Pauline Chaponnière-Chaix

Pauline Chaponnière-Chaix (ca.1920)

Pauline Chaponnière-Chaix (born November 1, 1850 in Geneva ; died December 6, 1934 there ) was a Swiss women's rights activist .

Life

She grew up as the eldest of four children of the geographer Paul Chaix and his wife Adèle (née Chaponnière). An older sister had died before she was born. She learned the English language at an early age in her middle-class parental home and spent a year in Germany around 1865. At the age of 18 she married the banker Edouard Chaponnière, a distant relative on her mother's side, ten years her senior. The marriage remained childless; her husband died in a psychiatric institution in 1878 after a long illness.

The young widow entered the deaconess home in Reuilly near Paris in 1880 and worked for a long time in France: first in a children's asylum, then in the Saint-Lazare prison in Paris, then for two years in the women's prison of Doullens , and finally until 1893 in the Protestant girls' home in Les Ombrages at Versailles . She also trained as a nurse .

Exhausted, she first returned to Lake Geneva to relax , where she was able to live in a chalet of her deceased husband between Céligny and Crans-près-Céligny , and ultimately stayed in Switzerland. Together with Emilie Gourd and Emilie Lasserre , she was now involved in socio-political activities in the Union des femmes in Geneva. She was on the organizing committee of the First Swiss Congress for the Interests of Women in 1896. Between 1902 and 1905 she was president of the Union des Femmes and later its vice-president during the First World War. Together with Auguste de Morsier and Camille Vidart , she founded the Geneva Association for Women's Suffrage in 1907.

In 1903, Chaponnière-Chaix persuaded the Federation of Swiss Women's Associations (BSF), which she co-founded in 1899/1900, to join the International Women's Council (ICW). From 1904 to 1910 and from 1916 to 1920 she served as BSF President. She and Vidart agreed to the BSF in a special meeting in 1919 to approve an initiative for women's suffrage. She was then President of the ICW during Ishbel Maria Hamilton-Gordon's second break from 1920 to 1922 and, together with Helene von Mülinen and Vidart, also organized the second congress for women's interests, which took place in Bern in 1921. Since she was fluent in the three predominant languages ​​of the international women's movement, English, French and German, she was a sought-after organizer, for example at the ICW General Assembly in Geneva in 1908.

In addition to women's rights, she continued to deal with questions of nursing and from 1922 was the first woman to be a member of the International Committee of the Red Cross and its vice-president between 1930 and 1932.

literature

• Martine Chaponnière: Chaponnière-Chaix, Pauline. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .