Johanna Kootz

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Johanna Kootz (* 1942 ) is a German librarian and sociologist . She is a pioneer in women's research and advancement at the Free University of Berlin . In 2004 she was awarded the Margherita von Brentano Prize for her life's work .

Life

Johanna Kootz trained as a librarian and then studied sociology in Munich and Berlin from 1965 to 1971 . At the time, the opportunities for women to pursue science as a career were limited, there were very few women on the faculty, and women did not appear as a topic in research and teaching. The diploma thesis by Johanna Kootz (together with Gisela Steppke) under the title On the question of women in capitalism is considered to be one of the first studies on women and gender studies in German-speaking countries after 1945. It was published in 1973 by Suhrkamp Verlag with the collaboration of Germanist Gisela Brandt; until 1987 three more editions followed.

Johanna Kootz is the mother of one son. A marriage was out of the question for her in the 1970s because, in her opinion, it was associated with social and individual discrimination. “Without the women's movement ”, Kootz said in a 1977 conversation with Spiegel editor Ariane Barth, “I would not have had the courage to consider having a child”.

Act

Since the early 1970s, Johanna Kootz has played a key role in introducing topics relevant to women in teaching and research at the FU. Together with the sociologists Ulla Bock and Elisabeth Böhmer, she was hired in 1981 to set up and work in the newly founded central institution for the promotion of women's studies and women's research at the Free University of Berlin , one of the first institutions of this kind in West Germany for which she was a scientific Employee and lecturer and which she led until 2003.

In order to make the work and history of women visible, Kootz designed and built a library for women and gender studies at the FU, which today comprises more than 6200 volumes and 20 current journals and periodicals; the entire holdings can be accessed via the OPAC catalog of the university library . This is also served by the documentation of women's research-related final and qualification theses at the Free University of Berlin since 1979 as well as the establishment of a database of women with qualifications in Germany 1970 ff.She is also one of the initiators of the Rhoda Erdmann program , which provides further training for scientifically active women during their qualification phase.

Outside the university, Johanna Kootz was involved in founding the first women's shelter in Berlin and in the accompanying research for this project.

As a member of the international women's research group Mahn- und Gedenkstätte Ravensbrück , she and Insa Eschebach published the volume Das Frauenkonzentrationslager Ravensbrück - Source situation and source criticism in 1997 .

In 2004 she was awarded the Margherita von Brentano Prize for her commitment to university politics. She had succeeded "with visionary commitment, assertiveness and perseverance promoting generations of women according to all the rules of the art." In his laudation, the political scientist Wolf-Dieter Narr said:

"It is thanks to their unrestricted commitment and their opinion that knowledge can best be increased by sharing it that successful networks of women scientists have formed far beyond the Federal Republic of Germany."

- Wolf-Dieter fool

Publications

  • On the question of women in capitalism , Suhrkamp Frankfurt am Main, first edition, 1st edition 1973
  • (Ed. With Insa Eschebach) The Ravensbrück women's concentration camp: Source situation and source criticism , FU Berlin 1997
  • (Ed.) Returning as a stranger. From Ravensbrück to Italy: 1945 - 1948 , Metropol, Berlin 2007

Article in:

  • In: Carol Hagemann-White u. a .: The model project 'Frauenhaus Berlin'. Help for abused women, Kohlhammer 1981
  • Marlies Arndt (Hrsg.): Excluded and in the middle. Women in Science , Edition Sigma, Berlin 1993
  • Elke Kleinau, Claudia Opitz (Hrsg.): History of girls and women education. Volume 1: From the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment, Volume 2: From Vormärz to the Present, Campus-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1996
  • Shifts in emphasis or breaks in tradition. The Berlin promotion of women in research and teaching , in: Femina Politica 2/2001

Awards

  • 2004: Margherita von Brentano Prize

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ In 1969/70 the proportion of women in the teaching staff of the Free University of Berlin was 12.9 percent.
  2. ↑ Dorothee Nolte: "An immense privilege" , Der Tagesspiegel, March 9, 1998.
  3. ↑ See: Elisabeth Meyer-Renschhausen: Feminist Research at German Universities? Nearly Impossible! Taking Stock after Ten Years . In: Critical Sociology, October 1990, vol. 17 no. 3, pp. 61-73
  4. ↑ Brentano Prize 2004 goes to Johanna Kootz .
  5. ↑ Better to marry twelve children than once. SPIEGEL editor Ariane Barth on mothers without a husband . Der Spiegel 37/1977, accessed on September 15, 2013.
  6. ↑ Emancipation cannot be resolved, Margherita von Brentano Prize, FU Berlin . Retrieved December 4, 2019.
  7. ^ Margherita von Brentano Prize, award winners
  8. ↑ Wolf-Dieter Narr, laudation for Johanna Kootz on the award of the Margherita von Brentano Prize 2004.
personal data
SURNAME Kootz, Johanna
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German sociologist and feminist
DATE OF BIRTH 1942