Ida von Kortzfleisch

Ida Ottilie Achatia von Kortzfleisch (born October 10, 1850 in Pillau , East Prussia , † October 7, 1915 in Fredeburg , Westphalia ) was the founder of the Reifensteiner Schools .

Life and work

Ida von Kortzfleisch , daughter of the royal Prussian Colonel Otto von Kortzfleisch and his wife Pauline Viktoria, née von Talatzko, grew up in Pillau in East Prussia. She had a brother ( Gustav ). She spent part of her childhood and youth in Königsberg , where her father had been transferred for professional reasons. She was educated together with the daughters of two befriended noble families. It moved mainly in circles of landowners and noble Prussian officer families:

It was a very rich social life, filled with visits, parties and balls, charity events and theatrical performances. Ida von Kortzfleisch evidently took a liking to artistic productivity, she occupied herself with painting and practiced intensively in writing occasional poems for extraordinary and festive occasions, which she kept in thick, black notebooks. Otherwise, the young woman's daily routine was in parts very uniform, which the often identical entries in a notepad make clear .

Ida von Kortzfleisch wanted to study art, but she lacked the necessary training. This resulted in her desire for better education for women. She received permission from her parents to study for several months in the Berlin painting studio of Professor Karl Gussow :

Her experiences led her to the bitter self-classification as a 'privileged beggar', a résumé with nevertheless optimistic aspects: another piece of the mosaic for the later restructuring of her life .

During the Franco-Prussian War of 1870/71 she took over the housekeeping of a military hospital in Pomerania . After moving to Hanover with her parents, she initially did not work. By visiting relatives in East Prussia, Kortzfleisch became aware of the poor educational situation of rural women at these times. As a result, Kortzfleisch became a pioneer in female vocational training.

On the occasion of the German Women's Day that took place in Hanover in 1877 , Ida von Kortzfleisch addressed the public for the first time with her draft about the female year of service and the establishment of economic women's universities :

By 'female year of service' she understood - analogous to the compulsory service of young men in the military - a year of boarding school in a business school for women. Here, the young women should be given the knowledge they need to independently manage the housekeeping area of ​​a larger farm or property .

Historical framework

In the second half of the 19th century there were hardly any vocational training institutions for women , neither for workers and rural women, nor for “higher daughters”. This resulted in a poor quality of work in the respective area of ​​activity of the woman, such as B. poor housekeeping or inefficient agriculture . The daughters of wealthy, noble, urban families, in contrast to the rural women, were not responsible for the household and the homestead , but were completely dependent on the parental home or spouse. The low level of education of women in housekeeping and agriculture represented a waste of scarce resources both individually and economically. The problem as well as various solutions, as well as their treatment by the bourgeois women's movement and Kortzfleisch's school concepts, were the subject of a dissertation on rural-domestic education as early as 1913 in Germany.

development

In 1894, Kortzfleisch published a memorandum under the title The female service obligation in the economic women's college in the daily newspaper Daily Rundschau . She was responding to a series of articles the writer Otto Leixner to women's issues in Germany, that he the political pushiness as the false concept of education of Weiberrechtlerinnen and their alleged increasing Vaterlandslosigkeit had attacked . The memorandum gave its name to the economic women's schools, and the controversy led to the founding of the schools. Ida von Kortzfleisch developed the idea of remedying this lack of education with the establishment of an "economic women's college". She was of the opinion that women should try to promote typical feminine characteristics and skills. She promoted this model of "economic women's universities" in lectures and publications and finally found financial support. In 1897, Ida Kortzfleisch and Auguste Förster founded the first "economic women's school in the country" in Nieder-Ofleiden, Hesse , which in 1900 was moved to the Reifenstein monastery . In the newly founded economic women's school, the girls / women received a well-founded training in self-sufficiency agriculture, horticulture , small animal husbandry, nursing, child-rearing, but also an introduction to chemistry and physics , art history and botany . Ida von Kortzfleisch called the students "Maiden", who should be characterized by qualities such as courage, perseverance, idealism and humility.

The founding of the "Reifensteiner Association for Economic Women's Schools in the Country" (1899 Reifensteiner Association ) by von Kortzfleisch in 1896, which became legally effective in 1900, was followed by further schools (see list of Reifensteiner schools ). a. 1901 Obernkirchen , 1905 in Maidburg in Posen , 1903 in Geiselgasteig and later Miesbach , 1908 in Scherpingen in West Prussia and 1911 in Bad Weilbach , the last founding of Ida von Kortzfleisch. These and other training centers, the Reifensteiner Schools, played an important role for the entire agriculture and economy of Germany in the following years. Influence on the rural exodus, the rural women movement and the domestic school and apprenticeship system were attributed to the training centers. In 1909 the schools, curricula and examination regulations were recognized by the state.

In 1913 she founded and headed the Maidenbund , an association of former students in women's economic schools.

Ida von Kortzfleisch died on October 7, 1915 in Fredeburg on a trip to the Grafschaft monastery in order to set up the first women's service station there. She was buried on October 11, 1915 in Limmer near Hanover.

Honors

• 1907 Order of Luisen

Works (selection)

• The voluntary service in the economic women's university, Braunschweig 1895
• Our twelve years of experience in economic women's schools in rural areas, in: Berlin local group of the German Evangelical Women's Association (ed.): Frauenschulen, Leipzig / Berlin 1909, pp. 42–53
• The Maiden Book, Gotha 1910

literature

• Anna von Heydekampf: Ida von Kortzfleisch her life and work , Gotha 1927
• Gertrud Schröder-Lembke:  Kortzfleisch, Ida von. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 12, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1980, ISBN 3-428-00193-1 , p. 605 ( digitized version ).
• Hiltrud Schroeder : Sophie & Co .: Significant Women of Hanover , Fackelträgerverlag, Hanover 1991
• Ortrud Wörner-Heil: Women's schools in the country . Reifensteiner Verband (1897–1997), Kassel 1997
• Christina Schwarz: Kortzfleisch, Ida von , in: Hugo Maier (Ed.): Who is who of social work . Freiburg: Lambertus, 1998 ISBN 3-7841-1036-3 , pp. 320–322
• Ursula Köhler-Lutterbeck, Monika Siedentopf: Lexicon of 1000 women , Bonn 2000, p. 187. ISBN 3-8012-0276-3 .
• Ortrud Wörner-Heil: Noble women as pioneers in vocational training , University press, Kassel, 2010, ISBN 3-89958-904-1

Web link

• http://www.reifensteiner-verband.de/kortzfleisch.pdf

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Ortrud Wörner-Heil: Noble women as pioneers of vocational training , p. 187, Kassel, university press
2. ↑ Wörner-Heil 1997, p. 37
3. ↑ Wörner-Heil 1997, p. 39
4. ↑ Heydekampf 1927, p. 11
5. ↑ Maier 1998, p. 321
6. ^ Johannes Kramer: The rural domestic education system in Germany , dissertation at the University of Erlangen, Fulda 1913
7. ↑ Both titles in Ortrud Wörner-Heil: Noble women as pioneers of vocational training: the rural housekeeping and the Reifensteiner Verband kassel university press GmbH, 2010, pp. 245–246, Wörner-Heil quotes Leixner's title Zur Frauenfrage in Deutschland 1893, published in several episodes of the Daily Rundschau (from No. 220) had appeared.
8. ↑ http://www.reifensteiner-verband.de/
9. ↑ Economic women's school in the countryside in Bavaria, Miesbach, Ursula Meyer, Reifensteiner Association
10. ↑ Ortrud Wörner-Heil: Noble women as pioneers of vocational training , p. 252, kassel university press