Cooperative bank of self-employed women

The cooperative bank of self-employed women (also called women's bank ) was founded in Berlin in 1910 . The bank only accepted women as customers and mainly wanted to help working women with financial transactions. The project failed. In November 1915 bankruptcy proceedings were opened. In 1916 the bank finally had to cease its business.

According to the Prussian general land law of 1794, women were not allowed to dispose of their own property. At the time of marriage, it was part of the husband's administration. After the introduction of the civil code , women were allowed to decide on their own wages or salaries , but they still needed the consent of their husbands to manage their property. Frauenbank accepted savings without permission from parents, guardians or husbands.

The management and the supervisory board were made up exclusively of women. The chairmanship of the supervisory board was occupied by Marie Raschke , among others , she was also co-editor of the magazine Frauenkapital.

The services went beyond mere financial transactions. In addition, the Frauenbank offered legal advice free of charge , organized lectures on economic or cultural topics and informed the members of the cooperative in the in-house magazine "Frauenkapital", in addition to general educational topics, on questions of asset management.

The failure of the women's bank was cited by opponents of women's emancipation on the general inability of women for banking. Improper or dubious management and disadvantages of the cooperative system were named as further reasons. The cooperative law stipulated, among other things, that the members of the cooperative had the same right to say regardless of the amount of their shares, which meant that laypeople could influence banking operations. The trial files and court judgments from 1918 as well as the bank's business documents are no longer preserved.

literature

• Gilla Dölle: The (un) secret power of money. Financing strategies of the bourgeois women's movement in Germany between 1865-1933. Frankfurt am Main 1997.