Margarethe Lenore Selenka

Margarethe Lenore Selenka née Heinemann (born October 7, 1860 in Hamburg , † December 16, 1922 in Munich ) was a German zoologist , women's rights activist and peace activist .

Life

Selenka comes from a merchant family. Her first marriage in 1886 with the author Ferdinand Neubürger was divorced after five years. In 1893 she married Emil Selenka , a professor of zoology who taught at the University of Erlangen . Under the influence of her second husband, she studied paleontology, anthropology and zoology and became her husband's research assistant. In 1892 she took part in a research trip led by her husband to what was then Ceylon , Japan, China and what was then the Dutch East Indies . When her husband fell ill during the trip and had to return to Germany, she stayed for months to study the life of monkeys in the wild on Borneo . On her return she wrote a report about it entitled Sunny Worlds - East Asian Travel Sketches .

In 1895 the Selenka family changed their place of residence and moved to Munich. It was there that Selenka met women's rights activists Anita Augspurg and Lida Gustava Heymann , and then became involved in the German women's rights and peace movement . Together with Augspurg, she started a campaign for women's rights in the German Empire . Selenka became a member of the Association of Progressive Women's Clubs (VfF). In 1899 she organized a peace demonstration.

During this time, the Selenka family was confronted with the discoveries of Eugène Dubois , who discovered the fossil of the Java man , Homo erectus , at Trinil in 1891 . In the flaring up theological and scientific debate, Selenka's husband decided to undertake another research trip to the Dutch East Indies to look for more fossils that should support the discovery of Eugène Dubois. Selenka's husband died suddenly the following year, 1892. Selenka then continued her husband's work and the research trip took place in 1907/1908. Although she was unable to discover any further fossils of the Java man near Trinil, she nevertheless managed to make contributions to regional stratigraphy and to find many fossils of mammals from the Pleistocene . After her return to Germany, she and the geologist Max Blanckenhorn wrote a report that received international scientific recognition.

In 1904 Selenka took part in the international peace conference in Boston , where she represented the German Association of Progressive Women's Associations (VfV). After a dispute with Augspurg and Heymann, she left VfV and joined the rival Association for Maternity Protection and Sexual Reform (BfMS), which was founded by her friend Helene Stöcker . In 1915 Selenka took part in another peace conference in The Hague , which Tsar Nicholas II had started to stop the First World War . In Germany she was then placed under house arrest during the further course of the First World War. Selenka died in 1922.

Web links

• Journal for Women's History: Kätzel, "A Radical Women's Rights and Peace Activist: Margarethe Lenore Selenka, Initiator of the First Worldwide Women's Peace Demonstration in 1899"