Mothers of the Basic Law

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Course of the mention of "fathers" (blue) and "mothers" (yellow) of the Basic Law in the corpus of Google Buch from 1974 (red: both sexes)

The four women who, along with the 61 men of the Parliamentary Council , drafted the Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany in 1948 are called the mothers of the Basic Law .

In the corpus of Google books , the first mention of "Mothers and Fathers of the Basic Law" can be found in 1976. After isolated finds, the mention of women increases noticeably from 1988 onwards.

overview

Elisabeth Selbert and Friederike (Frieda) Nadig (both SPD ) pushed through the inclusion of Article 3 (2) "Men and women have equal rights" in the Federal German Basic Law against initially fierce opposition, also from their own ranks .

Helene Weber ( CDU ), the oldest of the four women, had already worked on the Weimar Constitution and was a member of the Presidium as secretary of the Parliamentary Council. She was almost uninterrupted from 1919 to 1933 and after the Nazi era she was again a member of parliament from 1946 and reorganized the Catholic women's movement after 1945 .

Helene Wessel had been deputy chairwoman of the Center Party since 1946 . When she was elected chairman in 1949, she became the first woman to head a party in Germany and the first parliamentary group leader. In the final vote on May 8, 1949, she rejected the Basic Law because of insufficient consideration of Christian values ​​and the lack of basic welfare state rights.

literature

  • Carmen Sitter: The role of the four women in the Parliamentary Council: The forgotten mothers of the Basic Law. Münster 1995, ISBN 3-825-82545-0 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Negotiations of the German Bundestag: Stenographic Reports , Volume 222, 1976, p. 204: "The mothers and fathers of the Basic Law had something in mind when they decided in favor of representative democracy."