Louise Otto – Peters (1819-1895) Women's History Month 2003 by Sunshine for Women

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Louise Otto – Peters

1819-1895

Unlike nineteenth-century Britain and France, the independent German states did not unify into a single country until 1870. The Congress of Vienna (1814-1815) that resolved European political boundaries after the fall of Napoleon formally recognized the replacement of the Holy Roman Empire and its more than 240 states with the largely powerless German Confederation of 39 states, including four free cities. Consequently, although there was a similar language and a similar culture among the members of the German states, laws did vary from state to state, making it difficult to talk in specific terms about women's position as women under "German law." However, general statements about women under German law can be made: women were subordinated to men to a greater or lesser degree in all German states. In no German state did women have equal inheritance rights as men, did women have the same educational or professional opportunities as men, were women free from domestic violence, or did women have equal rights before the law.

None of the German states were democracies: all were under the sway of the nobility – the local baron, count, or king. As in other countries, the vast majority of the population consisted of peasants, little better than serfs. As the century progressed and industrialization took hold, two new classes developed: a wealthy class composed of capitalists (the owners of factories and other industries) that would compete with the nobility for political dominance and urban workers, the industrial counterpart of the rural peasant. The other two classes were the "petty bourgeoisie," lower-middle class shop owners, skilled tradesmen, innkeepers, and farmers with small- to medium- sized farms; and the upper-middle class "intelligentsia", university graduates and other professionals, such as doctors, lawyers, writers, and government bureaucrats. As in other countries, the nobility dominated the political system and only two classes pushed for political change: the capitalists and the urban workers.

Further, the rights which Americans today take for granted, the right to trial by jury, prohibitions against being tried for the same crime more than once, the right to free speech and free assembly, the right to travel unimpeded, in short, the right to go about one's life without fear of government intrusion, were nothing more than utopian dreams in the minds of the most radical reformers. For example, torture of prisoners was not abolished in Baden until 1831 and religious tolerance did not become the law of the land until 1803 in Bavaria and Württemberg, 1818 in Baden, 1831 in Hesse, and 1841 in Saxony.

To complicate the story, the rulers of almost all German-speaking states understood that sooner or later German unification would happen, the issue was what form unification would take. Prussia vied with Austria to become the dominant force in a unified monarchial Germany while many rulers of the smaller Germanic states desired a Parliamentary democracy with the same legal protections as in the American and British constitutions, a democracy that was dominated by neither Prussia nor Austria. In the context of Germany, then, nineteenth-century liberalism met nationalism and unification, not the extension of the franchise to additional classes of men. Liberalism and nationalism were bitterly opposed by the rulers of Prussia and Austria, as well as by the recently crowned and relatively powerful kings of Bavaria, Hannover, Württemberg, and Saxony, who begrudgingly granted constitutions and dreaded any encroachment on their individual power.

The July Revolution in Paris in 1830 set off liberal uprisings in many German states. As in France, during the reaction, the German confederation forbade public meetings and banned petitions. When another wave of revolution swept Europe in 1848, at first the frightened rulers agreed to send delegates to an assembly and promised a constitution and improved civil rights. By 1850, the rebellion was crushed, the assembly dissolved, and order was restored with most of the revolutionaries in exile or in prison and severe censorship regarding political speech, going so far as to prohibit women from participating in public political assemblies of any nature.

Prussian Chancellor Bismarck maneuvered Prussia in confederation with the other German states (excluding Austria) into war with France in 1870. Prussia won the war and created a unified Germany in the process. On January 18, 1871, Prussian King Wilhelm became Kaiser of a restored German Empire, the Second Reich and the process of integrating the independent German states into one nation began.

In such a milieu, it is not surprising that woman suffrage was not a prominent issue among women. Only a couple of the most radical women publicly advocated woman suffrage during the 1848 revolution, but their voices were quickly silenced in the post-revolutionary repression. A few other women intellectually supported woman suffrage, but did so privately in order to keep the focus of women's reform efforts on objectives that they believed could be accomplished and to keep the nascent women's rights movement from looking completely foolish.

After unification, one woman, Hedwig Dohm, openly spoke out in the 1870s in support of woman suffrage. Not until about 1900 when Prussia attempted to unify the German law code, in the process applying the most restrictive laws regarding German women on all German women, even those in the more liberal states, did German women seek political power and the movement for woman suffrage in Germany take root. Until that time, German feminism emphasized women in the economic sphere specifically: education at all levels from kindergarten to post-graduate training for women, access by women to advanced professional opportunities, and access for working-class women to a wider range of occupations.

Born into a middle-class family in Meissen, Saxony, Otto had a good education, learning French, German, and Latin. Her family was ravaged by tuberculosis: her sister Clementine died of it in 1831, her mother in 1835, her father in 1836, and her fiancé, Wilhelm Müller in 1841 – all by the time she was 22. Rather than marrying, Otto sought to become self-supporting from her writings. During the course of her life, she would pen dozens of fictional and non-fictional works including novels, novellas, short stories, opera libretti, and poems, in addition to her much better known polemical and political works, well as an autobiographical work and a history of women. Early in her writing career she wrote under the pseudonym of Otto Stern. At three periods in her life she was deeply involved in editing newspapers. The theme that binds all of her writing together is her interest in women: their place in society, their rights and privileges, and their duties. Through a series of heroines in various novels, Otto explores other possibilities for women and their lives.

In 1846, Otto moved to Leipzig where she remained for most of her life, earning her living as a writer, editor, publicist, and woman's rights activist. The revolution of 1848, which originated in Palermo before spreading to Paris and the rest of Europe, did not spare Germany. Several German women began mostly short-lived newspapers which advocated for women: Mathilde Franziska Anneke Frauenzeitung (Women's Newspaper, Cologne, one issue); Louise Aston Der Freischärler. Fur Kunst und sociales Leben (The Insurgent - For Art and Social Life, Berlin, nine issues); Louise Dittmar Soziale Reform (Social Reform, Mannheim, four issues, reprinted in the book Wesen der Ehe). Otto also began a newspaper in Mannheim, FrauenZeitung (Women's Newspaper). Unusually long-lived (from 1849 to mid- 1853 – some say mid-1852), Otto dealt with a number of issues of social interest to women despite house searches, threats, and restrictive legislation. In 1851, restrictions on newspapers forced her to relocate across the border to Gera. She closed her FrauenZeitung only when authorities finally decided to drive her out of business and passed a law prohibiting women from publishing newspapers. In the repression of the 1850s, Otto toned down her rhetoric.

Otto met the revolutionary August Peters in 1849 and married him in 1858 after his release from prison. Otto-Peters's second experience with a newspaper occurred after her marriage when she worked with her husband on the Mitteldeutsche Folkszeitung (Central German People's Newspaper). Peters died in 1864 and Otto remained single for the remainder of her life.

Undaunted and as committed to women's rights as ever, in 1865 Otto embarked on a program of woman's rights activism that would occupy her for the remainder of her life. In 1865, she founded the first national German organization dedicated to the improvement in the situation of women, the Allgemeiner deutscher Frauenverein (General German Women's Organization) and later the journal, Neue Bahnen (New Paths), the organ of the Allgemeiner deutscher Frauenverein. In 1894, Otto formed the Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine (Alliance of German Women's Organizations), an umbrella organization for a variety of middle-class women's organizations. Both organizations concentrated on issues of interest to middle-class women, especially opening educational and career opportunities to women, the so-called bourgeois feminism. Her speeches, activities, petitions, pleas to the government, and journal contributions sparked the German woman's rights movement. In 1866, Otto published Das Recht der Frauen auf Erwerb (The Right of Women to Employment) which served as the program of the early German middle-class women's movement. At this time, Otto also wrote the autobiographical Frauenleben im deutschen Reich. Erinnerungen aus der Vergangenheit mit Hinweis auf Gegenwart und Zukunft (1876; Women's Lives in the German Empire. Memories from the Past with References to the Present and Future).

Louise Otto-Peters did not write loudly and openly about woman's suffrage, her writings on the topic are hard to find. Otto, though, is such an outstanding figure in the history of German feminism that no story of the woman's movement in Germany would be complete without a reference to her. Today's material is a poem: unfortunately, the editors and translators did not include the date of publication or the source from which the poem was taken.

FOR ALL

"For all!" the host of angels pealed
On that sacred, holy night.
"For all, the Lord will be revealed
In His eternal, loving might.
For all. He suffered grave ordeals,
So we could see dear heaven's light.
Like all the members of one body. His demise
United all believers with firm ties."

"For all!"—the Hussite troops exclaimed—
"The blood of Christ brings immortality;
For all. His teachings were proclaimed,
Which profess the tenet of equality;
And the highest honor we on Earth may claim
Is His sacred consubstantiality."
In martyrdom, within a cruel death's halls,
It still resounds: "The sacred chalice is for all!"

Thus they recognized the Word's significance
And applied this sense to both sexes equally.
They didn't want to lose their proud inheritance,
The bourgeoisie in this realm of love and harmony.
There they knew no envy and no arrogance,
No slavery, no reigning strong and cravenly,
To deliver all free souls, this was their campaign,
To lead them out of darkness, to loose them from their chains.

The next time, however, that the cry was heard:
"Freedom for all!" it offered no serious solution,
Because on men alone rights were conferred
In the upheavals of the revolution.
For even though it seemed like changes had occurred
And like the monarchy was on the brink of dissolution:
Those new struggles were for the rights of man;
The rights of woman were not part of their plan.

A host of women, who had been humiliated,
Could only rise up by God's hand.
The best turned to prayer and supplicated,
Because the world simply didn't understand.
The others, however, were persuaded
That they were bom as playmates for a man,
That their highest goal and life's vocation
Were to tend to love's sweet ministration.

In time again, we'll hear this exclamation:
And as in heaven, here there'll be equality!
All human beings will strive for amelioration,
To found a realm of love and harmony,
Where both sexes share the rights of the nation
And preserve them with the palm branch of tranquility.
In the proud procession of the truth the call
Will ring out again: "Emancipation came for all!"

—S.L. Cocalis and G.M. Geiger

From Susan L. Cocalis (Ed.), The Defiant Muse: German Feminist Poems From The Middle Ages To The Present -- A Bilingual Anthology [New York: The Feminist Press At The City University Of New York, 1986] pp. 65-69

Footnotes:

1 Bell and Offen, p. 174

References:

Susan Groag Bell and Karen M. Offen, Women, the Fmily, and Fredom: The Debate in Documents: Vol 1, 1750 – 1880, [Stanford, Ca: Stanford University Press, 1983] p. 174

Susan L. Cocalis (Ed.), The Defiant Muse: German Feminist Poems From The Middle Ages To The Present -- A Bilingual Anthology [New York: The Feminist Press At The City University Of New York, 1986] pp. 65-69

Ruth-Ellen B. Joeres, "Louise Otto-Peters (1819-1895) Germany," Women Writers in German-Speaking Countries: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook, Elke P. Frederiksen and Elizabeth G. Ametsbichler (eds.) [Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998] pp. 356-366

Henry Charles Lea, Superstition and Force: Torture, Ordeal, and Trial by Combat in Medieval Law (1870) [New York: Barnes and Noble, 1996] p. 453

Ute Gerhard, "Women’s Experiences of Injustice: A Dimension of Feminist Legal Criticism," Paper for the 4th European Feminist Research Conference: Body, Gender, Subjectivity. Crossing borders of disciplines and institutions. Workshop 10: Ties that Bind: the Law, Economics and the Labour Market

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last updated February 2003