Stoecker, Helene (1869–1943)

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Stoecker, Helene (1869–1943)

German feminist and pacifist who was president and guiding spirit of the League for the Protection of Motherhood and Sexual Reform, and editor of the journal Neue Generation (The New Generation). Name variations: Helene Stöcker. Pronunciation: STIR-kir. Born on November 13(?), 1869, in Elberfeld, Germany; died on February 24, 1943, in New York City; daughter of Ludwig Stoecker (a textile merchant) and Hulda (Bergmann) Stoecker; attended middle-class schools; took four years of college preparatory work in feminist-sponsored courses in Berlin, and college work at Universities of Berlin and Bern; University of Bern, Ph.D., 1901; never married; no children.

At age 14, rejected her parents' Calvinism because of its obsession with "sin and damnation" (1883); at age 21, arrived in Berlin planning to prepare for a teaching career (1892) and became involved in women's causes; studied at the University of Berlin with the philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey (1896); left because one professor refused to accept female students (1899); earned Ph.D. at Bern (1901); returned to Berlin and became an officer in social reform organizations (1902); assumed the leadership of the League for the Protection of Motherhood and Sexual Reform (1905); founded the journal The New Generation (1908); attended conference of the Women's League for Peace and Freedom at the Hague (1915); founded War Resisters League (1921); founded War Resisters International and cofounded the Group of Revolutionary Pacifists (1926); refused to live in Germany after the Nazi accession to power, living in Switzerland and other countries before settling in New York City (1941).

Selected publications:

Die Liebe und die Frauen (Minden in Westphalia: Bruns, 1909); Die Frau und die Heiligkeit des Lebens (Leipzig: Neuer Geist, 1921).

When politically prominent German women of the first half of the 20th century are listed, Helene Stoecker is seldom included. Overshadowed by feminists whose organizations claimed larger numbers of followers, she nevertheless deserves prominence as one of the most politically involved women in Germany during the first 40 years of the 20th century. From 1905 through 1914, her organization, the League for the Protection of Motherhood and Sexual Reform, set an often controversial agenda for the German women's movement, raising issues that remain of interest within European and American women's movements.

There appear to be several reasons for Stoecker's modern obscurity. While her ideas on motherhood and the role of women in German society anticipated many controversies in modern women's movements, they also placed her at odds with both the mainstream of German middle-class feminism and the large and prominent women's movement of the Marxist Social Democratic Party in Germany. As a result, the member-ship of the League reached only some 4,600, an unimpressive figure in view of the estimate that more than 1 million Germans were involved in the German women's movement prior to 1933. Still another reason for Stoecker's recent obscurity has been the controversial and "radical" nature of her feminism, which led many of her contemporaries, when writing their memoirs, to ignore her or to belittle her significance. Unfortunately, many modern writers appear to have accepted this diminished view of her importance.

Born into a strict Calvinist family in 1869, Stoecker was the oldest daughter of eight children. She later recalled envying two sisters who died at a young age, because her parents told her they had escaped "original sin." As the oldest daughter, she bore a heavy responsibility during a long illness of her mother. Stoecker believed that the size of the household led her to hold strong opinions about love, marriage, and the family. But the experience of being responsible for younger siblings also convinced her that "motherhood" should not limit the "free development" of women.

Although she rejected the strict Calvinism of her parents by age 14, she seemed to gain from them a strong sense of idealism and self-reliance, and a determination to achieve her ideals. To these traits she would add an interest in scholarly work and "intellectual development." She benefited from changes in German universities during the 1890s which opened university admissions and classes to women (although individual professors were allowed to refuse to teach women students until 1908). She entered the University of Berlin in 1896, and served as an assistant to the philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey. When another professor refused to work with her, she chose to enroll in graduate study in Switzerland, at the University of Bern.

In 1901, she became one of the first German women to receive a Ph.D., writing her dissertation on 18th-century German literature. Although she would be very active in feminist and pacifist causes, her interest in "intellectual life" would remain with her. Her writings and speeches would often carry the tone of a scholar—a patient teacher who was explaining great ideas which would affect the everyday lives of her listeners and readers.

Women should have the right to a free intellectual development and the right to love, without having to make a cruel choice between an intellectual and cultural life and happiness as a woman.
—Helene Stoecker

German feminists before World War I included more conservative leaders such as Gertrud Bäumer ; middle-class (bourgeois) feminists such as Minna Cauer ; and Marxist-oriented women who joined the Social Democratic Party, such as Lily Braun . Believing that Marxists were willing to wait for a future revolution to establish a new, gender-equal society, Stoecker chose to join the second group. She would be considered one of the most "radical" of the middle-class feminists in Germany.

During the 1890s, she was a frequent contributor to the Freie Bühne, a left-wing journal edited by Bruno Wille, a theatrical entrepreneur. In these articles, she frequently expressed the view that "the best characteristic of women," the "mother instinct," had been used against them, relegating women to the home in a "supposedly holy occupation." In reply to a speaker who complained that women who wanted to become dentists or lawyers really wanted "to make women into men," Stoecker insisted: "We want to relieve these gentlemen of their worry: we want to become something quite different from men."

As early as the 1890s, Stoecker declared that masculine domination of Germany's state and society had deprived German women of "an intellectual education, economic independence, a congenial life work and a respected social position." In 1898, she published a commentary on a debate in the Prussian lower house over the issue of establishing separate, state-supported secondary schools for women; Stoecker insisted that only a coeducational system would meet "women's deserved rights to free intellectual development." When the Prussian minister of education commented that women were weak "in drawing logical conclusions" but represented "a great and holy good for our people as mothers," Stoecker asked whether a "lack of education, lack of rights, and a second-class status for women are really a great good for our people."

During the period from 1892 through 1903, Stoecker became involved in the abolitionist movement in German feminism. The abolitionist movement, which also attracted some of Stoecker's friends such as the radical pacifist Minna Cauer, was directed against prostitution in Germany in general; it specifically sought to end the long tradition that each major German municipality contained one or more bordellos sponsored by the local government. Stoecker regarded the existence of prostitution as a symptom of larger problems in German society. The abolition of prostitution, she declared, was a prerequisite to ending the "social, legal, and economic manipulation of women" and to "restore to wives the proper respect for their work."

Abolitionist ideas became central to the League for the Protection of Motherhood and Sexual Reform, the organization which Stoecker came to control in 1905. The League had been founded in 1904 by the feminist Ruth Bré and social reformer Walther Borgius. Bré, who hoped that the League would follow a vaguely Social Darwinistic program which was intended to improve conditions for mothers and infants, wanted to build agricultural living communities for unmarried mothers and their children. She was increasingly pushed into the background by Stoecker, who became general secretary of the League and its guiding spirit.

Under Stoecker's aegis the League campaigned for state-supported stipends for unmarried mothers; free medical care for mothers and mothers-to-be; increased education for the midwives who supervised a large proportion of Germany's births; paid pregnancy leave for pregnant women who also worked; and sex education in the schools as a means of combating prostitution, sexual disease, and pornography. The goal, for Stoecker, was to "unite the women's movement with motherhood" and to "make the best characteristic of women, the motherhood instinct," central to the German women's movement.

Despite the small size of its membership, the League by 1910 had attracted a number of well-known names, including the feminist Ellen Key ; the playwrights Frank Wedekind and Hermann Sudermann; the Marxist revisionist Eduard David; the zoologist Ernst Haeckel, one of the major popularizers of Darwinism in Germany; the physical chemist Wilhelm Ostwald; and the sexual researcher and homosexual-rights advocate Magnus Hirschfeld.

The most controversial and even notorious program of the League was Stoecker's own New Ethics, which sought greater economic, social, and political freedom for German women, particularly married women and especially in sexual matters. While some German feminists insisted that men should exhibit greater restraint regarding sex, Stoecker favored, instead, greater sexual freedom for women. Although Stoecker never married, she did not hide at least two affairs or "free marriages": one with Alexander Tille, who taught German at the University of Glasgow and whom she seriously considered marrying legally, and another with the lawyer Bruno Springer, with whom she lived from 1905 until his death in 1931.

She had rejected the idea of marrying Tille partly because she believed he had tried to dominate her. The New Ethics sought to avoid such a one-sided relationship between women and men. They sought to equalize the position of women and men in marriage, creating a "free union of independent and equal personalities." The goal, for both married and unmarried women, was "intellectual education, economic independence, a congenial life work, and a respected social standing."

The program of the League for the Protection of Motherhood and Sexual Reform reflected the spirit of the New Ethics: one meeting of the League passed a resolution favoring the full equality of husband and wife in marriage, including equality in the rights of both regarding the children; an easing of the requirements for divorce; and equal legal treatment for legitimate and illegitimate children. Stoecker's work to aid illegitimate children would be recognized, during the 1920s, when the German government removed the label "illegitimate" from birth records.

During the year 1908, Stoecker joined the German Monistic Alliance, led by Haeckel and Ostwald. Monism was a cultural movement, with Social Darwinistic overtones, which sought to apply the perceived "lessons" of natural science to German social and political life. Stoecker was a frequent contributor to the journal of the Alliance, writing a column which called for proof of health before marriages and genetic testing for

married couples. She was fascinated by eugenic ideas and insisted that contraception was "in the interests of the race." She believed, however, that premarital genetic counseling should be purely advisory; in no case were marriage licenses to be denied for "Darwinian" reasons.

Shortly after World War I began in 1914, Stoecker condemned the Social Democratic deputies in the Reichstag, the lower house of the German Parliament, who had voted in favor of emergency war appropriations for the German military. She accused them of failing to grasp the "shortcomings of power diplomacy." She also criticized the German army's invasion of neutral Belgium as an injustice and "the catastrophe of 1843." Stoecker's articles in 1915 suggested that the war was the direct result of masculine domination of society. War, although an atavism, was the "triumph of the state in the original form as a power organization."

The same year that these words appeared, Stoecker became a member of the Association for a New Fatherland, which was the first German "peace" organization to defy wartime military censorship. Its wartime activities centered on countering popular pressure in Germany to annex territories occupied by German troops, particularly Belgium and captured sections of Poland. Although the membership was small (a roster published in 1915 included less than 300 names), the list of members included several prominent German names, including Albert Einstein, the artist Kathe Köllwitz , and the Prussian finance minister Hugo Simon. In 1916, military censors forbade the Bund to issue any further written statements or publications.

At war's end, Stoecker, in her first postwar book, described the conflict as being an antieugenic disaster, which women, particularly mothers, had been the first to condemn. "[N]umerous researchers, biologists and historians have demonstrated that cultural decline is the result of the loss of the best in wartime," she declared, "and not the result of loose living and luxury."

In 1921, Stoecker affiliated the League for the Protection of Motherhood and Sexual Reform with the German Peace Cartel, a coalition of both mainstream and left-liberal "reform" or "peace" organizations. Stoecker was a co-author of several major statements and letters to the Reichstag from the Cartel, including a 1923 Cartel statement proposing German and French negotiations on the Ruhr question, after French troops had occupied Germany's heavily industrialized Ruhr area.

German pacifists during the 1920s tended to divide into two basic groups. One group, centered around the German Society for the League of Nations, tended to believe that the League was the surest mechanism to prevent future European wars. Others, including Stoecker's associate, the so-called "radical pacifist" Kurt Hiller, argued that the only certain way to avoid future wars was for the European masses to refuse to participate in any way. Stoecker initially appeared to ally herself with the former faction of German pacifism, rejecting suggestions that the League might become a "potential launching point for an international system of police that might, through police action, lead to more frequent wars."

When the League of Nations proved ineffectual in efforts to convince the French to withdraw from the German Ruhr, Stoecker reported to Hiller that she had lost faith in the League as an agency to prevent future European wars. After 1924, she increasingly spoke of "war resistance" as the best war preventative. She had taken one step in that direction in 1921, when she had founded a German War Resisters' League; in 1926, Stoecker and Hiller jointly founded a War Resisters' International. The situation facing European pacifists, she wrote, included not only the "inability of the League of Nations to organize the peace," but also "the lack of restraints on any cabinet or parliament which wishes to impose itself on hundreds of free and blameless peoples." The masses lacked the "will" to "resist this monstrous slavery"; a "general strike or refusal of any participation in any war activity" was the "sole natural step" to deny governments the means to wage war.

Did war resistance require pacifists to attempt to change the political systems of their countries? Stoecker did not attempt to answer this question until 1925, when, as a member the German League for Human Rights, she increasingly became disenchanted with the Weimar Republic, the democratic government of Germany during the 1920s. The League, which had been founded in 1922 as a revised version of the Association for a New Fatherland, campaigned against anti-Semitism in Germany. It held rallies and forums which berated German judges and educators for discriminating against Jewish defendants or students. The League also worked to expose secret rearmament plans and preparations which were being made by the government of the Weimar Republic. Such military plans were in violation of the Treaty of Versailles, which Germany had signed at the end of World War I.

During the 1920s, Stoecker also sought to liberalize restrictions on abortion and secure state stipends and paid maternity leave for employed, pregnant women. She criticized the Catholic political party in Germany, the Center Party. The party's "strong fanaticism," she wrote, forced poor couples to "bring a child into the world without knowing how they will obtain the means to clothe that child." Stoecker published letters she had received from German women, detailing the hardships caused by German anti-abortion laws. She cited a case in which both a woman who had undergone an abortion and her lover were sentenced to two months in jail. Since the Center Party was an important part of the Weimar Republic, Stoecker found herself more willing to listen to parties on the German left, including the German Communist Party.

During the 1920s, Stoecker visited the Soviet Union three times. She came to hope that the USSR would become the sexually equal society that Germany was far from achieving. She wrote that in post-revolutionary Russia, "The revolution has changed everything. Women are fully equal, and the state provides protective care for women and their children. Mothers who work as factory workers or farmers have a four-month leave of absence; mothers who are office workers have a three-month leave. Mothers have a half hour recess, without deductions from their pay; they may not be required to work at night."

During the late 1920s, Stoecker did accept some programs of the German Communist Party, particularly the party's sponsorship of a League against Colonial Oppression. Stoecker was a German delegate to an international Conference against Colonial Oppression, held at Brussels in 1926. She also showed an interest in peace proposals advanced during 1927 by the Soviet Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov. The proposals were sweeping in nature, encompassing the banning of all land, sea, and air weapons; abolition of all means of chemical warfare; banning of all forms of compulsory military service; and the dismantling of war industries and destruction of machines used to make weapons.

Ill when Adolf Hitler was appointed German chancellor in January 1933, Stoecker chose to leave Germany and live in Switzerland for several years. There, she participated in international efforts to aid friends who had remained behind. She was a prominent participant in successful campaigns by Germans in exile—such as Willy Brandt in Stockholm and Einstein in the United States—to secure a Nobel Peace Prize in 1936 for Carl von Ossietzky, an anti-Nazi publicist who was one of the first political prisoners of the Nazi government. With the approach of World War II, Stoecker left Switzerland, traveling to the United States via London, Stockholm, the Soviet Union, and Japan. She arrived in the United States just before it, too, entered the war. It was a war she had both predicted and feared.

sources:

Frevert, Ute. Women in German History: From Bourgeois Emancipation to Sexual Liberation. Translated by Stuart McKinnon-Evans, with Terry Bond and Barbara Norden. NY: Berg, 1989.

Gerhard, Ute. Unerhört: Die Geschichte der deutschen Frauenbewegung. Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1990.

Greven-Aschoff, Barbara. Die bürgerliche Frauenbewegung in Deutschland, 1894–1933. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1981.

Hackett, Amy. "Helene Stoecker: Left-Wing Intellectual and Sex Reformer," in When Biology became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany. Edited by Renate Bridenthal, Atina Grossmann, and Marion Kaplan. NY: Monthly Review Press, 1984.

collections:

Most of Stoecker's personal papers were burned by the Nazis. Some materials, including an autobiography, are housed in the Swarthmore Peace Collection, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, Pennsylvania.

Niles Holt , Professor of History, Illinois State University, Normal-Bloomington, Illinois

Women in World History: A Biographical Encyclopedia