Therese Schlesinger

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Therese Schlesinger (born Therese Eckstein on 6. June 1863 in Vienna , Empire of Austria ; died on 5. June 1940 in Blois , France ) was an Austrian women's rights activist and politician of the SDAP . She was one of the first social democrats to be elected to the parliament of the First Republic .

Live and act

Therese Eckstein grew up in a liberal Jewish industrial family in Vienna. Her siblings include Emma Eckstein , Friedrich Eckstein and Gustav Eckstein . Unlike her brothers, she was denied higher education. However, she took private tuition and continued her education through self-study. In 1888 she married Victor Schlesinger, a bank clerk with whom she had a daughter born in 1890. During childbirth, she became infected with puerperal fever and, after two and a half years of illness, during which she could only move in a wheelchair and on crutches, she had a stiff hip joint for life. Her husband died of tuberculosis during this time. Her daughter Anna, who married the lawyer Josef Frey, committed suicide in 1920.

Through her friend Marie Lang , who introduced her to feminism, she joined the General Austrian Women's Association (AÖFV) in 1894 . She soon belonged to the circle around Auguste Fickert , who became her mentor and encouraged her to write her own articles. She wrote for the weekly women's supplement of the newspaper Volksstimme by Ferdinand Kronawetter , became vice-president of the AÖFV and was promoted to speaker of the assembly. She particularly advocated women's access to university studies, liberal professions and women's suffrage .

In 1896 she was delegated by the AÖFV with Rosa Mayreder to a study conference of the Ethical Society Vienna on the situation of Viennese workers, where she made first contacts with the social democrats. In the same year she gave a lecture on the Austrian women's movement and the results of the study at the first international women's congress in Berlin. During this time she began to deal with the theoretical foundations of social democracy and attended lectures in social ethics with Emil Reich at the University of Vienna.

Therese Schlesinger (bottom row, third from left) at the Women's Reich Committee in 1917

In the autumn of 1897 she became a member of the Social Democratic Labor Party . It decided an internal conflict between the bourgeois women's movement and the "cause of the workers". She had been interested in the labor movement before, but she dared not give in to it because of her bourgeois background. In her memoirs she wrote: “... when the Social Democrats entered the election campaign for the first time in 1897, I was carried away so powerfully that my friends in the bourgeois women's movement themselves saw that my place in the future would only be in the Social Democrats could be. "

Therese Schlesinger (second row, right) at the Constituent National Assembly on March 4, 1919

In the SDAPÖ she was confronted with resistance to treating women-specific demands as equal in social democratic politics. At the 1900 party congress in Graz, for example, her application for women's suffrage was rejected and only accepted in 1906. In 1901 she was a co-founder of the Association of Social Democratic Women and Girls . Therese Schlesinger wrote books on the question of women, gave lectures and published articles in the social democratic monthly Der Kampf , in the Arbeiter-Zeitung and in Die Unsatisfiedene . She campaigned for the education of girls , the protection of children and young people as well as maternity protection for women workers and addressed the problem of the compatibility of motherhood and employment. In her book What Do Women Want in Politics? by 1909 she highlighted the education of women to political maturity. It was not until 1909 that the party granted its female comrades a "free political women's organization" and recognized the Women's Reich Committee founded in 1898 (today: SPÖ Federal Women) as the party's organ. During the First World War she was a leading figure in the left wing of the party around Victor Adler and later Otto Bauer , who fought for the ideals of internationalism and peace.

When universal suffrage for women was enforced in 1918, she and Adelheid Popp published the weekly Die Wahlin with a view to the upcoming election to the Constituent National Assembly , in which women were allowed to stand and vote for the first time .

With Adelheid Popp , Anna Boschek , Gabriele Proft , Maria Tusch and Amalie Seidel , Therese Schlesinger was one of the first female social democratic MPs in the constituent national assembly. From 1919 to 1923 she was a member of the National Council , then a member of the Federal Council until 1930 . She wrote the women's political parts of the Linz program of the SDAP from 1926. She became a role model for young socialists like Käthe Leichter and Stella Klein-Löw . In 1933 she withdrew from the party leadership. In 1934 the SDAP was forced into illegality.

After Austria's annexation in 1938, Therese Schlesinger was no longer safe in her country because of her Jewish origins and fled to France. She spent the last year of her life in a sanatorium in Blois .

Publications

Honors

  • 1949: The municipal residential complex at Wickenburggasse 8 / Schlösselgasse 14 in the 8th Josefstadt district in Vienna is named "Therese-Schlesinger-Hof"
  • 2006: At the request of the district council of the 8th district of Vienna , Schlesingerplatz in the 8th district of Vienna, named since 1901 after the Christian social and anti-Semitic Reichsrat member Josef Schlesinger, is named after her.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Michaela Raggam-Blesch: Therese Schlesinger-Eckstein . Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia. March 1, 2009. Jewish Women's Archive. (Viewed on February 20, 2016) < http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/schlesinger-eckstein-therese >
  2. ↑ The working and living conditions of wage workers in Vienna. Results and stenographic minutes of the Enquête on women's work , held in Vienna, from March 1 to April 21, 1896 (digitized)
  3. ↑ Quoted by Michaela Raggam-Blesch in: Margarete Grandner and Edith Saurer (eds.): Gender, Religion and Engagement . L'Homme. Writings Volume 9, Böhlau 2005, ISBN 978-3-205-77259-0 , p. 49
personal data
SURNAME Schlesinger, Therese
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Eckstein, Therese (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian publicist, politician (SDAP) and women's rights activist, member of the National Council, member of the Federal Council
DATE OF BIRTH June 6, 1863
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH June 5, 1940
Place of death Blois , France