Lore Agnes

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Lore Agnes

Lore Agnes (born Benning ; born June 4, 1876 in Bochum , † June 9, 1953 in Cologne ) was a social democratic politician and women's rights activist. She was a member of the Weimar National Assembly in 1919/20 and of the Reichstag from 1920 to 1933.

Live and act

Lore Agnes came from a family of miners and became a maid in Düsseldorf after her father's early death . In 1906 she married the union secretary Peter Agnes and became a housewife. Around the same time, she joined the SPD and was involved in the child protection commission of the Lower Rhine district and the emerging social democratic women's movement. She played a leading role in founding the " Association of Domestic Workers ". This association worked to improve the dire situation of domestic workers. Although the maids had to live and work in the worst conditions, they represented the politically most difficult class of workers to reach. They were hardly aware of the few rights that the servant order granted them. They were also little aware of the value of their work. The organization of the servants is the great merit of Lore Agnes, who walked from place to place as an agitator to address female servants. The establishment of the Arbeiterwohlfahrt in the Düsseldorf area was also largely due to her initiative.

Lore Agnes (left) together with Clara Zetkin (center) and Mathilde Wurm (right) in front of the Reichstag in Berlin (1919)

Politically, she was on the left wing of the SPD before the First World War and adopted the views of Clara Zetkin and Rosa Luxemburg . As a pacifist , she was a determined opponent of the war during the First World War. A speech at a peace rally in Düsseldorf in 1914 earned her several weeks in custody . In 1915 she took part in the International Socialist Women's Conference for Peace in Bern . In 1917 she was arrested again because she had allegedly left for an international women's meeting in Zurich without papers. In the same year she joined the USPD . She played an important role as a member of the central leadership of the party.

For the USPD she was a member of the Weimar National Assembly and also of the Reichstag until reunification with the MSPD. For the now unified SPD, she sat in the Reichstag until 1933 and campaigned primarily for social and women's policy. In the National Assembly on July 17, 1919, she called for child welfare to be expanded because the capitalist economic system meant that many parents were no longer able to raise their children adequately. At the same time, she called for a provision to be included in the Weimar Imperial Constitution , according to which parents may no longer be deprived of their children for politically or religiously motivated reasons and put in a home.

At the beginning of the National Socialist “ seizure of power ” she went underground, but was quickly arrested and only released after serious illness. A year later, she was detained again for several months. In 1938 she became unemployed for political reasons. In connection with the Hitler assassination attempt on July 20, 1944 , she was imprisoned again for several months as part of the grating action .

After the war she participated in the reconstruction of the workers welfare and the local SPD in Düsseldorf . Lore Agnes died in the Lindenburg in Cologne, but was buried in the Nordfriedhof in Düsseldorf.

Honors

AWO houses in Düsseldorf and Essen and a kindergarten in Radevormwald are named after her, as are streets in Düsseldorf and Duisburg . In addition, the Rectorate of the Ruhr University Bochum awards the Lore Agnes Prize for projects on equality between women and men.

literature

  • Lore Agnes . In: Franz Osterroth : Biographical Lexicon of Socialism. Deceased personalities . Vol. 1. JHW Dietz Nachf., Hannover 1960, pp. 9-10.
  • Social Democratic Party of Germany (ed.): Committed to freedom. Memorial book of the German social democracy in the 20th century. Marburg 2000, ISBN 3-89472-173-1 , p. 17f.
  • Bernd Haunfelder : North Rhine-Westphalia. Country and people. A biographical manual. Düsseldorf 2006, ISBN 3-402-06615-7 , p. 36.
  • Wilhelm Heinz Schröder : Social Democratic Parliamentarians in the German Reich and Landtag 1867-1933. Biographies, chronicles, election documentation. A handbook (= handbooks on the history of parliamentarism and political parties. Volume 7). Droste, Düsseldorf 1995, ISBN 3-7700-5192-0 , pp. 343-344.
  • Martin Schumacher (Hrsg.): MdR The Reichstag members of the Weimar Republic in the time of National Socialism. Political persecution, emigration and expatriation, 1933–1945. A biographical documentation . 3rd, considerably expanded and revised edition. Droste, Düsseldorf 1994, ISBN 3-7700-5183-1 .

Web links

Commons : Lore Agnes  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ cf. West German newspaper of 30 June 1983rd
personal data
SURNAME Agnes, Lore
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Benning, Lore (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician (SPD, USPD), MdR
DATE OF BIRTH June 4, 1876
PLACE OF BIRTH Bochum
DATE OF DEATH June 9, 1953
Place of death Cologne