Klara Schleker

Klara Schleker (originally Auguste Clara Christine Ottilie Schleker ; born June 3, 1852 in Grabow near Blumenthal , died November 4, 1932 in Rostock ) was a German women's rights activist and the first age president of the state parliament of the Free State of Mecklenburg-Schwerin .

Life

Klara Schleker grew up as the third of five children of the married couple Wilhelm Hermann Ludwig and Henriette Agneta Elise Sophia Schleker, nee. Weber, on. The family owned a manor in Grabow near Blumenthal. Klara's next elder sister died at the age of 2 in the same year as Klara was born.

Her partner was the women's rights activist Käthe Schirmacher . The private relationship between the two of them consolidated from 1906 onwards, and in 1908 they moved into a country house that Klara Schleker had built for them both in Marlow . The two were considered the first openly living lesbian couple in the women's movement . When Klara Schleker was in need of care, she was cared for by her 13-year-old friend, who, however, died of cancer two years before her.

Author

Excerpt from Klara Schleker The culture of the apartment 1911, p. 196

In 1911 Klara Schleker published her first book The Culture of the Apartment , followed in 1912 by The Woman and the Household . The books were published as Volume 4 and Volume 6 of the series Die Kulturarbeiten der Frau in Amelangs-Verlag in Leipzig. The editor of the series was the Landschulrat Jakob Wychgram (1858-1927). Other authors in the series were the women's rights activists Elsbeth Krukenberg (The woman in the family) , Ika Freudenberg (The woman and the culture of public life) , Else Wirminghaus (The woman and the culture of the body) and Gertrud Bäumer (The woman and the spiritual Life) .

The culture of the home

The book The Culture of the Apartment , dedicated to Käthe Schirmacher , first gives a cultural-historical outline of the apartment and the living of the various social classes in Germany. The dwelling is seen as a “precondition for all culture”, its development in rural areas and under urban conditions is traced and shown from the Middle Ages to the most recent times and its industrial conditions . Occasionally there are nationalist remarks, e.g. B. against Poland and " slavery " (p. 28).

In the second part, entitled “How the apartment should be”, specific advice is given on the selection, design and handling of one's own apartment. Structural questions, questions about the location of the apartment and the individual rooms, the importance of light and air, hygiene , furnishings and maintenance are dealt with. City apartments and rather poor financial circumstances are taken into account, as well as living in your own house, gardens or surrounding green areas and keeping pets . Socially critical aspects, such as the negative impact of living in tenements , are just as much a focus of the explanations as the gender perspective. In addition, there are many comments on questions of taste and the influence of living on social and family relationships. The explanations on a total of more than 300 pages are as broad as they are detailed (see excerpt).

Book cover 1912

The wife and the household

In The Woman and the Household , Schleker positively emphasizes the diversity of household work compared to most professional work outside the home and sees it as a balance. She assumes that women are employed, and does not overlook the resulting double burden on women as long as the men shy away from household work, which she sees as a time phenomenon to be overcome: "... this will open up the possibility for both sexes, the beneficial contrast of household work to enjoy and take advantage of their ever-changing possibilities and requirements against the specialization of those outside the home, which today is only available to women ” (p. 3f). She repeatedly calls for the same educational opportunities for girls and boys and laments the lack of training for boys in matters of housekeeping , nutrition and health care. She emphasizes the need for innovations in housekeeping due to the changed living and economic conditions, differentiates between the conditions of big city , small town and rural housekeeping, the different nutritional needs in physical or mental work, in the different ages and in diseases.

The breadth of the topics covered on almost 350 pages gives a comprehensive overview of questions of nutrition, hygienic conditions, health conditions of the various social classes as well as the state of the art, water and electricity supply, heating technology and living conditions in early cities 20th century . Further topics are raising children , nursing and dealing with servants as well as furnishing the house, cleaning and laundry care, but also bookkeeping , insurance, taxes and investments. Advice is also given for the creation and maintenance of a garden and topics relating to keeping pets are discussed.

The book also contains a few recipes on the margins .

Political activities

Together with Käthe Schirmacher, Klara Schleker founded the "Mecklenburg State Association for Women's Suffrage " in 1908 and became its first chairwoman. Both were also members of the Progressive People's Party (FVP) founded in 1910 and initially represented left-liberal positions, but increasingly turned to national and right-wing positions. In 1914 they left the FVP and joined the German National People's Party (DNVP), for which Klara Schleker successfully ran for the first state parliament of the Free State of Mecklenburg-Schwerin in 1920. As a member of the DNVP, she now represented a right-wing, national German, xenophobic and anti-Semitic position. This led to her refusing to work with the social democrats in the context of the women's issue.

From 1920 to 1924 she was one of the few women to be a member of the state parliament in the Free State of Mecklenburg-Schwerin in the first and second electoral periods. Of the 65 MPs in the first term , she was one of only 6 women. The rest were Hermine Countess von Bernstorff, also from the DNVP, Margarete Detmering from the German People's Party (DVP), Elise Fincke from the German Democratic Party (DDP) and Marie Cordes and Margarete Ketelhohn from the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). In the second electoral term , four women were represented out of a total of 81 MPs: in addition to Schleker, Cordes, Ketelhohn and Detmering were again represented. In 1920, Klara Schleker opened the first assembly of the state parliament of the Free State of Mecklenburg-Schwerin as the first female president.

Publications

• The culture of the home. CF Amelangs Verlag, Leipzig 1911
• The wife and the household. CF Amelangs Verlag, Leipzig 1912.

Web links

Wikisource: Klara Schleker  - Sources and full texts

• Literature about Klara Schleker in the state bibliography MV

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Auguste Clara Christine Ottilie Schleker on ancestry.com, accessed December 18, 2015
2. ↑ Benedikt Brunner: The senior president. Springer-Verlag, 2011, ISBN 978-3-531-94362-6 , p. 84 ( limited preview in Google book search).
3. ↑ The manor in Grabow near Blumenthal ( memento of the original from March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , accessed December 18, 2015 
4. ↑ Auguste Clara Christine Ottilie Schleker in the Grabow Family Book, accessed on December 18, 2015
5. ↑ Ulrike Janz: Reflections on “negative lesbian property”. Bochum 1994. Online project lesbian history. Boxhammer, Ingeborg / Leidinger, Christiane , accessed on December 18, 2015
6. ↑ umbrella project of the University of Vienna. Retrieved April 23, 2019
7. ↑ Kersten Krüger (Ed.): Women's studies in Rostock. Reports by and about female academics. University of Rostock 2010 , accessed on December 22, 2015
8. ↑ Christian Streubel: Radical Nationalists: Agitation and Programs of Right-Wing Women in the Weimar Republic (History and Gender). Campus Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 2006