GERMANY
| Total population: | 61,720,529. |
| Women: | 31,259,429. |
| Men: | 30,461,100. |
| German Federation of Women’s Clubs. Woman’s Suffrage League. |
In no European country has the woman’s rights movement been confronted with more unfavorable conditions; nowhere has it been more persistently opposed. In recent times the women of no other country have lived through conditions of war such as the German women underwent during the Thirty Years’ War and from 1807 to 1812. Such violence leaves a deep imprint on the character of a nation.
Moreover, it has been the fate of no other civilized nation to owe its political existence to a war triumphantly fought out in less than one generation. Every war, every accentuation and promotion of militarism is a weakening of the forces of civilization and of woman’s influence. “German masculinity is still so young,” I once heard somebody say.
A reinforcement of the woman’s rights movement by a large Liberal majority in the national assemblies, such as we find in England, France, and Italy, is not to be thought of in Germany. The theories of the rights of man and of citizens were never applied by German Liberalism to woman in a broad sense, and the Socialist party is not yet in the majority. The political training of the German man has in many respects not yet been extended to include the principles of the American Declaration of Independence or the French Declaration of the Rights of Man; his respect for individual liberty has not yet been developed as in England; therefore he is much harder to win over to the cause of “woman’s rights.”
Hence the struggle against the official regulation of prostitution has been left chiefly to the German women; whereas in England and in France the physicians, lawyers, and members of Parliament have been the chief supporters of abolition. I am reminded also of the inexpressibly long and difficult struggle that we women had to carry on in order to secure the admission of women to the universities; the establishment of high schools for girls; and the improvement of the opportunities given to women teachers. In no other country were women teachers for girls wronged to such an extent as in Germany. The results of the last industrial census (1907) give to the demands of the woman’s rights movement an invaluable support: Germany has nine and a half million married women, i.e. only one half of all adult women (over 18 years of age) are married. In Germany, too, marriage is not a lifelong “means of support” for woman, or a “means of support” for the whole number of women. Therefore the demands of woman for a complete professional and industrial training and freedom to choose her calling appear in the history of our time with a tremendous weight, a weight that the founders of the movement hardly anticipated.
The German woman’s rights movement originated during the troublous times immediately preceding the Revolution of 1848. The founders—Augusta Schmidt, Louise Otto-Peters, Henrietta Goldschmidt, Ottilie v. Steyber, Lina Morgenstern—were “forty-eighters”; they believed in the right of woman to an education, to work, and to choose her calling, and as a citizen to participate directly in public life. Only the first three of these demands are contained in the programme of the “German General Woman’s Club” (founded in 1865 by four of these women, natives of Leipzig, on the anniversary of the battle of Leipzig). At that time woman’s right to vote was put aside as something utopian. The founders of the woman’s rights movement, however, from the very first included in their programme the question of women industrial laborers, and attacked the question in a practical way by organizing a society for the education of workingwomen. The energies of the middle-class women were at this time very naturally absorbed by their own affairs. They suffered want, material as well as intellectual. Therefore it was a matter of securing a livelihood for middle-class women no longer provided for at home. This was the first duty of a woman’s rights movement originating with the middle class.
Of special service in the field of education and the liberal professions[69] were the efforts of Augusta Schmidt, Henrietta Goldschmidt, Marie Loeper-Housselle, Helena Lang, Maria Lischnewska, and Mrs. Kettler. Kindergartens were established; also courses for the instruction of adult women, for women principals of high schools, for women in the Gymnasiums and Realgymnasiums. Moreover, the admission of women to the universities was secured; the General Association of German Women Teachers was founded, also the Prussian Association of Women Public School Teachers, and high schools for girls. The Prussian law of 1908 for the reform of girls’ high schools (providing for the education of girls over 12 years,—Realgymnasiums or Gymnasiums for girls from 12 to 16 years, women’s colleges for women from 16 to 18 years) was enacted under pressure from the German woman’s rights movement. Both the state and city must now do more for the education of girls. The academically trained women teachers in the high schools are given consideration when the appointments of principals and teachers for the advanced classes are made. The women teachers have organized themselves and are demanding salaries equal to those of the men teachers. At the present time girls are admitted to the boys’ schools (Gymnasiums, Realgymnasiums, etc.) in Baden, Hessen, the Imperial Provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, Oldenburg, and Wurttemberg. The German Federation of Women’s Clubs and the convention of the delegates of the Rhenish cities and towns have made the same demands for Prussia.
The Prussian Association of Women Public School Teachers is demanding that women teachers be appointed as principals, and is resisting with all its power the threatened injustice to women in the adjustment of salaries. The universities in Baden and Wurttemberg were the first to admit women; then followed the universities in Hessen, Bavaria, Saxony, the Imperial Provinces, and finally,—in 1908,—Prussia. The number of women enrolled in Berlin University is 400.