Jenny Hirsch

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Jenny Hirsch around 1890
"The leaders of the women's movement in Germany" in the gazebo in 1883. Jenny Hirsch is shown in the lower row on the left.

Jenny Hirsch (born November 25, 1829 in Zerbst , † March 10, 1902 in Berlin ) was a German translator , writer , editor and women's rights activist .

Life

Jenny Hirsch was born in Zerbst on November 25, 1829 as the daughter of the respected Jewish businessman Jakob Hirsch and the Berliner Bertha Elkisch Bendix. Her parents were strictly religious. The mother died early, and Jenny Hirsch and her siblings came to live with their grandmother, who raised them.

As a girl of the educated bourgeoisie, Jenny Hirsch received a good general education with her attendance at the “Höheren-Töchter-Schule”, which - as is common practice - ended abruptly for her when she was 15. From 1844 on, she ran her parents' household, looked after her father, hired herself as a maid and made a living by secretly selling handicrafts. At night she trained herself so comprehensively that she later effortlessly translated entertainment and specialist literature from French, English and Swedish.

Bad harvests around 1846 and in the following years worsened their situation. Jenny Hirsch also experienced the German March Revolution and its suppression. After her father's death, she opened an elementary school in Zerbst, which was open to girls and boys of different denominations. She thus joined the large number of middle-class women who, with the teaching profession, were probably the only gainful employment that was respectable for middle-class women at the time.

In 1860 she moved to Berlin and joined the editorial team of the Berlin women's and fashion magazine Der Bazar , to which she belonged until 1864 and since then has remained associated as a freelance journalist. At the first women's conference in Leipzig in 1865, she took part in the founding of the General German Women's Association (ADF) , which was the first women's association to operate nationwide and whose founding she accompanied journalistically with numerous articles. In 1866 she and others founded the association for the promotion of employability of women , the so-called Lette-Verein , to which she belonged for 17 years as managing director and the only woman on the board.

The book Subjection of women appeared in England in 1869 , in which the philosopher and economist John Stuart Mill advocated women's suffrage. In the same year she translated the work under the title Die Hörigkeit der Frau into German. The book caused a sensation in Prussia and had three editions.

That was the beginning of her writing activity, which from 1882 onwards turned into writing her own works. Her own works were mostly about crimes and "strong women" and were not necessarily part of great German literature. Still, some of them went through multiple editions and translations. Under various pseudonyms, including "F. Arnefeld "or" F. Arnefeldt ”and“ Franz von Busch ”, she wrote numerous crime and entertainment novels for the feature pages of German-language newspapers. Jenny Hirsch's fiction works underlined her demand for an improvement in the social situation of women.

She continued this struggle through her journalistic work until the end of her life. She knew how to maintain contact with the press and not just stick to magazines and newspapers that were aimed at a smaller circle of committed activists.

tomb

Jenny Hirsch slowly went blind towards the end of her life and died on March 10, 1902 in Berlin at the age of 72. 16 years would pass before women suffrage was introduced in Germany in 1918 after the end of the First World War . She is buried in the Jewish cemetery at Schönhauser Allee .

Importance in the women's movement

With the co-founding of the General German Women's Association (ADF) and the Lette Association, Jenny Hirsch is considered a pioneer of the organized women's movement and female journalism. Her translation of The Subjection of Women was a standard work by radical women's rights activists such as Hedwig Kettler , Marie Stritt and Anita Augspurg in the 1890s . Early research on women's history in the 1970s and 1980s criticized Jenny Hirsch for “only” campaigning for education and gainful employment and ignoring political and sexual issues.

Works

Own works

  • Jenny Hirsch: Princess Mrs. Mother . Dresden, 1881, reprint Zerbst, 2009
  • L. Arenfeldt (pseudonym): Liberated . Berlin, 1882
  • Jenny Hirsch: Fathers fault . 1882
  • Jenny Hirsch: Heavy chains . 3rd edition, 1884
  • Jenny Hirsch: The heirs . 1889
  • Jenny Hirsch: snake list . 1891
  • Jenny Hirsch: History of the 25 year old effectiveness of the Lette Club. , Berlin 1891
  • Jenny Hirsch: The American . Original novel, Mannheim, 1894
  • Fritz Arnefeldt (pseudonym): The bailiff of Rapshagen . Roman, Mannheim, 1896
  • Jenny Hirsch: A strange case . Argus, Berlin, 1912

Translations

  • John Stuart Mill: The bondage of women . 1869, 2nd edition, Berlin, 1892.
  • Taxile Delord: History of the Second Empire . Translated from the French by Jenny Hirsch, Berlin, 1870.
  • Marie Sophie Schwartz: The childhood companions . Story, adaptation from Swedish, Berlin, 1871.
  • H. von Trolle: The sea officer . Historical novel, from the Swedish, 1872.
  • Florence Marryat: Sesame, open up! Roman, from the English, Stuttgart, 1876.
  • Henry Kingsley: The Ghost Garden . Translated from the English, Berlin, 1877.
  • Mary M. Wall: Home and Society in England . Translated from the English, Berlin, 1878.

Magazines and newspapers

  • Der Bazar , magazine for women, Berlin, 1860 to 1864, editorial office
  • Women's advocate , organ of the women's education association Lette-Verein , 1870 to 1876 and 1878 to 1881, sole editor
  • Neue Bahnen , organ of the General German Women's Association (ADF), irregular contributions through articles
  • German housewives newspaper. , 1887 to 1892, with Lina Morgenstern - better known as Suppenlina - as co-editor
  • Magazine for foreign literature , irregular reviews
  • Northwest , magazine, irregular reviews
  • Zeitgeist , irregular contributions
  • Berliner Tageblatt , irregular articles

literature

  • Lina Morgenstern, in Bloch's Österreichische Wochenschrift , Vienna, March 21, 1902
  • Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums , March 14, 1902
  • Irmgard Maya Fassmann: Jewish women in the German women's movement . Hildesheim, Olms, 1996, ISBN 3-487-09666-8
  • Marianne Büning: Jenny Hirsch (1829–1902). Women's rights activist - editor - writer , Hentrich & Hentrich Verlag, Teetz / Berlin 2005, ISBN 3933471818
  • Jana Mikota: Jewish women writers - rediscovered. Jenny Hirsch: Suffragette & crime writer . In: Medaon, 2 (2009), 3 ( online ).
  • Jana Mikota: Hirsch, Jenny, pseudonyms "Fritz Arnefeldt", "JN Heynrichs", "Franz von Busch" . In: Eva Labouvie (Ed.): Women in Saxony Anhalt , Vol. 2: A biographical-bibliographical lexicon from the 19th century to 1945 . Böhlau, Cologne et al. 2019, ISBN 978-3-412-51145-6 , pp. 228-234.
  • BERLINmacher: 775 portraits - one network . [Exhibition as part of the overall project "775 Years Berlin"] / ed. by the Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin, Franziska Nentwig et al. - Berlin: Kerber, 2012, pp. 190–191.
  • Jenny Hirsch (1829-1902). Suffragette . In: Ekkehard Vollbach: Poets, Thinkers, Directors. Portraits of German Jews , Leipzig: edition chrismon, ISBN 978-3-96038-243-0 , pp. 123–135.

Web links

Commons : Jenny Hirsch  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Helene Lange and Gertrud Bäumer: Handbook of the women's movement. Berlin: Moeser, 1901, p. 67.
  2. ^ Hans-Jürgen Mende : Lexicon of Berlin burial places . Pharus-Plan, Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-86514-206-1 , p. 353.
personal data
SURNAME Hirsch, Jenny
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Arnefeld, F .; Busch, Franz von; Arnefeld, Fritz; Arnsfeldt, Fritz
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German women's rights activist
DATE OF BIRTH November 25, 1829
PLACE OF BIRTH Zerbst
DATE OF DEATH March 10, 1902
Place of death Berlin