Paula Müller-Otfried

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Paula Müller-Otfried
At a DNVP party conference in Königsberg, from left: Elsa Hielscher-Panten , Else von Sperber , Annagrete Lehmann , behind them Magdalene von Tiling , Margarete Behm , behind them Therese Deutsch , Helene Freifrau von Watter , Paula Müller-Otfried, behind them Ulrike Scheidel

Paula Müller-Otfried , baptized as Pauline Sophie Christiane Mueller (born June 7, 1865 in Hoya ; † January 8, 1946 in Einbeck ) was a leading German women's rights activist , politician and pioneer of social work . She became known as a co-founder of the German Evangelical Women's Association , of which she was the first chairwoman and which she had a lasting influence on for three decades. Their work was ostensibly in the right wing of the bourgeois, Christian women's movement .

Life

Childhood and youth

Paula Mueller grew up in a middle-class, intellectually open-minded family. She received a broad scientific and artistic education from her father Karl Hugo Müller , who worked in the city of Hanover from 1895 as the state director of the then Prussian province of Hanover . Like many other middle-class girls at the time, her parents sent her to an Evangelical Lutheran secondary school for girls and then to a boarding school abroad. Various educational trips also took her to Greece and Italy in her youth . As a child she came into contact with the needs of the working classes, as she often accompanied her mother on the corridors to the homes of the poor. Her father also conveyed to her the connections between economic development and the social problems of industrial society .

Denominational women's movement and social work

Since 1893 Paula Mueller worked in Christian poor relief. In particular, the fight against prostitution, with its many social problems, became a personal concern of hers. With the increasing deepening into the problem of the so-called women's question , after a long hesitation she finally turned to the women's movement . For a long time she had doubted the need for such a movement.

On the question of women , Paula Mueller stated in 1904: “The realization that in our time, in addition to the tasks of Christian charity, a large, wide field of work for women lies in the field of social welfare. That [...] there are great emergencies of entire classes of the people and of professional colleagues, including women. That the woman's gainful employment can no longer be hindered, but that it should be steered into suitable channels. That not only the woman of the people needs help and support, but that the situation of the educated woman who sees herself dependent on earning a living by her own strength is desperate. "

In 1899 she took over the chairmanship of the Hanover branch of the German-Evangelical Women's Association (DEF), which had been founded shortly before at the Evangelical Church Congress in Kassel . From 1901 Paula Mueller was the first chairwoman of the federal government, whereupon the management of DEF was moved from Kassel to Hanover, where it is still based today. In her function as chairwoman, which she exercised until 1934, she was involved in various (mainly women-related) areas of social work , especially in the moral movement , and also advocated the church's right to vote for women, which was granted in 1903. However , she and the DEF vehemently rejected women's political suffrage . In her work she was strongly based on the example of the Evangelical-Lutheran tradition of active neighborly love demanded and exemplified by Johann Hinrich Wichern . For many years she was in close contact with the works of Inner Mission he founded . a. she was a long member of the Central Committee of the Inner Mission. Her close connection to the work of the Inner Mission also brought her into the Christian women's movement and into the DEF , whose work she understood as a complementary branch of the great diaconal work of the Inner Mission.

In 1902 she became a member of a commission for the recruitment and training of female workers for the Inner Mission. The aim was to provide young women with material security for the future through this training, and to win them over as suitable workers for church social work . The fields of activity of these forces should be areas of youth care , orphanages , the management of girls' homes and work in city ​​missions and rescue work. From 1904 to 1932 she was the publisher of the Evangelical women's newspaper . Together with Adelheid von Bennigsen , she founded the Christian-Social Women's Seminar for women and girls of educated classes in Hanover in 1905, which was later renamed the Evangelical University of Applied Sciences Hanover as part of the university reform . Since September 2007 the school has been affiliated with the Hanover University of Applied Sciences . The Christian-social women's school was the first training center for professional women. After successfully completing the course, the young women received state recognition and the professional title of “welfare worker” or “social worker”. Paula Mueller also taught there as a lecturer . Her areas of study were: poor relief - its concept, its method and its legal provisions and the question of servants and their organization .

In 1908 she published a handbook on the women’s question as well as the text The 'new ethics' and their danger . In 1911 Paula Mueller co-founded the Association of Conservative Women (VKF). In 1921 she supported the Protestant welfare nurses in founding their own professional association , independent of other professional groups , the Association of Evangelical Welfare Nurse Germany (VEW), which has since been renamed the German Professional Association for Social Work (DBSH) and the largest professional association for social workers and Social pedagogues in Germany. In addition, she made her influence effective in various associations and organizations. B. In 1922 elected to the board of the Evangelical Federation and the German National Committee for Combating Trafficking in Girls . From 1928 she also worked at the German Academy for Social and Educational Women’s Work in Berlin and also acted as a board member of the German Society for Combating Venereal Diseases , today the German STI Society - Society for the Promotion of Sexual Health .

First World War

In 1914 she was elected chairman of the National Women's Service in Hanover , which was an amalgamation of all female, civil and proletarian aid organizations and set itself the goal of centrally organizing social aid for the population during the war and thus contributing to successful warfare. Between 1916 and 1917 she was a board member of the Federation of German Women's Associations (BDF). In 1917, however, her association resigned from the BDF because it was not ready to join the general demand for the introduction of political voting rights for women .

Weimar Republic and political engagement

After 1918 she was a member of the regional synod . In 1919 she was a member of the first German Evangelical Church Congress in Dresden and in the same year took part in the elections for the Weimar National Assembly. In the course of her candidacy for the Reichstag, Paula Müller added the first name of her grandfather, Carl Otfried Mueller , to her family name to Paula Müller-Otfried and in 1920 received a seat in the Reichstag. She was re-elected twice, so that she was a member of the Reichstag for the German National People's Party (DNVP) until 1932 . In the Reichstag she was a member of the Criminal Law Committee . In addition, she campaigned primarily for small pensioners as well as in the area of ​​population and cultural policy issues. 1921 founded Paula Mueller Otfried the draft Reich Youth Welfare Act (RJWG) with that of Agnes Neuhaus introduced and women of all factions of Parliament was born. From 1928 to 1933 she was a member of the committee for the processing of the draft law on illegitimate children , which had been introduced by the BDF . As a politician, she managed to gain the support of the right-wing DNVP for the German-Evangelical Women's Association, which, however, also led to tensions within the movement.

Honors

Paula Müller-Otfried has received numerous awards, including a. the Red Cross Medal and the War Merit Cross . In 1930 she was given the special honor of receiving an honorary theological doctorate from the Georg-August University of Göttingen for her services and her life's work , which was a very rare honor for a woman at the time.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c cf. Kuhn 2005, p. 100
  2. ↑ Inge Mager : Women's Profiles of Lutheranism. Life stories in the 20th century (= The Lutheran Church, History and Design , Vol. 22), Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlag-Haus, 2005, ISBN 978-3-579-05213-7 and ISBN 3-579-05213-6 , p 101; limited preview in Google Book search
  3. ↑ cf. Archive of the German Women's Movement 1999, p. 8
  4. ↑ cf. Reinicke 1998, p. 408
  5. ↑ cf. Kuhn 2005, p. 101f.
  6. ↑ cf. Kuhn 2005, p. 102 f.
  7. ↑ Mueller quoted. in Kuhn 2005, p. 104
  8. ↑ a b c cf. Kuhn 2005, p. 103
  9. ↑ a b c Lexicon of women 1954, p. 680
  10. ↑ a b c d e f g h i cf. Reinicke 1998, p. 409
  11. ↑ cf. Kuhn 2005, p. 102f.
  12. ↑ cf. Reinicke 1998, pp. 408f.
  13. ↑ cf. MdR, The Reich Members of the Weimar Republic […] . 1992, p. 404
  14. ↑ Weiland 1983, p. 178
  15. ↑ cf. Weiland 1983, p. 178
  16. ↑ a b Archived copy ( memento of the original from February 20, 2005 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.dbsh.de
personal data
SURNAME Müller-Otfried, Paula
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Mueller, Pauline Sophie Christiane
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German social worker, women's rights activist and politician (DNVP), MdR
DATE OF BIRTH June 7, 1865
PLACE OF BIRTH Hoya
DATE OF DEATH January 8, 1946
Place of death Einbeck