For so many years, women from all over the world had no voice and come only secondary to the male specie. Even in this generation when we thought the world has accepted gender equality, there are still instances of discrimination to women. Women were usually thought to be just good for cleaning and baby sitting, this is no longer true. Women can now build an empire as to where they are good at and it’s not just an empire for gebäudereinigung aachen und umgebung but an empire that could change the world.
The Revolution of 1848
During the revolution of 1848, women fought for their interests for the first time. It is the beginning of emancipation in Germany.
Your weapon is the words. Louise Otto began to write as a young woman – and sometimes she uses a male pseudonym to accept her texts. “The participation of women in the interests of the state is not only a right, but it is also a duty of women,” she wrote in the Saxon Fatherland Gazette in 1843. With sentences like this, she becomes a pioneer of the bourgeois women’s movement.
It is the middle-class women who began to fight for their rights in the 1830s and 1840s. They want to be able to learn more and they want to work. They are not allowed to do both at this time. In poor families, it goes without saying that girls and women work – families need their labor and money. For daughters from wealthy and educated families, there is only one option: life alongside a rich man.
Women like Louise Otto want more than that. When the political situation was publicly criticized across the country in the 1840s, women also demanded reforms. Many support the revolution of 1848/49: They sit in the stands in the Paulskirche in Frankfurt, help their politically active men – and fight vigorously themselves. For the first time, women are also doing something for their own interests.
During the revolution of 1848/49, women did something for their own interests for the first time.
The revolution fails. But Louise Otto remains active. In 1849 she founded the Frauen-Zeitung in Leipzig, which became an important medium for women because of politics. In 1850 , Saxony prohibited women from publishing newspapers – the law is known as “Lex Otto”. She moves to Thuringia and continues to work on her newspaper for two years until she is also banned from working there.
The voices of women cannot stop publication bans. In addition to Louise Otto, other women’s rights activists became popular after 1848: Helene Lange fought for better education, the socialist Clara Zetkin for the workers and the theoretician Hedwig Dohm called for women’s right to vote as early as 1873. In 1865, 120 women met in Leipzig for a conference and founded the General German Women’s Association.
In 1918 women were given the right to vote and to vote – and they used both a year later. Around 90 percent voted in 1919; Ten percent of the members of the newly elected parliament are women. There you will find majorities for important laws: maternity leave, minimum wages for homeworkers, more rights for prostitutes.
They did not achieve any other goal: in 1931, many women – but also men – fought for the reform of paragraph 218 of the Criminal Code. This is true since 1871 and punished a termination of pregnancy up to five years in prison. You have no success. The paragraph was only reformed more than 40 years later.
When the Nazis came to power in 1933, the success of the women’s movement was lost. In the dictatorship, women have only one task: to be a mother – and to support the man.