Bertha Wendt

Bertha Theodore Wendt , b. Bahnson (born October 10, 1859 in Hamburg ; † March 14, 1937 there ) was a German politician of the DDP and member of the Hamburg Parliament .

Life and social engagement

Grave slab (right) for
Bertha Wendt , Ohlsdorf cemetery

Bertha Theodore Bahnson was a daughter of the Hamburg high school teacher Franz Wilhelm Viborg Bahnson (1826-1919) and his wife Rosalie Bertha, nee. Philipp (1839–1884) from Glückstadt. She attended the secondary school for girls and the convent school .

In 1878 she married Gustav Wendt (1848–1933), with whom she had eight children. She received the Cross of Merit for her charitable work . After the death of her husband, Wendt withdrew from public life.

Bertha Wendt was buried in Hamburg's Ohlsdorf cemetery on the right side of the Bahnson-Wendt family grave (grid square W 8, east of the funeral forum ).

During World War I she organized war kitchens and accommodation for returning soldiers and single women. In addition to working with women within the liberal movement, she became chair of the “Democratic Women's Group Hamburg”. Her main concerns there were the accommodation and care of girls who had finished school, the construction of home rooms for female domestic staff and the fight against the exploitation and abuse of children. She also took over guardianship and became a member of the German Association for Maternity Protection and Sexual Reform . What was special about the federal government was that they also felt obliged to unmarried women who had recently given birth and organized the protection and care of unmarried or abandoned mothers.

She was also active in the “Hamburg Women's Club”, the “German Association of Abstinence Women”, the “Association of North German Women's Associations” and the Hamburg branch of the German Association for Women's Suffrage .

politics

In 1911 Bertha Wendt was elected to the board of the United Liberals Association and sat for the German Democratic Party (DDP) from 1919 to 1924 in the Hamburg parliament . Her focus there was child and women's politics. She was also active in her political function as a parliamentarian in the Department of Public Child Welfare and Justice Administration (there in the Prisons Department).

She became chair of the DDP-affiliated “Democratic Women's Group Hamburg”. After the First World War, she devoted herself to the political education of women . As a leader of democratic women, she organized emergency courses in political education into old age . These had become urgently necessary because with the beginning of the Weimar Republic women were granted the right to vote and stand as a candidate and political education for women was mostly not considered necessary during the imperial era.

literature

• Rita Bake / Brita Reimers : That's how they lived! Walking on the paths of women in Hamburg's old and new town. Hamburg 2003, p. 202.
• Ursula Büttner : Political new beginning in difficult times. Election and work of the first democratic citizenship 1919–1921. Hamburg 1994, pp. 134/135.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Celebrity Graves