Women's Groups.
Anna Simson, née Haberkern was a German women's rights activist.
Helene von Forster was a German women's rights activist and author. She is considered the most important representative of the feminist movement's moderate "bourgeois" wing in Nuremberg.
Guste Schepp was a German politician and, over many years, a women's rights campaigner.
