Emmi Welter

Emilie (Emmi) Florine Auguste Welter ( née Merten ) (born August 7, 1887 in Cologne , † March 10, 1971 in Aachen ) was a German CDU politician and women's rights activist . She belonged to the German Bundestag in the 1950s and 1960s .

Live and act

Emmi Welter, from a liberal Protestant house and shaped by two world wars, the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich , fought at a young age for a modern position for women in society, against their oppression in choosing and exercising their careers and against their imposed role as an exclusively active housewife and mother with social commitment. As early as the 1920s, she was the first woman in the presbytery of her congregation in Aachen and chairwoman of the Evangelical Women's Aid in the Rhineland , where she was particularly instrumental in promoting the legal equality of female theologians with their male colleagues.

In 1945 she joined the Christian Democratic Party in Aachen, which was founded in the same year under the supervision of the military administration. December 1945 in Bad Godesberg was renamed Christian Democratic Union (CDU). Only one year later, on August 20, 1946, she was one of the founding members of the Women's Union in the Aachen section, along with Clementine Norres and Helene Weber , which the committed women's rights activist had headed as its elected chairwoman from 1955 to 1966. At the same time as she joined the maternal convalescence organization in 1950, Emmi Welter was also elected to the Aachen City Council. She retained this mandate until 1961 and only gave it up because of her dual role as a member of the Bundestag.

Emmi Welter took up the position on January 4, 1954 for Walther Kolbe, who died on December 25, 1953 . In the federal elections in 1961 and 1965 she was elected to parliament via the state list of North Rhine-Westphalia . As a member, she was a member of the Committee on Cultural Policy (later Committee on Cultural Policy and Journalism), the Committee on Public Welfare Issues (later Committee on Local Policy and Public Welfare), the Petitions Committee, the Committee on Family and Youth Issues and the Health Committee. In the German Bundestag she was significantly involved in laws for the equalization of family burdens , the Youth Welfare Act and social welfare legislation.

In addition, she was active in the Evangelical Action Group for Family Issues (EAF) founded by Friedrich Münchmeyer and Hansjürg Ranke since September 1953 . This body, which in the spring of 1954 had merged with the Family Association of German Catholics and the German Family Association, she also headed from 1957 to 1962 as first chairwoman.

Honors

The Emmi-Welter-Strasse in Aachen and the mother-and-child cure facility “Emmi-Welter-Haus” of the Evangelical Women's Aid in Reichshof- Feld in the Oberbergischer Kreis are named after Emmi Welter .

Literature by and about Emmi Welter (selection)

• Gisela Engberg, Elisabeth Fischer-Holz: Emmi Welter. Sit-in strike against Adenauer. In: Arnim Laschet (ed.): Aachen, Adenauer and the Bonn Republic. Memories of MPs from the “Charlemagne” constituency. Eupen 1995, pp. 33-51.
• Emmy Welter: For Mother's Day. In: The family challenges us. 2 (1963), No. 5, pp. 1-2.
• Rudolf Vierhaus , Ludolf Herbst (eds.), Bruno Jahn (collaborators): Biographical manual of the members of the German Bundestag. 1949-2002. Vol. 2: N-Z. Attachment. KG Saur, Munich 2002, ISBN 3-598-23782-0 , p. 638.

Web link

• The Christian-Democratic Union in Aachen - From foundation to consolidation (PDF; 1.6 MB), dissertation by Claudia Conrads (2006).