Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine (Federation of German Women’s Clubs)
On March 29, 1894, the Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine (BDF, or Federation of German Women’s Clubs) was founded in Berlin. It was the first umbrella organization with the specific aim of connecting and centralizing the broad spectrum of women’s interests and concerns.
The idea for such a federation had originated in the United States. In 1893, several prominent German women’s rights activists—Anna Simson, Hanna Bieber-Bohm, Auguste Forster, and Kathe Schirmacher—had attended the International Women’s Congress at the Chicago World Fair and had familiarized themselves with the perspectives, strategies, and organizational forms of the American women’s movements. Taking the National Council of Women as their model, they had returned to Germany with the plan to bring together, under one organizational roof, as many different women’s clubs as possible and thus to extend the movements’ political reach and influence. The World Fair in Chicago and the resulting formation of the BDF can thus be considered the formal beginning of German American organized women’s cooperation.In addition to the National Council of Women in the United States, the BDF was also indebted to the International Council of Women (ICW), which was founded in Washington, D.C., in 1888. The meetings of the ICW happened in the context of a lively, more informal transatlantic exchange. At the end of the nineteenth century, travel times between the United States and Europe had shrunk to five days on an ocean liner, although distance and cost often still constituted considerable obstacles, both for individual women and the organizations of which they were part. Nevertheless, many professional contacts were established, and individual friendships developed. One prominent example was Jane Addams, the founder of the settlement movement, who traveled to Europe in 1883 as part of her “finishing tour.” She visited Ireland, England, the Netherlands, Italy, Greece, Austria, France, Switzerland, and Germany.
This journey, intended as the final step of her formal education, turned into the initial impulse for her later dedication to social reform. Two years later, she again visited Europe (this time especially England, Germany, Italy, and Spain) and brought back the idea for Hull-House. During this second trip, Ad- dams collected information on women’s situation and the state of the women’s movements in these European countries, being especially impressed by German social reform. And Addams was not alone in her interest and engagement. Other reformers of the Progressive Era—among them Florence Kelley, Alice Hamilton, Mary Church Terrell, Mary Kingsbury Simkovitch, and Emily Greene Balch—re- peatedly traveled to Europe, often including visits to Germany. Most of them had initially come on study or finishing tours but later deliberately sought contacts with German reformers. Many saw in German institutions and reforms models to take back and implement on their side of the Atlantic. Especially the German educational system and an insurance legislation that emphasized social responsibility seemed worthy of emulation.In turn, German women familiarized themselves with the goals and perspectives of the American women’s movements during their travels to the United States. Ad- dams in particular became a role model for the prominent positions women could occupy within social reform. Hull-House in Chicago was considered one of the most attractive destinations of politically interested European travelers; even Bertha von Suttner, Austrian writer, pacifist, and first recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, stopped there. German women also took advantage of the opportunity to inform American women of their activities at home because most American activists had only a sketchy understanding of the situation in Germany, despite the general enthusiasm that accompanied these transatlantic connections. And several prominent German women’s rights activists managed to be acknowledged in the United States for their ideals and goals; Alice Salomon in particular established herself in American circles as an expert on German social policies and published widely in American journals.
ICW and BDF shared the idea of bringing together and accommodating a wide variety of women’s interests; accordingly, both organizations’ statutes were intentionally vague and flexible. The ICW’s corresponding secretary, Teresa Wilson, expressed both apprehension and enthusiasm when she described this strategy of noninterference in the Quinquennial Report of the ICW for 1899 as both “our stumbling-block and our pride—our stumbling-block because of the difficulty we experience in explaining precisely by rule and measure what we are and what we want, and our pride because this very vagueness enables us to be all-embracing” (Rupp 1997, 19). In a similar vein, paragraph 2 of the BDF’s founding documents determined that the federation should explicitly refrain from interfering in its member societies’ internal affairs.
This policy of noninterference, however, was not easy to maintain, as the various groups’ perspectives and goals differed widely and often resulted in conflicting demands. In Germany, the bourgeois women’s movement alone was divided between radicals and moderates, and Socialist and conservative women constituted independent factions outside middle-class organizing. In addition, Prussian law prohibited women, high school students, apprentices, and “insane” persons—until 1908—from being members of political organizations. This law had far-reaching consequences for the formation of an organized women’s movement in the German Empire because it forced all women’s organizations to project an explicitly nonpolitical image in order to prevent being shut down by police. This was especially detrimental to the Socialist/Social Democratic women’s movement because their support for the rights of female workers was, as far as the state was concerned, undoubtedly political. Socialist women’s societies and their members were thus constantly under observation, running a high risk of persecution and/or prohibition.
Despite these difficult political circumstances and its highly contested beginnings, the BDF quickly developed into a very powerful organization.
Before World War I, membership grew surprisingly fast. With 65 member organizations in its first year, it grew to include 137 organizations with about 70,000 individual members in 1901. In 1913, it consisted of 2,200 organizations and approximately 500,000 individual members. In 1933, the National Socialists tried to incorporate the BDF in its own women’s organization; to avoid this development, the BDF chose to disband.Kerstin R. Wolff
See also Addams, (Laura) Jane; International Council of Women
References and Further Reading
Gerhard, Ute, and Ulla Wischermann.
Unerhort: Die Geschichte der deutschen
Frauenbewegung. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1990.
Greven-Aschoff, Barbara. Die burgerliche Frauenbewegung in Deutschland, 1894—1933. Gottingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1981.
Herminghouse, Patricia. “‘Wohl auf Schwestern!' Schnittpunkte der deutschen und amerikanischen Frauenbewegung im 19. Jahrhundert.” Deutsch-amerikanischen Begegnungen: Konflikte und Kooperation im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Ed. Frank Trommler and Elliott Shore. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 2001, 103-116.
Rupp, Leila J. Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Womens Movement.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997.
Schuler, Anja. Frauenbewegung und soziale Reform: Jane Addams und Alice Salomon im transatlantischen Dialog, 1889—1933. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2004.