Hanna Sahlfeld-Singer

Hanna Sahlfeld-Singer (2018)

Hanna Sahlfeld-Singer (born October 17, 1943 in Flawil ; resident in Nennigkofen ) is a Swiss politician ( SP ). In 1971 she was one of the first eleven women on the National Council .

Life

Hanna Singer, daughter of Werner Singer, master weaver, and Margrith nee Hohl, housewife, attended primary and secondary school in Flawil and the cantonal school in St. Gallen and then studied Protestant theology in Zurich, Basel and Vienna. After her internship in Oberhelfenschwil , she was ordained in 1969 . On September 22, 1968, she married Rolf Sahlfeld. From November of the same year, she held a part-time position for pastoral activities in Altstätten , where her husband was a pastor.

In 1970 Hanna Sahlfeld-Singer gave an August 1st speech on women's suffrage , which one year later - after its acceptance, the parties looked for candidates - earned her a place on the list of the Social Democratic Party (SP) for the National Council elections. After her election she had to give up her employment with the church in order to fulfill her mandate due to the ecclesiastical exception article from 1874 (Article 75 of the Federal Constitution), which came from the time of the Kulturkampf . At 28, she was the youngest of the twelve first-generation parliamentarians and was the first social democratic national councilor of the canton of St. Gallen. In 1972 she gave birth to her second child, making her the first woman to become a mother during her tenure in the federal parliament. In the National Council, Sahlfeld-Singer campaigned for better tenant protection, the introduction of community service, the easier naturalization of refugees and the introduction of Tempo 40 in urban areas, and criticized the low wages that Swiss companies in South Africa paid their workers.

Despite being re-elected in 1975, Sahlfeld-Singer waived another legislative period. Since her husband, who had given up his job in Altstätten, could not find a job as a pastor in the canton of St. Gallen because of his German origins and political commitment, the couple first moved to Wil , from where Rolf Sahlfeld commuted to the canton of Zurich . The family received financial support from relatives until they decided in autumn 1975 to move to the Federal Republic of Germany. From 1976 to 2003 Sahlfeld-Singer was a school pastor for Protestant religious teaching at the Archbishop's High School St. Angela in Wipperfürth in North Rhine-Westphalia . She no longer accepted a party office, but continued to campaign for development policy and ecumenism , for example in 1981 as a co-founder of the ecumenical initiative Weltladen. For this commitment, among other things, she was awarded the first citizen prize of the Christian Democratic Union Wipperfürth in 2003. In retirement, Sahlfeld-Singer moved to Barsinghausen near Hanover (Lower Saxony).

literature

• Susan Boos : In the right place too early. In: Marina Widmer, Heidi Witzig (Ed.): Blossom white to raven black. St. Gallen women - 200 portraits. Limmat, Zurich 2003, pp. 328–329.
• Karl Graf (Ed.): Pastors of the Evangelical Reformed Church of the Canton of St. Gallen, 1971–2009. Theological Publishing House Zurich, Zurich 2010, p. 53.

Web links

• Fabienne Amlinger: Hanna Sahlfeld-Singer. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland . June 12, 2019 , accessed on August 2, 2019. , With photo by Hanna Sahlfeld-Singer
• Hanna Sahlfeld-Singer on the website of the Federal Assembly

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Extraordinary women. In: parlament.ch. Retrieved February 11, 2020 . 

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