Rosa Bloch-Bollag

Rosa Bloch-Bollag (around 1915)

Rosa Bloch-Bollag (born June 30, 1880 in Zurich ; † July 13, 1922 there ) was a politician of the Swiss labor movement of the early 20th century and women's rights activist .

Life

Rosa Bloch came from an impoverished family of merchants in Zurich and worked as a representative for a jewelry store, which earned her the nickname “Diamond Pink”. Originally an anarchist , she turned into a revolutionary Marxist over time . During the national strike in 1918 she was a member of the Olten Action Committee . In the same year she was elected President of the Central Women's Agitation Commission of the Social Democratic Party (SP). She became editor of Margarethe Hardegger 's magazine Die Vorkampfin .

In order to defend the living conditions of working-class families in view of the price increases in the war years, she carried out campaigns at the weekly markets, where the women took physical action against stalls with inflated prices. On June 10, 1918, Bloch led a “hunger demonstration”. Several hundred workers' women moved from the Volkshaus in Stadtkreis 4 to the town hall and demanded measures from the cantonal government such as "immediate confiscation of all living and necessities" and "distribution of these under the control of the workers as required". A week later, on June 17th, she was one of the three women who were allowed to speak officially in the Cantonal Council of Zurich for the first time ever , after she had been refused on June 10th. Their appearance with quite understandable social demands ultimately led to the resignation of the authoritarian-anti-modernist farmer leader Fritz Bopp .

Rosa Bloch was the only woman involved in the "Olten Action Committee", which prepared the 1918 general strike. The fact that the committee's request for “active and passive women's suffrage” came second in the list of demands is attributed to their influence.

In 1920 the SP split and Rosa Bloch became a founding member of the KPS , while her husband Siegfried Bloch , head of the Central Office for Social Literature in Switzerland , stayed with the SP. Rosa Bloch-Bollag died in 1922 of a failed goiter operation. Her husband Sigfried Bloch did not believe in malpractice; He was convinced that Bloch-Bollag, who was hated in the “Citizens 'Block” - the party group of free-minded, Catholic-Conservative, Bernese farmers' and bourgeois parties - and was reviled by their newspapers, was deliberately allowed to die.

Mentona Moser took over her functions in the party executive committee of the KPS .

literature

• Annette Frei: Red Patriarchs, Labor Movement and Women's Emancipation in Switzerland around 1900. Zurich 1987
• Willi Wottreng : Rosa Bloch, demonstrator and general strike leader, 1880–1922. In: The same: Revolutionaries and cross-heads, Zurich fates. Zurich 2005, pp. 12–17.

Web links

• Annette Frei Berthoud: Bloch [-Bollag], Rosa. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .