New ethics

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The New Ethics is a reform movement that was typical of the German Empire around 1900. In addition to the founder Helene Stöcker , the women's rights activist Maria Lischnewska was one of the main representatives .

The New Ethics refers to Friedrich Nietzsche's reevaluation of all values . Traditional hierarchies should be changed, philosophically justified and negotiated in a public discussion. In the opinion of the representatives, love should have the highest priority, which also clearly shows the Christian roots of the movement, especially since the initiator Helene Stöcker had received a strictly Protestant upbringing. Love in the New Ethics should, however, integrate the spiritual and the physical. Sex life is, as Maria Lischnewska explained, "indispensable for the health, morality and happiness of every person". Another starting point of the New Ethics was the problem of women around 1900 to combine family and work and to combine a fulfilled life as a wife and mother with that of a working woman. According to the principles of the New Ethics , this requires the relationship between men and women to be decoupled from economic issues. In concrete terms, this means that women should have access to all educational paths, that they should take up a profession of their choice and receive maternity allowance as a mother. The New Ethics was therefore also an expression of and demand for individual self-responsibility.

The appreciation of physical love led to the demand that sexuality should be possible for every adult human being. For the time before the First World War, this was remarkable in that many people were viewed as incapable of marriage, for example men without a permanent job, “fallen girls”, but also with young adults such as students . The advocates of the New Ethics always emphasized that they by no means aimed at the abolition of marriage. But they advocated that the illegitimate cohabitation should be equated with the conjugal. However, the protagonists of the movement saw themselves as advocates of marriage, for example by making prostitution and other economic sexual relationships superfluous. Adele Schreiber noted that it was about: "How should marriage be designed so that the possibility of many good marriages is given?" The demand for the right to abortion was closely related to the commitment to eugenics and "for the advancement of race". However, the representatives of the New Ethics were very far removed from the National Socialist ideas and their murderous worlds of ideas. Like Stöcker, they were therefore violently persecuted by the National Socialists.

The federal organ for maternity protection , the New Generation , also formed a platform for the New Ethics on which its ideals could be propagated.

The New Ethics was controversial and was particularly rejected by the conservative women's movement.

literature

  • Hedwig Dohm et al. a. (Ed.): Marriage? To reform sexual morality. Berlin 1905.
  • Annegret Stopczyk-Pfundstein: philosopher of love. Helene Stocker. The "New Ethics" around 1900 in Germany and its philosophical environment until today. Stuttgart 2003.
  • Susanne Omran: Women's Movement and the "Jewish Question". Discourses on race and gender after 1900. Frankfurt: Campus, 1999, esp. Pp. 374–435.
  • Katharine Anthony: Feminism in Germany and Scandinavia. New York 1915, pp. 93-96. [1]

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Annegret Stopczyk-Pfundstein: Philosopher of love. Helene Stocker. The "New Ethics" around 1900 in Germany and its philosophical environment until today. Stuttgart 2003, p. 74.
  2. ^ Maria Lischnewska: The sexual instruction of children. On the history and methodology of thought, in: Mutterschutz 1 (1905), p. 138.
  3. ↑ Reinhold Lütgemeier-Davin u. Kerstin Wolff: Helene Stöcker, Memoirs, Cologne: Böhlau, 2015, 287–289.
  4. ↑ Diethart Kerbs u. Jürgen Reulecke (ed.): Handbook of the German reform movements. Wuppertal: Peter Hammer, 1998, p. 202.
  5. ↑ Reinhold Lütgemeier-Davin u. Kerstin Wolff: Helene Stöcker, Memoirs, Cologne: Böhlau, 2015, 287.
  6. ↑ Helene Stöcker: On the reform of sexual ethics, in: Mutterschutz. Journal for the Reform of Sexual Ethics 1/1 (1905), 3–12, 5; Reinhold Lütgemeier-Davin u. Kerstin Wolff: Helene Stöcker, Memoirs, Cologne: Böhlau, 2015, 287 f.
  7. ^ Adele Schreiber: Marriage reform, in: Hedwig Dohm u. a. (Ed.): Marriage? To reform sexual morality. Berlin 1905, 63 f.
  8. ↑ Susanne Omran: Women's movement and "Jewish question". Discourses on race and gender after 1900. Frankfurt: Campus, 1999, p. 375 et passim; Helene Stöcker: The evolution of sexual reform for a hundred years, in: Hedwig Dohm u. a. (Ed.): Marriage? To reform sexual morality. Berlin 1905, pp. 36-58.
  9. ↑ Reinhold Lütgemeier-Davin u. Kerstin Wolff: Helene Stöcker, Memoirs, Cologne: Böhlau, 2015, 290–293.
  10. ^ Theresa Wobbe : The woman as a zoon politicon. Reflections on the historical reconstruction of the politics of the German bourgeois women's movement around 1900, in: Jutta Dalhoff , Uschi Frey , Ingrid Schöll (eds.): Frauenmacht in der Geschichte. Düsseldorf, 1985, pp. 326-337, here p. 330.