Feminism: Hedwig Dohm: Against the “signature of our time”

Hedwig Dohm became angry. In 1873, she dramatically expressed what she had to say about the political oppression of women. Dohm denounced the “tyranny” of men, in which women “live involuntarily under the will of others” and are treated like “slaves.” The Berlin feminist saw the reason for this as being that the laws were made by men. Consequently, she advocated giving women the right to vote: »For me, the beginning of all true progress in the area of ​​women’s issues lies in women’s right to vote. The laws they are most interested in are against them because without them.”

Like no other women’s rights activist of the time, Hedwig Dohm threw herself into the public debate, asked clear-sighted questions, brought contradictions to light and never shied away from digging trenches – explicitly against other women. The women’s rights activists Helene Lange and Gertrud Bäumer wrote in 1901 that “the polemics at this time were led exclusively” by Hedwig Dohm. The Berliner wrote the most decisive feminist pamphlets of her time in Germany and is rightly considered an important pioneer of the radical women’s movement.

»Our humble women«

Hedwig Dohm’s anger had good reasons. The German Empire was proclaimed in 1871. Hopes that women would now be considered full citizens and given opportunities to participate in politics were disappointed. The organized “bourgeois” women’s associations nevertheless remained cautious. This was not only because they often depended on traditional role models. In addition, women were forbidden from political activity in the Empire by the Prussian association laws. The General German Women’s Association (ADF), which was founded in 1865 as an interest group, appeared relatively tame and represented demands that were tolerated by the official censors.

Under these circumstances, the commitment to promoting economic independence and freedom for women was permissible. This in turn presupposed the opportunity for women to pursue independent employment. In order to do this, however, professions had to be opened up to women and, above all, educational opportunities had to be created for girls who were not allowed to obtain a high school diploma or study in Germany. This is where the women’s movement started: The “economic independence of the female sex” was the most important task of the time, wrote the chairwoman of the ADF Louise Otto-Peters in 1866, “for everything else we hardly need to make any further demands, hardly fight – it will come naturally of its own accord.”

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Such an understanding of politics was downright ridiculed by Hedwig Dohm: “The good German women are busy proposing some improvements to girls’ schools and building small, cute further education institutes (…). Our modest women long for a small job at the post or telegraph office.” Dohm could afford the tips because she remained a solitaire. Nevertheless, it was anything but natural that a woman would intervene so confidently in the debates.

Polemics and criticism of ideology

As the daughter of a tobacco manufacturer, Hedwig Dohm grew up in relative prosperity, had, like many other feminist activists, completed her teaching exams and acquired her knowledge as an autodidact. At the age of 21, she married Ernst Dom, 12 years her senior, who, as a moderate liberal democrat and editor of the satirical newspaper “Kladderadatsch”, introduced her to Berlin’s intellectual circles, where she made contact with other intellectuals, including Ferdinand Lasalle. Nevertheless, marriage also meant a traditional sexual division of labor for Hedwig Dohm. The couple’s five children were born in the 1850s. The first-born son died at the age of 12, and the four daughters – among whose daughters were Katia Mann and Hedda Korsch – later moved in intellectual and political circles themselves.

Her first writing from 1872, “What the Pastors Think of Women,” conveyed her anger about these traditional role expectations almost unfiltered on paper. “I cannot say how disgusting the mendacity of these common phrases fills me,” wrote the 41-year-old from Berlin about the presumptions with which men justify the social oppression of women. With a great willingness to confront, she attacked clergy, tore apart their arguments and literally demonstrated them. At the end of their intellectual dismantling, the mockery remained: “Lord, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing!”

The book “Jesuitism in the Household,” published a year later, was Dohm’s most extensive work. Here she criticized ideology at a high level and identified herself as a critic of bourgeois ideology and moral concepts. At a time when technical progress could have made women’s lives easier with sewing machines, gas and water pipes or the banal invention of matches, the social model of women as housewives and mothers became even more obligatory. The network of bourgeois moral concepts grew ever tighter around women. Dohm castigated this development: “What is the signature of our time? The hypocrisy, the Jesuitism, which pervades all social conditions, which poisons our thoughts and feelings right down to our actions, which poisons not only the word on our tongue, but even the germs from which thoughts become.” With their demands, which lead to… At the same time, Dohm declared himself to be a radical or leftist.

Women’s rights as human rights

In her two writings that appeared in the following years, Dohm maintained this combative political stance. “The Scientific Emancipation of Women” repeated the tried-and-tested procedure of exposing scientists to their obvious delusion. Once again, the focus was on female role expectations, but this was not about the fate of being a housewife, but rather about the demand and right to education.

If there was a hint of a rapprochement with the women’s movement on this topic, this became even clearer in her polemic “Women’s Nature and Law”, which appeared in 1876. Here she directly called for women’s political struggle. Because women suffer from a “gender despotism” that leaves them no opportunity to decide about their own concerns. In this book, Dohm directly called for women to organize. The women’s movement is a “main factor of our time”; women’s right to vote is the decisive key to improving their situation.

However, Dohm challenged the German women’s movement. Because the Berliner had the women’s movement in England and the United States in mind as role models. There the “women’s question was one of the great national issues.” Dohm accordingly called for the establishment of “suffrage associations” and concluded her paper with the words: “Human rights have no gender.” In doing so, she placed women’s rights and the right to vote in the tradition of the French Revolution, whose central document was the Declaration of Human Rights. As early as 1791, another radical intellectual, Olympe de Gouges, had given this a feminist revision.

An “inevitable” fight

Understanding women as full legal subjects and not allowing any distinction based on gender was fundamental to Hedwig Dohm’s thinking. In Germany, this was first demanded in an organized manner by the “radical” wing of the women’s movement, which was formed in the 1890s around Minna Cauer, Anita Augspurg and others. Hedwig Dohm supported one of its predecessors, the Women’s Welfare Association founded by Cauer in 1888, from the beginning. It was only in the following years that the demands for the introduction of female voting rights developed into a concern that could be based on a mass basis. In 1902 it became a main demand of feminists.

Hedwig Dohm now dared to make a comeback as a political polemicist. In “The Antifeminists” she collected essays that had appeared in recent years. The book – which was published by the same publisher as the organ of the “Radikalen”, the newspaper “The Women’s Movement” – defended the women’s movement against those male critics who wanted to “perpetuate female disenfranchisement for all time”. The fight against it is “inevitable”; it will bring “flooding movement to the masses.”

Dohm was right in her skepticism, which made the fight a necessity. It took another 16 years and required the dismantling of the monarchy after the defeat in the World War until women were granted full voting rights on November 30, 1918. Hedwig Dohm experienced this triumph on her deathbed. The feminist died on June 1, 1919, 105 years ago.

David Bebnowski is a historian and social scientist. He works at the Americas Institute at LMU Munich in the ERC project “The Arts of Autonomy” on a history of feminist pressure in Germany and the USA.

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