Anita Augspurg (1857-1943)

(this text can also be heard in the audio clip)

She grew up in Verden an der Aller, attended a teacher training seminar in Berlin, became an actress in Riga and Amsterdam and a photographer with her own studio “Elvira” at Munich’s Englischer Garten (Von-der-Tannstraße 15, Munich from 1888). She was unconventional: she rode a horse through the Englischer Garten in a gentleman’s saddle; she was a vegetarian; she smoked and rode a bicycle; later she drove a car and cut her short. She studied law in Zurich, because women were still denied university access in Germany, and in 1897 became the first woman to gain a doctorate in law in the German Empire.

She published her first publications as a lawyer from 1895. Her core thesis was that the women’s question is a question of financing one’s livelihood, or as she puts it, a “food question”. Today we would say it was about the gender pay gap, which was 50% in the German Empire. Since only legal changes could improve the situation of women, she demanded full recognition of women as equal subjects alongside men and was not open to compromise on this point. She wanted to change marriage law, which treated women as minors. In contrast to more militant feminists, she rejected violence and said “We women don’t want to break laws, we want to make laws!”;

She moved to Berlin in 1897 and first lived with Mina Cauer at Nettelbeckstrasse 21, now An der Urania 15, and then with Agnes Hacker at Eisenacher Str. 80. She campaigned for the rights of unmarried women, went on an educational tour through many cities and gave lectures focusing on family law and marriage rights. At the turn of the century, she called for women to be abolished as second-class citizens when the German Civil Code was reformulated. One specific demand, for example, was the separation of property.

Augspurg, her partner Lida Gustava Heymann, Katharina Erdmann and Minna Cauer were regarded as the radical wing of the women’s movement, which demanded immediate voting rights for women without compromise. Minna Cauer was one of the initiators of the “Frauenwohl” association and founded the magazine “Die Frauenbewegung”, where Augspurg became a close collaborator of Cauer. After a falling out with Cauer in 1907, Augspurg published the monthly magazine “Journal for Women’s Suffrage” on her own. From 1912 to 1913, she published the magazine “ Women’s Suffrage” and from 1919 “The Woman in the State” for her feminist, radical democratic and pacifist positions. In her publications, she took a clear stance against the increasing anti-Semitic developments and criticized political grievances.

The women’s rights activists achieved their greatest success in 1918 when they won universal and equal suffrage for women in Germany.

From 1907, Augspurg lived again in Munich at Kaulbachstraße 12a together with Lida Gustava Heymann. In 1915, during the First World War, Augspurg co-initiated the International Women’s Peace Congress in The Hague, at which the “International Committee for a Lasting Peace” was founded. The committee was later renamed to “International Women’s League for Peace and Freedom”. Augspurg was part of the board of the German branch until 1933. Augspurg and Heymann took part in international women’s peace conferences and campaigned against the First World War with leaflets. After a brutal attack by Nazis in January 1923, Augspurg and other women unsuccessfully petitioned the Bavarian Minister of the Interior to expel the Austrian Adolf Hitler for incitement of the people. Hitler attempted a coup a few months later.

Augspurg never spoke publicly about her homosexuality, probably so as not to jeopardize the fight for women’s rights and pacifism. She was able to live her relationship with Heymann relatively undisturbed; Paragraph 175, which stipulated a prison sentence for homosexuality, only applied to men. She probably wanted to keep her options open, as her homosexuality would have been seen as an illness, which would have weakened her argumentative position for women’s rights. She must have regarded the fight for women’s rights as more important than her discrimination as a woman who loved women.

After the Nazis came to power, Augspurg and Heymann found themselves in exile in Switzerland, as they were on the list of people to be liquidated following Hitler’s request for their deportation. Both were expatriated, their property was confiscated and from then on they lived in exile in Zurich with the support of friends, where they learned to drive a car at the age of 70. Anita Augspurg died in 1943, just five months after her beloved Lida, after decades of loving and working together. Today, the Anita Augspurg Prize for Commitment to Women’s Equality is awarded annually in Munich in her memory.