Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

In 1847–8, as revolutions broke out across Europe, international movements for women's suffrage, economic independence, and property rights emerged as feminists began to reach out to one another for inspiration and help. German feminists Louise Dittmar (1807–84) and Louise Aston (1814–71) took radical positions on property and other rights, while middle-class feminist Louise Otto (1819–95) emphasized the distinctive contributions of “German womanliness” in her politically radical work and in her long-running publication Frauenzeitung (Women's Newspaper). Following unification in 1871 and the establishment of national male suffrage, Hedwig Dohm (1831–1919), inspired by the British suffrage campaigns, made a case for German female suffrage in 1873. Marxist-socialist feminists contributed landmark texts to the German women's movement, such as August Bebel's Women in the Past, Present and Future (1878) and Clara Zetkin's 1889 address to the founding congress of the Second International Working Men's Association, “Women Workers and the Woman Question.” In 1894 when the Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine (National German Women's Association) (BDF) was founded, women's political participation was forbidden in Wilhelmian Germany; the BDF cautiously included only charitable, educational, and philanthropic groups and chose to campaign for women's educational and economic issues over suffrage. ... log in or subscribe to read full text