Federation of German Women's Associations
The Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine (BDF) was founded as the umbrella organization of the civil women's movement on 28/29. Founded March 1894 and existed until the National Socialists came to power in 1933.
The federal government was influential and had up to over a million members.
Goals and areas of work
In order to be able to integrate as many women's associations as possible into the BDF and thus into the women's movement, the BDF should pursue a more moderate line. In particular, it promoted the interests of women in education, better working conditions and social participation, especially in the social field; However, political rights such as the right to vote were only explicitly demanded later.
The founding was inspired by the General Assembly of the International Women's Council on the occasion of the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago. Following the American model, the National Council of Women founded in 1888 , the federal government based joint actions on the principle of consensus, so that only those points were included in the BDF program that all member associations could support. The BDF should not interfere in the internal affairs of the member associations. According to an assessment by Gertrud Bäumer , many members did not count themselves as part of the women's movement in the narrower sense, but primarily pursued charitable or job-related goals.
Accordingly, women workers were welcome, but socialist women's associations could not belong to the federal government. A major reason was that socialists usually demarcated themselves from the bourgeois women's movement, because they did not put the class question first. Another reason was that women in Prussia were forbidden from any explicitly political activity until 1908; with the admission of socialist women's associations, it is feared, one would have risked the dissolution of the association.
Associations that had a member on the board were able to assert their interests. Under the chairmanship of Marie Stritt, more radical positions were therefore also represented in the BDF, while her successor Gertrud Bäumer initially prioritized the integration of more conservative associations in order to strengthen the association's membership base.
Club structure
The board of directors represented the main areas of activity and the most important member associations of the BDF and conducted the association's business between the annual general assemblies, which took place every two years from 1898 onwards. Resolutions had to be passed by the general assembly or confirmed by all member associations. The work areas were represented by commissions. The organ of publication of the association was the Centralblatt des Bundes Deutscher Frauenvereine, which appeared from 1899.
Board
The first board consisted of:
- Auguste Schmidt : 1st chairwoman until 1899
- Anna Schepeler-Lette : 2nd chairwoman; Chairwoman of the Lette Association
- Anna Simson
- Hanna Bieber-Böhm , as chairwoman of the youth protection association, representative of the moral movement
- Auguste Förster
- Ottilie Hoffmann
- Helene von Forster , chairwoman of the Nuremberg Women's Welfare Association
- Helene Lange
- Betty Naue
- Jeanette Schwerin : on the board from 1896; Head of the girls and women groups for social aid work
- Marie Stritt : on the board from 1896, first chairwoman from 1899–1910; Founder of the first legal protection association for women in Germany.
In 1910 the office of the first chairman passed to Gertrud Bäumer . From 1919 to 1924 it was occupied by Marianne Weber , from 1924 to 1931 by Emma Ender and from 1931 until the dissolution of the BDF in 1933 by Agnes von Zahn-Harnack . Gertrud Bäumer remained on the board as deputy chairwoman for the entire time.
General Assembly
The number of delegates entitled to vote per association was calculated based on the amount of the membership fees. Additional votes could also be acquired through additional contributions. Proposals that should counteract the disadvantage of poorer clubs could not prevail.
Members
- 1895: 65 clubs
- 1901: 137 associations with 70,000 members
- 1913: 2,200 associations with around 500,000 members.
- 1928: Over a million members.
Memberships
In 1897 the BDF joined the International Women's Council .
financing
The BDF was financed almost exclusively through membership fees. Donations were rare. Other sources of income were the sale of magazines and yearbooks and the 1912 Women's Congress, which made a profit. The club's assets invested in securities were lost during inflation.
Commissions
The content-related work of the BDF took place in the commissions. They included the following areas of work:
- Law, especially family law in connection with the reform of the BGB . Members of the legal commission included Marie Stritt and Anita Augspurg
- Protection of women workers, especially the hiring of trade inspectors, on the one hand to give women workers female contacts and on the other hand to create new job opportunities for women from the middle class. This commission was headed by Jeanette Schwerin until her death in 1899 .
- Improvement of morality, which was to be achieved above all through the fight against so-called "regulated prostitution"
- Education
- Promoting moderation, particularly through measures to limit alcohol consumption, such as the establishment of alcohol-free restaurants
- Promotion of employment and economic independence for women, for example by improving training and working conditions
- child protection
position
Already at the founding meeting of the BDF in March 1894, the relationship between the bourgeois (and aristocratic) women's movement and the workers' movement was the subject of heated debates. In her introductory address, chairwoman Auguste Schmidt stated that workers' associations were welcome in the federal government as long as they had no political tendencies. Was the background of this distinction the above-mentioned, until 1908 valid law on associations , the women, the operation in political associations banned.
Some members of the BDF (among them Minna Cauer ) protested in newspaper articles against the exclusion of social democratic women, they - above all Clara Zetkin - refused to cooperate with the bourgeois women because the bourgeois women's movement only wanted reforms within the to effect civil society. The self-image of the proletarian women's movement , on the other hand, was to work with (proletarian) men to change society for the benefit of both sexes. A public confrontation and a clear distinction between bourgeois and proletarian women's movements took place at the international women's congress as part of the Berlin trade fair in 1896.
The denominational women's associations were generally rather conservative. With the exception of the Jewish Women's Federation , they were rather hostile to the BDF. The Protestant German-Evangelical Women's Association entered the BDF in 1908 in order to strengthen the conservatives in the BDF in the discussion about the reform of §218 . Similarly, the thoroughly conservative education provider, the Reifensteiner Verband, largely influenced by aristocratic women, joined the BDF in 1913 on the initiative of Elisabeth Boehm . Elisabeth Boehm (1859–1943) was the founder of the agricultural housewives' association and later a longstanding board member of the Reifensteiner.
When the BDF finally resolved to demand the right to vote for women, the DEF left the BDF in 1918. The Catholic equivalent of the DEF, the Catholic Women's Association of Germany , never officially joined the BDF, but worked with the BDF on issues such as women's education and legal issues.
resolution
In 1933 the Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine dissolved to avoid subordination to the NSDAP .
After the Second World War , the "Information Service for Women's Issues" was created in 1951 from a merger of fourteen women's associations at the federal level. In the course of time, the German Women's Council developed from it, which sees itself in the tradition of the BDF.
literature
- Gilla Dölle: The Federation of German Women's Associations: an umbrella organization in constant financial difficulties. In: The (un) secret power of money. Financing strategies of the bourgeois women's movement in Germany between 1865 and 1933. dipa-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1997, ISBN 3-7638-0361-0 , pp. 106–121.
- Ute Gerhard : heyday and battles for direction. In: Ute Gerhard: Unheard of. The history of the German women's movement. Rowohlt, Hamburg 1990, ISBN 3-499-18377-3 , pp. 169-213.
- Barbara Greven-Aschoff: The bourgeois women's movement in Germany 1894-1933. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1981, ISBN 3-525-35704-4 .
Web links
Sources and individual references
- ↑ About Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine (BDF), in: Digitales Deutsches Frauenarchiv, URL: https://www.digitales-deutsches-frauenarchiv.de/akteurinnen/bund-deutscher-frauenvereine-bdf .
- ↑ Helene Lange and Gertrud Bäumer: Handbook of the women's movement. Berlin: Moeser, 1901, p. 132.
- ↑ See Ute Gerhard and Ulla Wischermann: Unheard. The history of the German women's movement, Hamburg: Rowohlt 1990, pp. 114–122.
- ↑ Ortrud Wörner-Heil: Frauenschulen auf dem Lande 1997, pp. 26–31.
- ^ German Women's Council eV, Berlin: German Women's Council | History. Retrieved July 9, 2018 .