Adele Schmitz

Adèle Marie Henriette Schmitz (born February 26, 1868 in Bremen , † March 14, 1951 in Bremen) was a German women's rights activist .

biography

family

Schmitz was the daughter of the Bremen cotton merchant and Dutch consul Christoph Friedrich Theophilius Roessingh and Lucine-Marie Philomène de Buys, who came from New Orleans . She had five siblings. She experienced childhood in her new house at Am Dobben 117, on the corner of Feldstrasse in Bremen-Mitte .

From 1874 to 1884 she graduated from Christian habenicht's private secondary school . After that she lived with her mother in Le Havre . Here she met the Swiss cotton merchant Paul Schmitz, both married in Bremen in 1886, where she lived again from 1901. The couple had four children.

Women's movement

In Merano in 1904 she met Helene Stöcker , who was active in the radical wing of the bourgeois women's movement and in 1905 founded the German Association for Maternity Protection and Sexual Reform in Berlin . With the support of Stöckers, a local branch in Bremen was established in 1909 to convince the Bremen Senate that unmarried mothers needed more protection. Schmitz was chairman of the group until 1924 and represented it in the general assemblies of the federal government. From 1924 until the compulsory dissolution in 1933, she was its secretary.

Since 1904 she was also a member of the Bremen branch of the German Women's Suffrage Association and represented them at their Berlin General Assembly in 1912. In 1914 she moved to the new local group of the German Women's Suffrage Association, which more firmly adhered to the same suffrage for both sexes.

In 1915 - during the First World War - the friends Schmitz and Auguste Kirchhoff were the only Bremen women who participated as members of the 28-member German delegation at the International Women's Peace Congress in The Hague in April / May 1915. The International Committee for Lasting Peace (from 1919 International Women's League for Peace and Freedom ) was founded here.

After the World War she was also a member and for a short time on the board of the Bremen Association for Alcohol-Free Dining Houses and the Bremen Association for New Women's Clothing and Culture .

In the women's movement she fought for unrestricted women's suffrage, against Section 218 of the Criminal Code ( abortion ), for equality between illegitimate and legitimate children, for sexual education and against war as a solution to international conflicts. In 1918 she and her husband left the Protestant church because pastors had also supported the war. She worked with her husband on the board of the maternity protection association . Her husband managed to create a room in the cotton exchange for the care of illegitimate children.

Literature, sources

• Romina Schmitter: Schmitz, Adèle Marie Henriette, b. Roessingh . In: Women's history (s) , Bremer Frauenmuseum (ed.). Edition Falkenberg, Bremen 2016, ISBN 978-3-95494-095-0 .