Helene Bonfort

Fanny Helene Bonfort (born March 10, 1854 in Hamburg ; † June 5, 1940 in Munich ) was a German teacher and co-founder of the Hamburg branch of the General German Women's Association (ADF).

Life

Helene Bonfort came from a liberal Jewish family. Her mother was well acquainted with the women's rights activist Emilie Wüstenfeld . Bonfort attended a secondary school for girls and then a seminar for women teachers and teaches from the age of 18 at the Hamburg Paulsenstift, a secondary school for girls. She then moved to Düsseldorf , where she made the acquaintance of the teacher Anna Meinertz (1840–1922), who became her friend and partner. In 1881 both went to Hamburg and jointly ran a secondary school for girls. In 1893 they traveled to the USA for two years , where they found out about welfare work, methods of organizing popular education and the women's movement.

After returning to the Hanseatic city , Bonfort worked through an uncle employed by the Hamburg correspondent as the first journalist in the Hamburg daily press. Together with her partner Meinertz, she founded the first public reading hall in Hamburg and, in 1896, the local branch of the women's association ADF. She also wrote articles on the bourgeois women's movement and its demands. From 1896 to 1900 and from 1906 to 1916 she took over the chairmanship of the local branch of the ADF, which at that time was not primarily concerned with questions of gender equality policy, but with welfare. Because of her leadership style, Bonfort quickly came into conflict with Lida Gustava Heymann , who then founded a local branch of the Frauenwohl association founded in Berlin in 1888 together with other former members of the ADF in Hamburg . Bonfort also came into conflict with Julie Eichholz , first chairwoman of the local branch of the ADF from 1900 to 1904. While Bonfort saw the association as the mouthpiece of the uniformly acting bourgeois women's movement, Eichholz was of the opinion that it was a matter of different, independently appearing groups. Eichholz also campaigned for the admission of women to the office of poor carers , while Bonfort called on the members of the ADF not to take up women's rights positions. Eichholz then withdrew from the ADF and founded the Hamburg Housewives Association, which left the ADF in 1907, as well as the legal protection for women and the Association of North German Women's Associations.

Memorial stone in the women's garden

While the radical wing of the bourgeois women's movement found Bonfort's approach too moderate, authorities and some men in higher positions considered it too radical. In 1898/99 Hermann Blohm rejected Bonfort's demands that women should take part in the administration of the bookhouses that were being established. Their efforts to enable women to work in poor relief have also been criticized by volunteer men who threatened work stoppages. When Bonfort asked Mayor Carl August Schröder to set up a girls' grammar school, he replied: "If it were up to you, all girls would learn Latin and my sons would have to take the ashtrays out into the street."

In 1913, at Bonfort's instigation, the Hamburg Society for Charity was founded. During the First World War , Bonfort took over the chairmanship of the women's committee comprising 62 associations and the Hamburg War Aid. In addition, she was in charge of the care for women surviving dependents. The social women's school, for which Bonfort had long campaigned, was founded in 1917.

After Bonfort's partner died in 1922, Bonfort lived in the previously shared apartment at Beselerstraße 8 and after 1934 moved to Munich , where she died in June 1940. The urn with Bonfort's ashes was buried in the Ohlsdorf cemetery in Hamburg next to the remains of Anna Meinertz. The graves of both women no longer exist today. A memorial stone in the women's garden at the Ohlsdorf cemetery commemorates her .

literature

• Rita Bake : Bonfort, Helene . In: Franklin Kopitzsch, Dirk Brietzke (Hrsg.): Hamburgische Biographie . tape 3 . Wallstein, Göttingen 2006, ISBN 3-8353-0081-4 , p. 53-54 .