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Religious Dissent, Women's Rights, and the Hamburger Hochschule fuer das weibliche Geschlecht in mid-nineteenth-century Germany

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Catherine M. Prelinger
Catherine M. Prelinger
Affiliation:
Assistant editor of The Papers of Benjamin Franklin and visiting lecturer in Yale College, New Haven, Connecticut.
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Extract

The German women's movement, like so much else that was progressive in modern German history, had its origins during the decade culminating in the revolution of 1848. An important and neglected source of German feminism may be found in the radical separatist congregations which appeared in both the Roman Catholic and the Protestant communions during those years. Historical interest in early German feminism has centered almost exclusively on Louise Otto-Peters, partly because of her extraordinary contribution and partly because her personal involvement gives continuity to the women's movement, linking the activities of the 1840s with the founding of the Allgemeiner Deutscher Frauenverein in 1865, the association which signals the birth of the modern campaign for women's rights in Germany. Religious radicalism on the other hand was stifled in all of its organized manifestations during the reaction of the 1850s. Little survived to remind future feminists of its seminal importance to their cause. Yet Louise Otto-Peters herself felt that the nonconforming religious movement offered the single most important manifestation of female emancipation in pre-revolutionary Germany.

Type
Research Article
Information
Church History , Volume 45 , Issue 1 , March 1976 , pp. 42 - 55
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 1976

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References

An earlier version of this article was originally presented as a paper at the second annual Conference on Women's History sponsored by the Berkshire Conference and Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts, October 25–27, 1974. I wish to thank Mr. Kayser of the Staatsnnd Universitätsbibliothek and Mr. Plog of the Staatsarchiv in Hamburg for their assistance in locating the materials on which this article is based.

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