Marie-Elisabeth Lüders

(1878 to 1966) - Bonn women (places):
Former Bundestag: Platz der Vereinten Nationen; Marie-Elisabeth-Lüders-Straße

"For the right of all women to be fully human."

Black and white portrait photo of Marie-Elisabeth Lüders

Portrait of Marie-Elisabeth Lüders

"The exclusivity with which men claim the regulation of everything and everyone in the world solely according to their will is indeed unbearable." (1929)

"Being a woman means being political. Our whole everyday life is politics from the first to the last hour." (1947)

"Women's issues are human issues." (1953)

Marie-Elisabeth Lüders was a woman who, at the end of the 19th century, summoned up the courage to go against all the conventions of her sheltered middle-class world in order to fight for women's rights. She fought for equal rights for women from the German Empire through the Weimar Republic and the National Socialist dictatorship to the early Federal Republic of Germany. She was a pioneer who won women access to new, previously closed spaces. In her obituary in 1966, Die Zeit wrote: "This woman's life was dedicated to the fight against male supremacy."

From 1953 to 1961, she was the elderly president of the German Bundestag in Bonn. She campaigned intensively for the adaptation of all contradictory laws to the equal rights article of the Basic Law. But her voice also carried weight on all other issues under debate in the Bonn parliament.

After completing her studies with a doctorate (Dr. rer. pol.) in 1912 as the first woman in Germany, the Berlin Privy Councillor's daughter devoted herself to social and women's work. She held leading positions in this field until 1922. When women were given the right to vote and stand for election after the First World War in 1919, she was elected to the National Assembly and later to the Reichstag as a member of the German Democratic Party (DDP). In 1922, she gave birth to a son, whom she raised alone. In 1937, she was imprisoned for four months as a political prisoner. Until the end of the Nazi regime, she lived in seclusion, partly in southern Germany, for fear of further reprisals. She returned to Berlin in 1947 and from 1948 - during the blockade of West Berlin by the Soviet Union and the Western Allies' airlift - until 1951, she held the office of City Councillor for Social Affairs, where she made a great contribution to the reconstruction of social welfare and medical care in the devastated city. In the second and third legislative periods, she represented the FDP as a Berlin member of the German Bundestag and thus shaped the young Bonn Republic.

She was not concerned with her personal sensitivities when she described Bonn, the federal capital at the time, as a "provisional arrangement". Her ultimate goal was the reunification of Germany, as an essential prerequisite for global peace, and the associated return of parliament and government to the old imperial capital of Berlin, the "ancestral home of the German people's representation". In her opening speech of the second Bundestag in 1953, she assured: "We do not yet have an all-German parliament, but we will have one." She expressed the hope "that the next President of the age will be able to reopen the German Reichstag - or whatever it may be called - in the former capital Berlin".

The SPD politician Herta Gotthelf characterized Lüders in 1958 on the occasion of her 80th birthday: "She was known and feared for her quick-wittedness, which was based on great expertise. She is a liberal person in the best sense of the word and embodies that German liberalism which, unfortunately, was never very strongly anchored in the German people. Her integrity, her self-discipline, her complete dedication to her work command the respect of even her opponents. But Marie-Elisabeth Lüders is even more than that: when she congratulated Louise Schröder on her 70th birthday last April, she did so with so much human warmth and with an almost girlish charm that one would otherwise not suspect behind her outward sternness. Yet for decades she quietly proved in her personal life that one should not only have social theories, but also put them into practice. Marie-Elisabeth Lüders is indisputably the most outstanding female personality in the Federal Republic of Germany."

Unequal rights (1878 to 1900)

Even at a young age, Marie-Elisabeth Lüders, who was curious, hungry for education and self-confident, struggled with the limitations of her opportunities as a member of the female sex. Her parental home was liberal, but as a woman she was subject to the traditional understanding of roles.

As a girl, she felt inferior to the boys because she was not allowed to learn as much as they were. As a sporty and wild girl - no tree was safe from her climbing skills, she earned pocket money by riding her bike on Kurfürstendamm - she slid down the banisters of his house from the top floor and met the prominent liberal Eugen Richter because he scolded her. The two deepened their acquaintance on regular walks where they discussed politics. As a girl, Lüders regularly read the Vossische Zeitung. When her father asked her what she found so interesting about it, she replied: "You can read what the emperor does every day (court report!) and what people want, why they want it, and what other people say about it." Richter confirmed her: "Too bad you're not a boy, then everything would be very easy! High school, university, exams, etc., and maybe you could even look into politics." But in his opinion, the basic evil of not being a boy could not be remedied. Marie-Elisabeth Lüders did not want to accept this. On her own initiative, she tried to enrol at a grammar school. She was rejected by the principal with the argument that it wasn't for girls, that they wouldn't understand what was being taught here. Her protest that her brothers were no smarter than her did not convince the principal.

Lüders described her prospects after finishing the Höhere Töchterschule as follows: "At not yet sixteen, I was facing the beginning of a life that many thousands of so-called 'higher' daughters were condemned to lead until they got married or until they (...) 'stayed put'. This seemingly beautiful but meaningless and aimless life, filled with socializing, travelling, playing tennis, cycling, riding, skating, playing the piano with varying degrees of talent, some painting and singing lessons, dressmaking, cooking lessons and visiting art exhibitions, etc., offered little prospect of intellectual advancement." In terms of career options, she only had the uninviting choice between being a companion, governess or nurse. "The companion was lucky if the 'mistress' took her on trips, the governess if the children were reasonably obedient, and the nurse if a place in a motherhouse or a spiritual home beckoned at the end of her hard, self-sacrificing work." So she first took singing lessons, learned photography and attended a home economics school.

She applied to countless advertisements without her parents' knowledge. Eventually, she found a job as an assistant teacher in Weimar. Here she came into contact with leading representatives of the women's movement, an encounter that determined the course of her life. "It was a circle of intellectually sophisticated, highly educated women. Those around her described (...) their aspirations as typical of somewhat 'cranky old maids'. After the two world wars, they numbered millions! None of them were 'cranky'." When she attended a general assembly of the Federation of German Women's Associations (BDF) in Wiesbaden in 1901 and soon afterwards became a member of the BDF, a completely new, unlimited world opened up to her, which she had been unconsciously seeking for years. "These women were so different from how they were portrayed in public. They were neither radical nor sentimental; they spoke calmly, they backed up their assertions and the claims derived from them with examples from life, with the results of scientific research and with statistical material."

These women, who had fought for their academic education despite all obstacles and adversities, became role models for Lüders. But she had a long and rocky road ahead of her, with an excess of non-stop work and enduring the prejudices of teachers, professors and fellow students against her as a student. In 1908, Berlin University allowed women to enrol and Lüders began studying economics in the same year. She needed a special permit to do so, as she had not yet passed her school-leaving examination. Parallel to her studies, she completed her humanistic Abitur as an external student until 1910. In her doctoral thesis in 1912, she examined the legal and economic foundations of women's gainful employment.

Marie-Elisabeth Lüders had already returned to Berlin from Weimar in 1902 to do voluntary work for a few years in the "Girls' and Women's Groups for Social Aid Work", which were run by Alice Salomon. She immersed herself in the working-class districts of Berlin, which had previously been foreign to her, with their poverty and precarious housing and living conditions, and was confronted with the 'social question'. She had to learn everything she needed to do social work herself in practice. Women's social schools with professional qualifications did not yet exist. In 1909, Lüders and Josephine Levy-Rathenau founded the "Verband für Handwerksmäßige und fachgewerbliche Ausbildung der Frau" (Association for the Training of Women in Crafts and Skilled Trades).

From 1850 until the reform of association and assembly law in 1908, women were prohibited from joining political associations and attending political meetings. With the opportunity to organize politically, women had a much better chance of fighting for their rights. Lüders felt challenged by the arrogance and ignorance of the members of parliament: "The speeches and bursts of laughter with which the 'people's representatives' (...) accompanied the passing of this law, which was decisive for us, pushed me more than many other things onto the political path." Like Gertrud Bäumer, Marie Baum and other representatives of the bourgeois women's movement, she joined the left-wing liberals. Her motivation for political engagement was the experience of the "contradiction between women's human aspirations in the exclusively male-dominated social order and working world and their actual position".

In 1912, Lüders was one of the first women to join the administration of the Berlin-Charlottenburg housing office, a paid position after years of unpaid social work. During the First World War, she transferred to the German civil administration in occupied Belgium to set up an aid center for Belgian women. In 1916, at the suggestion of the BDF, she was appointed head of the new women's department in the Prussian Ministry of War. This was the highest office in the civil service for a woman at the time. Her task was to recruit female workers to take the jobs left by the men due to the war. In the last year of the war, Lüders left her post in the ministry in conflict with her male superiors. She took over the management of the Lower Rhine Women's Academy in Düsseldorf, a training center for social work, until 1922.

Women's rights in the Reichstag (1918 to 1933)

A member of the DDP since November 1918, Marie-Elisabeth Lüders replaced the deceased Friedrich Naumann in the constituent National Assembly in 1919. This election was the first to include women as voters and elected representatives. (The proportion of women at that time was just under 10 percent. This 10 percent was not reached again until 1983, when the Greens entered the German Bundestag with one third female representatives). In 1920/21 and from 1924 to 1930, Lüders was a member of the Reichstag, where she fought primarily for equal rights for women, sometimes together with SPD MP Louise Schröder. But she also campaigned to improve the situation of the unemployed and to protect young people. The "Reich Law for Youth Welfare" bore Lüder's signature. Through her work on the parliamentary committees for law and economic policy, she also made inroads into distinctly male domains.

According to Lüders, most female MPs found it extremely difficult to push through the issues that particularly concerned them without parliamentary experience, especially as most colleagues were all too inclined to dismiss their demands as 'women's stuff' compared to 'big politics'. Lüders attributes the fact that a number of women became involved in the parliamentary groups and committees after a surprisingly short time and did not just remain followers to their many years of practice in the much derided women's movement. Lüders herself was helped by her work in various fields before and during the war, during which she gained a comprehensive insight into the workings of the authorities and became accustomed to working in a circle of men who were only rarely benevolent. As a woman, Lüders had to fiercely defend her promising place on the list of candidates. She complained that she was not an "old shunting locomotive" that could be shunted back and forth on the lists. Her clout was based on her roots in the women's movement. Her network ranged from the BDF to the "Vereinigung der Nationalökonominnen Deutschlands", the "Deutscher Akademikerinnenbund" (DAB) and international women's organizations.

She founded the DAB in 1926 together with a few like-minded women. In 1933, the board resigned because the influence of National Socialist tendencies could no longer be stopped. The association disbanded in 1934, but was re-established in Berlin in 1949 with the participation of Lüders.

Founders of the Deutscher Akademikerinnenbund e.V., May 11, 1926 - Historical photo

Founders of the Deutscher Akademikerinnenbund e.V., May 11, 1926 (3rd from left in the back): Marie-Elisabeth Lüders

The Weimar Constitution granted women the same rights as men "in principle", but this did not mean that women were legally and practically equal to men. Lüders' greatest success was the admission of women to all legal professions in 1922, when they were granted access to the office of lay assessor. In 1927, Lüders played a key role in bringing about the end of state supervision of prostitution, with responsibility being shifted from the vice squad to the health authorities.

According to Lüders, "after the women of all parties had unwaveringly and energetically emphasized their will, this law showed that even their male colleagues in the Reichstag were ultimately unable to resist their demands." Lüders was also a strong advocate for the equality of children born out of wedlock and their mothers. She knew from her own experience what this discrimination meant, as the father of her son born in 1922, rumoured to be the Reich Minister of Justice and her party colleague Eugen Schiffer, did not recognize his paternity. Lüders denounced the fact that civil servants who were illegitimate mothers "were dismissed as 'morally unacceptable', to the detriment of mother and child. An illegitimate civil servant father, however, was discreetly transferred."

When gender competition on the labor market intensified during the global economic crisis of 1929, women were forced to leave their jobs as so-called "double earners". Lüders commented on this in her biography: "Our fears very quickly proved to be only too justified and led to fierce battles in parliament against the so-called reduction ordinance for female civil servants, which made it possible for the authorities to dismiss women for nothing if they got married, despite years of successful service. All female MPs fought against the completely inadequate 'compensation' for the pension entitlements of such 'downsized' female civil servants."

One of the unfulfilled demands that Lüders made a hundred years ago was the reorganization of the nursing profession. She criticized the excessive working hours of nursing staff, who were also particularly at risk from the transmission of infectious diseases. In 1963, she wrote: "Even today, women are still fighting together for a radical reform of this profession, not least in the interests of the sick, whose care must suffer from the overtiredness of nursing staff. Will a female Minister of Health (Elisabeth Schwarzhaupt U.K.) take energetic action to finally make this profession more attractive?"

Oppression of women under National Socialism (1933 to 1945)

Women's rights in the Bundestag (1945 to 1966)

In 1946, Lüders taught at the American military school in Oberammergau for six months. During this time, she was asked to join the denazification committee of an Upper Bavarian community. Because of her doctorate, she had been taken for a man. In the end, however, the "local parish bourgeoisie" rejected her, "not only because I was Prussian and Protestant, but above all because of the 'undignified' imposition that a woman should pass judgment on men."

In 1947, Lüders returned to her home town to become involved in the women's committees that had sprung up all over Berlin. These committees had set themselves the goal of counteracting the unimaginable hardship in the shattered city through their own efforts. In 1948/49, Lüders became a city councillor as a member of the FDP and from 1949 to 1951 she was a city councillor for social affairs.

In 1953, at the age of seventy-five, Marie-Elisabeth Lüders became a member of the German Bundestag in Bonn for the FDP. She was re-elected in 1957. She left the Bundestag in 1961. She announced her retirement to Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, two years her senior, with the ambiguous remark: "Mr. Chancellor, you have to be able to stop sometimes. In view of anti-Semitic incidents, she warned in a speech on 18 February 1960 that Germany bore a special responsibility because of its terrible past and had to recognize "that a truly horrific past is anything but generally overcome in our country". Unfortunately, her hope "that this will be the last, the very last time that any of us will be in the position of having to speak about this before this House" did not materialize at all. On April 7, 1960, she gave a speech on the Compulsory Emergency Service Act, in which she spoke out against the forced conscription of women for compulsory service. "But it doesn't seem to have occurred to anyone that women are not men and that, as a result, they can't be recruited at the drop of a hat (...). That doesn't work with women! It is especially not possible with those for whom our government always publicly documents such deep compassion; it is primarily not possible with married women and women with children. (...) We (women U.K.) are never and never independent of other living people in our thoughts, feelings and actions; whether they are related to us or not."

Stamps from 1969 and 1997

During the two legislative periods, Lüders continued to campaign vigorously for the cause of women. In 1949, the equal rights of men and women (Art. 3, Para. 2) were included in the Basic Law because of Elisabeth Selbert. A transitional period until March 31, 1953 was granted in order to adapt laws that were contrary to equal rights (Art. 117, Para. 1). Lüders fought against the efforts of supporters of the "God-ordained subordination of women" in the Bundestag to postpone the necessary changes to family and marriage law in the German Civil Code as far as possible, if not to repeal them altogether. In order to achieve full equality, she helped draft a bill. The Equal Rights Act was passed on June 18, 1957 - four years late. However, the opponents had insisted that the spouses should come to an agreement in the event of differences of opinion, but - if an agreement could not be reached - the husband should have the last word, the so-called "casting vote". Lüders successfully challenged this before the Federal Constitutional Court. In 1959, the "casting vote" was overturned, mainly thanks to the Federal Constitutional Court judge Erna Scheffler.

Marie-Elisabeth Lüders was regarded as an intelligent, quick-witted and astute politician with wit. The Bonn court chronicler Walter Henkels attested to her outstanding rhetorical skills: "The courage and impressive self-confidence with which Mrs. Lüders tackles men from the lectern are almost always bravura pieces. She especially refutes the foolish and occasionally pitiful saying that women know nothing about politics. She tells the men's men, these so-called lords of creation, what they think with friendly charm, sometimes with biting sharpness. She can book hilarious successes almost every time." And in 1955, Die Zeit wrote about her: "Ms. Lüders is one of the best and (...) most amusing speakers in this parliament. (...) That's why you'd rather see her take the rostrum than many other MPs."