Mothers of the Basic Law
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
- The Parliamentary Council: The mothers of the Basic Law , historical recordings by Erna Wagner-Hehmke , House of History Foundation
- Biographical testimonies - The mothers of the Basic Law, ( Memento from April 9, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Permanent exhibition in the German Bundestag
- Gerda Kuhn; Brigitte Reimer: The almost forgotten mothers of the Basic Law ( Memento from December 19, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) radio broadcast (10:43 min.) On Bayern 2 , from May 11, 2010, Bayerischer Rundfunk
- Mothers of the Basic Law, Federal Ministry for Family, Seniors, Women and Youth , June 2010 (PDF; 1.2 MB)
- A stroke of luck for democracy - The Four Mothers of the Basic Law State Center for Civic Education Baden-Württemberg , 2009 (PDF; 388 kB)
- Elisabeth Selbert - Federal Agency for Political Education
- Friederike Nadig - Federal Agency for Political Education
- Helene Weber - Federal Agency for Political Education
- Helene Wessel - Federal Agency for Political Education
Individual evidence
- ^ 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."