Women in Free Religion

Written summary of a lecture by retired pastor Heinrich Keipp, given on Sunday, March 10, 2019, as part of the events for the Festival of Women in the Free Religious Community of Offenbach on the occasion of International Women’s Week around International Women’s Day 2019.

What could be more fitting than to put the spotlight on women who received special attention around the time of the emergence of free religion in Germany and in the early days, or who put equality between men and women into practice, or at least attempted to do so, at an event for International Women’s Day in our free religious community? For the sake of clarity, I will refer to the “German Catholic” communities that emerged from the Catholic Church and the “Free” communities that developed from the Protestant Church as equally free religious communities in the following.

It was difficult for me to make a selection, because the list of all those women who could be mentioned in or around the first Free Religious Communities is long and would be impossible to cover in the context of such a lecture, given that, for example, active and passive voting rights for women were among the fundamental tenets of Free Religion in the early days.

That’s why I’ll get straight to the point
Johanna Friederieke Louise Dittmar (also Luise) (born September 7, 1807 in Darmstadt; died July 11, 1884 in Bessungen). She was a German women’s rights activist, early socialist, publicist, and philosopher during the Vormärz (Pre-March period) who consistently advocated for gender equality in her books.

Dittmar’s father, Heinrich Karl, was a senior finance official. His wife, Friederike Caroline, had ten children with him. The couple were politically progressive and republican in their views, but their image of women was traditional. There was not enough money for their daughter Louise to continue her education. Among the daughters, she was destined not to marry, but to care for her parents in their old age. After the death of her parents, Dittmar took care of the household of her unmarried brothers from 1840 onwards. Her brother Georg Hermann had taken part in the Frankfurt Wachensturm in 1833 and was a friend of Georg Büchner. Another brother, Karl Anton, married the daughter of Darmstadt publisher Karl Leske, who had close ties to liberal and democratic writers of the Vormärz period. She began to study literature, philosophy, political theory, social reform ideas, and religious criticism on her own. Historians consider Dittmar’s writings to be the only deliberate attempt by a feminist of her time to participate in the male-dominated discourse on these topics.

Dittmar was particularly impressed by the philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, with whom she corresponded for a time. In the mid-1840s, she published her first essay, Skizzen und Briefe aus der Gegenwart (Sketches and Letters from the Present), anonymously. In it, she advocated freedom of religion and belief. This was linked to political demands and ideas for economic change, which she contributed to a solution to the social question. In these, she advocated early socialist positions. In addition, Dittmar emphasized that fundamental political and economic changes must go hand in hand with unconditional gender equality. It was precisely in this question that she recognized a deficit in contemporary literature and philosophy:

“Only in free circumstances can the feeling of independence take root, and only from this feeling can self-confidence grow, enabling one to arrive at an unbiased judgment of oneself. (…) I cannot help but doubt the ability of those who doubt the possibility of their freedom to recognize it, just as I doubt their ability to understand female nature. They search throughout existence to find an unconditionally free position for human beings, but in the truest sense, they only understand the man in this position; there always remains a tiny thread of bondage to which the woman is attached.”

Such views were ahead of their time. In 1845, she published the satire Bekannte Geheimnisse (Known Secrets), in which she sharply criticized the liberal bourgeoisie. This was followed shortly afterwards by the religiously critical work Der Mensch und sein Gott in und außer dem Christentum (Man and His God in and Outside Christianity). Later, she published the book Lessing and Feuerbach, in which she commented on selected texts and advocated, in an idealistic sense, a faith that was independent of the church and based on anthropology.

She found unreserved recognition among the religious reform movement, the German Catholics. She published her 1847 lecture, delivered before a gathering of this political opposition, as Vier Zeitfragen. Beantwortet in einer Versammlung des Mannheimer Montag-Vereins (Four questions of the day. Answered at a meeting of the Mannheim Monday Club) Regardless of the content of her theses, she considered the lecture to be a significant event, as it was the first time a woman had publicly expressed “what she understood by freedom of conscience.”

She published two volumes of political poetry and, in 1849, launched the magazine Die soziale Reform (Social Reform). Well-known authors of the time, such as Louise Otto, Julius Fröbel, Claire von Glümer, and Malwida von Meysenbug, contributed to the magazine.

Perhaps her most important book was published in 1849. Das Wesen der Ehe (The Nature of Marriage). Along with several essays on social reform by women . Once again, she fought for a social, democratic, egalitarian society. The anthology also included essays by Louise Otto, among others, which had first been published in Dittmar’s magazine Die soziale Reform (Social Reform). In an essay about the revolutionary Charlotte Corday, Dittmar positioned herself as Corday’s successor. This drew criticism even from women close to her, who felt that Dittmar’s radical ideas went too far.

In her sketch Zur Charakterisierung der nordischen Mythologie (On the Characterization of Norse Mythology), published in 1848, she attempted to create a political-religious system. According to this system, “human nature” is driven by the urge “to discover the innermost truth.” Hostility toward nature and the separation of spirit and nature are characteristics of “self-misunderstanding.” Freedom is the essence of nature, and thus “the highest being is nature that has become free within itself.”
After 1850, Dittmar published nothing more. The suppression of the revolution and the subsequent reaction, with its bans on associations and assemblies, including for women, meant the end of a political utopia for her. She spent the last four years of her life, already seriously ill and impoverished, with her two nieces in Bessungen.

I will only touch briefly on Emilie Wüstenfeld (born August 17, 1817, in Hanover; died October 2, 1874, in Hamburg), even though she was particularly important to the Free Religious Movement. She was a women’s rights activist and philanthropist from Hamburg who championed girls’ education and vocational training for women.

Emilie Wüstenfeld’s maiden name was Marie Emilie Capelle. In 1841, she married Julius Wüstenfeld, a merchant from Hamburg.

In 1846, Emilie Wüstenfeld founded an ecumenical women’s association, which operated under the name “Women’s Association for the Promotion of Free Christian Communities and Humanitarian Causes.” On January 1, 1850, Karl Friedrich Fröbel and Emilie Wüstenfeld founded the College for Women in Hamburg, the first institution of its kind in Germany, which demonstrated the new religious movement’s ability to grant women and girls unrestricted access to education. In 1846, Emilie Wüstenfeld founded an ecumenical women’s association.

On February 18, 1867, she founded an association to promote female employment.

Emilie Wüstenfeld is mentioned in the same breath as

Bertha Ronge (born April 25, 1818 in Hamburg; died April 18, 1863 in Frankfurt am Main; née Bertha Meyer, divorced Bertha Traun), a German women’s rights activist and educator.
Bertha Meyer was born in Hamburg in 1818 as the second eldest daughter of the wealthy cane manufacturer Heinrich Christian Meyer. At her father’s request, she married Friedrich Traun, the private secretary to the Duchess of Cambridge and later a manufacturer himself, who was 14 years her senior, at the age of only 16. Six children were born from this marriage. In 1846, she met Johannes Ronge, the founder of German Catholicism. Ronge exerted a particular attraction on middle-class women, as he combined his reformist ideas with the demand for women’s emancipation. Bertha fell in love with Ronge and separated from her husband. In October 1850, she followed the excommunicated priest Ronge into exile in London with three of her children. The two married there on August 5, 1851. Soon after, their daughter Marie was born, and Bertha asked her younger sister Margarethe to come from Hamburg to London to support her. In 1861, Bertha returned to Germany with Johannes Ronge and died shortly thereafter in Frankfurt in 1863.

Bertha Ronge devoted her entire life to promoting Friedrich Fröbel’s educational ideas, Johannes Ronge’s liberal religious beliefs, and women’s rights. Together with Emilie Wüstenfeld, mentioned above, and 30 other interested women, she founded the Association of Women and Maidens for the Support of German Catholics in Hamburg on December 12, 1846, whose goal was, among other things, to achieve recognition by the Hamburg Senate for the free religious community. From 1848, she was a member of the “Social Association of Hamburg Women for the Equalization of Confessional Differences,” which sought to abolish the unequal treatment of Jewish citizens. In many lectures, especially before free religious communities, she promoted the establishment of Fröbel kindergartens. Together with Emilie Wüstenfeld and her husband Johannes Ronge, she founded the College for Women, which began training teachers and kindergarten teachers in Hamburg on January 1, 1850. On April 1, 1852, the female educational institution had to cease teaching because, on the one hand, financial support was no longer guaranteed and, on the other hand, the institution had to be closed again under pressure from the Hamburg police authorities, as the authorities feared the revolutionary spirit emanating from this women’s educational institute to the utmost.

Soon after, following the failure of the revolution and the resurgence of the princes, Bertha Ronge was forced to flee to England with her husband. In London, she founded a free religious community with Johannes Ronge, and in Manchester, she established a kindergarten and a training center for kindergarten teachers. In 1857, she founded the Manchester Committee (later the Manchester Fröbel Society) to promote the spread of kindergartens. With her husband’s support, she published a guide for educators based on Friedrich Fröbel’s educational ideas. In England, too, she gave lectures to promote the establishment of kindergartens. After her return to Breslau, she attempted to found a kindergarten there as well, but as a member of the Free Religious Movement, she failed mainly due to opposition from the established clergy and instead founded an educational institution for kindergarten teachers.

This brings me to
Louise Otto-Peters (also Luise Otto-Peters, pseudonym Otto Stern; born March 26, 1819 in Meissen; died March 13, 1895 in Leipzig), the socially critical writer and co-founder of the bourgeois German women’s movement.
Louise Otto was the youngest of five daughters born to court director Fürchtegott Wilhelm Otto (1776–1835) and his wife Charlotte Otto, née Matthäi (1781–1835). She grew up in her father’s affluent middle-class household. Her father was not only a court director, but also served as a senator for the city of Meissen for a time. Her parents died of pneumonia in 1835, leaving Louise Otto an orphan at the age of 16. She initially remained in her parents’ house in Meissen with her two sisters, under the care of an aunt. She earned her living mainly from her inheritance and her writing, and later from her journalistic activities.

As a young woman in 1840, Louise Otto had witnessed the oppressive living conditions of working-class families in Oederan, now a small town in the Saxon district of Central Saxony, which was then a thriving industrial town. When she published a poem about this, entitled “Die Klöpplerinnen” (The Lace Makers), in the Oederaner Stadtanzeiger newspaper, it caused great outrage. In 1842, she published a letter to the editor in the Sächsische Vaterlandsblätter newspaper. In it, she declared that “women’s participation in the interests of the state is not only a right, but also a duty.” In doing so, she supported the liberal politician and editor of this newspaper, Robert Blum (1807–1848), who had raised the question of the current political position of women. Four years later, in 1846, she published her socially critical novel Schloss und Fabrik (Castle and Factory), in which she described the bitter hardship of industrial workers and their rebellion. The fictional experience of the bloody suppression of an uprising in Leipzig became the initial spark for her to campaign for the rights and support of workers, but also their wives. This novel was banned by the censorship authorities immediately after its publication and was only released again when Louise Otto agreed to tone down some “dangerous passages.” During this time, she intensified her social criticism and published numerous articles on social issues, mostly under the pseudonym “Otto Stern,” as it was quite difficult for women to be accepted in such public activities at that time. In these works, she repeatedly emphasized two demands: first, to open up the world of work to women, and second, to improve the living conditions for women.

Through her publications, Louise Otto became a figure of public interest, but also one who was noticed by the authorities. Her 1847 collection of poems, Lieder eines deutschen Mädchens (Songs of a German Girl), earned her the nickname “Lerche des Völkerfrühlings” (Lark of the Spring of Nations), as her verses were imbued with the spirit of optimism that prevailed in the period before the March Revolution. This earned her recognition in liberal religious, democratic, and working-class circles. In the same year, Robert Blum’s Vorwärts. Volkstaschenbuch für das Jahr 1847 (Forward: People’s Pocketbook for the Year 1847) published a noteworthy article by Louise Otto entitled “On the Participation of Women in Public Life.” In it, she developed programmatic proposals for an organized “women’s movement” with the demands: equal rights for men and women, and access to education for girls and women. Further publications by her during the “Vormärz” period can be found in the magazines “Constitutionelle Staatsbürger-Zeitung,” “Der Komet,” “Der Leuchtturm,” “Der Wandelstern,” “Neue Zeitschrift für Musik,” “Nord und Süd,” “Typographia,” “Unser Planet,” Veilchen, harmlose Blätter für die moderne Kritik (Violets, Harmless Pages for Modern Criticism), and others. While studying in Dresden, she had already heard of the progressive Catholic preacher Johannes Ronge, whom she then sought out on a trip to Silesia. When she met him, she was particularly taken with the idea of equal rights for women in Catholic communities, which even allowed women to be elected to church offices.

In 1848, her address to the highly esteemed Minister Oberländer in Dresden, in which Louise Otto demanded: “Gentlemen! In the name of morality, in the name of the fatherland, in the name of humanity, I urge you: do not forget women when organizing work!” The issue at stake was the appointment of a commission to develop proposals on economic policy issues in Saxony, particularly with regard to the organization of work. She therefore also had to ensure the organization of women’s work, among other things so as not to drive women into prostitution. Louise Otto’s demand that women also be appointed to the workers’ commission was considered almost scandalous at the time. Nevertheless, she was asked for suggestions on this issue. She organized meetings to raise awareness about the situation of female workers, co-founded a patriotic association, and was in lively exchange with the increasingly organized workers.

During the March Revolution in 1849, she became editor of the Frauen-Zeitung (Women’s Newspaper), which she had founded, under the motto “I recruit female citizens for the realm of freedom!” This attracted the attention of the Saxon censorship authorities. This was followed by house searches, interrogations, the dissolution of the servants’ and workers’ associations she had helped to found on the basis of the Prussian Association Act of 1851, and the banning of the Frauen-Zeitung in 1850 on the basis of a specially amended Saxon press law (Lex Otto), which prohibited women from publishing newspapers, also with reference to her intensive contacts with the Free Religious, whose demands were also hers. She moved the editorial office to Gera before a similar Prussian law finally banned the newspaper in 1852.

She became engaged in prison to the writer August Peters, who had to serve seven years in prison for participating in the revolutionary struggles of 1848/49. After his remaining sentence was remitted in 1856, the wedding took place in November 1858. The couple then lived in Leipzig from 1859 onwards. She worked in libraries in Dresden and Leipzig, wrote articles, reviews, and novels, and, together with her husband, published the Mitteldeutsche Volkszeitung until his death in 1864, heading its arts and culture section.

In 1865, Louise Otto-Peters, together with Auguste Schmidt, Ottilie von Steyber, and Henriette Goldschmidt, founded the Leipzig Women’s Education Association and convened the first German women’s conference in Leipzig that same year. She was also a co-founder of the General German Women’s Association (ADF), which she led as its first chairwoman for the next three decades. The association’s main goals were: women’s right to education, women’s right to gainful employment, and access to university courses.

She encouraged the association to address female workers not only as a target group for charitable and educational work, but also as allies in the fight for women’s rights. Among other things, the General German Women’s Association ran a “Sunday school,” a continuing education school for girls, and a soup kitchen, and organized entertainment evenings for women. At the Philosophy Congress in Frankfurt am Main in 1869, she represented the association with her own speech in order to reach even more of the public and stakeholders for women’s rights. Her last public appearance was in 1894 on the occasion of the opening of the first high school course for women and girls in Leipzig.

Louise Otto-Peters died in Leipzig on March 13, 1896.

Another important woman for the Free Religious Movement was and remains
Margarethe Meyer-Schurz (née Margarethe Meyer, born August 27, 1833, in Hamburg; died March 15, 1876, in New York), who opened the first German-language kindergarten in the USA in 1856.
Margarethe Meyer was born as the youngest of eleven children to factory owner Heinrich Christian Meyer and his wife Agathe Margarethe, née Beusch. Her mother died just a few hours after giving birth.

Her sister Bertha, who was 15 years older, as you may recall, remarried after separating from her first husband, Friedrich Traun, to the excommunicated priest Johannes Ronge, founder of German Catholicism. As a result, Margarethe and her other older sister Amalie came into contact with the circle of German Catholic friends at an early age. Margarethe later attended the Hamburg College for Women, which had been founded at the suggestion of Johannes Ronge, among others.

After the failed revolution of 1848, Bertha followed her husband into exile in London, as we have heard. When she fell seriously ill in the fall of 1851, 18-year-old Margarethe followed her to the British capital to help with the housework. There, Margarethe met Carl Schurz, who, like Ronge, had been forced to leave Germany for political reasons because he had participated in the Reich constitutional struggles of 1849 in the Palatinate and Baden, but had managed to escape from prison in Rastatt and flee to London. The two were married in a civil ceremony in London’s Marylebone district on July 6, 1852, and soon after left for the United States of America. They first lived in Philadelphia, then in Watertown, Wisconsin, from 1856, where they purchased a small farm, with Margarethe’s dowry providing the financial means for the purchase. Following the ideas of Pestalozzi’s student Friedrich Fröbel and her free-thinking sister Bertha, she opened the first German-speaking kindergarten in the United States in 1856 in the local free-thinking community in Sauk City, which, incidentally, still exists today and where – at least among the very elderly – German was still spoken in some cases until a few years ago. In 1866, after the Civil War, the couple moved to Detroit and then to St. Louis in 1867. From the fall of 1867, Margarethe stayed in Wiesbaden for a cure.

With the support of his wife, Carl Schurz pursued a political career in the United States, campaigning for the abolition of slavery. He served as U.S. ambassador to Spain, fought actively as a general on the side of the Northern states during the Civil War, became a recognized leader of the Liberals, and finally served as Secretary of the Interior.

Margarethe Meyer-Schurz and her husband Carl had five children: Agathe (1852–1915), Marianne (1857–1929), Emma Savannah (1865–1867), Carl Lincoln (1871–1924), and Herbert (1876–1900). She died of childbed fever on March 15, 1876, in St. Louis, just three days after the birth of her son Herbert.

Let’s now take a brief leap forward in time to
Ida Altmann (born June 30, 1862 in Obscherninken, East Prussia; died November 30, 1935 in Berlin) was a prominent trade unionist and activist in the proletarian women’s movement.
Ida Altmann came from a Jewish family and was able to attend the municipal secondary school for girls in Königsberg, which was not possible for many women of her time. She passed her exam as an elementary school teacher in Königsberg in 1881.

However, as a Jew, she was denied a position as a teacher in state schools. In 1881, she moved to St. Petersburg and worked there as a private tutor. She traveled extensively and tried her hand at writing stories and poems. In 1890, she moved from St. Petersburg to Berlin.

In 1891, she renounced Judaism in Berlin. From 1892 onwards, she was an active member of the Free Religious Community of Berlin. It was she who formulated the principles of the Berlin Free Religious Community in writing in 1895. One of these principles was: “Free self-determination in accordance with progressive reason and science in all areas of life.” Because of her activities, she was under police surveillance and had to serve her first prison sentence in 1895 for disregarding a ban on her lecturing activities—the repressive application of association law and other regulations was typical of the state’s actions against activities considered “subversive” in the 1890s.

Due in part to her involvement with the Free Religious Movement, Ida Altmann was permanently banned from entering the state school system and was only allowed to work as a private tutor. She did this primarily as part of the youth work of the Free Religious Community. Ida Altmann taught “cultural history lessons,” held ceremonies, and gave lectures to over 500 children at times. The then liberal Prussian Minister of Culture, Moritz August von Bethmann-Hollweg, reported on this to the House of Representatives in Berlin: “The dissident communities claim two rights: first, to provide religious instruction through their leaders, speakers, etc., and second, to be allowed to keep their children away from religious instruction in public schools. …”

Initially, Sunday lectures open to all parishioners were established as a substitute for youth education. Ida Altmann-Bronn addressed young people directly in her 1895 “Guidelines for the Children of Freethinkers and Free Religious.” The notes for adults stated: “These principles are intended to guide our children to do the right thing, to live a rational life, which is not possible without rational thinking and healthy feelings.” Because of her continued commitment to the Free Religious Community, Ida Altmann-Bronn’s teaching license was revoked by the Provincial School Board in early 1897.
From 1900 to 1912, Ida Altmann was active not only in the Free Religious Movement but also in the Social Democratic Party, which at that time worked closely with the Free Religious Movement. Together with Emma Ihrer and Clara Zetkin, she worked in Berlin to establish a proletarian women’s movement. This movement emerged in the 1880s as a socialist parallel to the bourgeois women’s movement and had to fight on several fronts: it was persecuted by the police through bans on organization and assembly, while the labor movement often viewed it as a potentially divisive special endeavor, and the bourgeois women’s movement considered it too radical. The political police also kept an eye on Ida Altmann, seeing her as one of the leading agitators of the proletarian women’s movement in Berlin. But Ida Altmann and her fellow activists overcame all resistance and, starting in the 1890s, were able to establish the proletarian women’s movement as a permanent fixture.

Altmann was particularly active in the trade union movement, and from 1905 onwards she was Germany’s first full-time trade union secretary for more than three years. Her position at the “Trade Union Women Workers’ Secretariat” of the General Commission of Trade Unions dealt specifically with the problems of working women.

Ida Altmann resigned from her position at the General Commission on March 1, 1909. However, she continued to work for the General Commission as a translator and interpreter. At the same time, she appeared as a speaker at social democratic gatherings. In April 1912, she married her long-time friend Yegor Bronn (1870–1932), who worked as an inventor and chief engineer at the Rombach ironworks. She moved to Alsace-Lorraine to live with him that same year. She no longer played a prominent political role, but continued to publish essays and articles in Freireligiöse Blätter (Free Religious Papers), wrote poems and novels. After returning to Berlin with her husband in 1919, Ida Altmann-Bronn only resumed her active membership in the Free Religious Community of Berlin. She devoted herself to caring for her ailing husband, with whom she took several recuperative trips to Nice. After his death in 1932, she withdrew completely from public life.

Ida Altmann-Bronn is undoubtedly one of those personalities who, alongside Bruno Wille (1860–1928) and Adolph Hoffmann (1858–1930), had a decisive influence on the history of the Free Religious Community in Berlin at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century.
Ida Altmann-Bronn died on November 30, 1935, in Berlin.

There are certainly other women who could be mentioned, or women who have not been mentioned here. But given the intensity with which people fought and argued for changes in social, political, and religious conditions in the mid-19th century, the above description must be considered fragmentary. What remains important for us as an active part of the Free Religion movement is that ideas from our founding days have found their way into the present day and can serve as the basis for important reforms in all areas of human coexistence, especially with regard to the equality and equal treatment of women in our society.

Sources:

• Wikipedia
• E. Pilick (ed.), Lexikon freireligiöser Personen, Publishing House P. Guhl, Rohrbach/Pfalz
• Dagmar Herzog, Intimacy and exclusion. Religious politics in pre-revolutionary Baden, Princeton University Press, 1996
• Sylvia Paletscheck, Frauen und Dissens – Frauen im Deutschkatholizismus und in den freien Gemeinden 1841 – 1852, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen, 1990
• F. Kampe, Geschichte der religiösen Bewegung der neueren Zeit, Publishing House O. Wigand, Leipzig, 1852