Katti Anker Møller

Katti Anker Møller (1910)

Signature (1929)

Katti Anker Møller (born October 23, 1868 in Hamar ; died August 20, 1945 in Torsnes , Østfold ) was a Norwegian suffragette.

Life

Catherine Anker was born the fourth of ten children to teacher Herman Anker , who founded the first Norwegian folk high school , Sagatun Folkehøyskole , in 1864 . Using the example of her mother, the Danish Mix Boysen, she learned about the fate of women, to go through an unlimited number of pregnancies and then to die exhausted at the age of fifty. Anker trained to be a teacher and spent four months in Paris to learn French. When she was twenty years old, she was married to her cousin, the landowner and liberal politician Kai Møller , they moved to the country and had three children. Anker Møller saw the misery of the young female servants in her household, who often changed because they accidentally became pregnant.

In 1900 she began to write newspaper articles for the Norwegian magazines Neunland and The Unmarried Mother , which were very well received. When Kai Møller was elected Member of Parliament, she worked in Oslo to set up a home for unmarried mothers, which had to be pushed through against political opposition. Her brother-in-law, the liberal politician Johan Castberg , motivated her to take a political initiative that led to the adoption of the “Children's Laws” in Storting in 1915 , with which unmarried mothers and illegitimate children are given greater support and a right of the child to ascertain paternity and to claim a name Inheritance claim was formulated. In 1919 maternal insurance - free midwifery assistance and a financial contribution for the puerperium - was included in the statutory health insurance. In 1915, Anker Møller issued a pamphlet calling for the abortion penalty to be abolished .

From the 1920s onwards, Anker Møller organized the establishment of women's clinics in Norway which, on the one hand, organized better obstetrics and medical care for newborns and, on the other hand, wanted to help ensure that more desired children were born through education and distribution of contraceptives.

Anker Møller demanded a state salary for mothers and carried this demand into the Labor Party in 1923 . During the First World War , in which the Scandinavian states remained neutral, she formulated a women’s birthing strike with pacifist goals . When her ideas for family planning got into the wake of the eugenicists in the thirties , who wanted to exclude “inferior” genetic material from reproduction through forced sterilization , her own contributions fell silent and she no longer went public.

Her daughter, the doctor Tove Mohr, wrote a biography in 1968.

literature

• Elga Kern (Ed.): Leading Women in Europe , Munich 1999 [1928], short biography p. 246f.
• Short autobiography in: Elga Kern (Ed.): Leading Women in Europe , Munich 1999 [1928], pp. 63–71
• Tove Mohr: Katti Anker Møller: en banebryter . Tiden Norsk Forlag, Oslo 1968. ISBN 82-10-01258-4
• Ida Blom : Voluntary Motherhood 1900–1930: Theories and Politics of a Norwegian Feminist in an International Perspective , in: Gisela Bock ; Pat Thane (Ed.): Maternity and gender policies: women and the rise of the European welfare states, 1880s-1950s . London: Routledge, 1991, pp. 21-39
• Inger Elisabeth Haavet (Ed.): Katti Anker Møller, mødrenes forkjemper, 125 år . Bergen, 1994

Web links

Commons : Katti Anker Møller  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Katti Anker Møller in the bibliographic database WorldCat
• Katti Anker Møller , in the norske leksikon store
• Katti Anker Møller , in the Norsk biografisk leksikon