Helene Stöcker | |
|---|---|
 Portrait of Stöcker,c. 1903 | |
| Born | (1869-11-13)13 November 1869 |
| Died | 24 February 1943(1943-02-24) (aged 73) |
| Education | Royal Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin |
| Alma mater | University of Bern |
| Organization | Paco |
| Notable work | Die Liebe und die Frauen |
| Movement | Pacifism |
Helene Stöcker (13 November 1869 – 24 February 1943) was a Germanfeminist,pacifist and gender activist.[1] She successfully campaigned to keep same sex relationships between women legal, but she was unsuccessful in her campaign to legalise abortion. She was a pacifist in Germany and joined theDeutsche Friedensgesellschaft.[2] As war emerged, she fled to Norway. As Norway was invaded, she moved to Japan and emigrated to America in 1942.
Born inElberfeld, Stöcker was raised in aCalvinist household and attended a school for girls which emphasised rationality and morality.[3] She moved to Berlin to continue her education and then she studied at the University of Bern, where she became one of the first German women to receive her doctorate. In 1905, she helped found the League for the Protection of Mothers (Bund für Mutterschutz, BfM),[1][4][5] and she became the editor of the organisation's magazineMutterschutz (1905–1908) and thenDie Neue Generation (1906–1932).[3]
In 1909, she joinedMagnus Hirschfeld in successfully lobbying German parliament from including lesbian women in the law criminalisinghomosexuality.[6] Stöcker's influential new philosophy, called the New Ethic, advocated the equality of illegitimate children, legalisation of abortion, and sexual education, all in the service of creating deeper relationships between men and women which would eventually achieve women's political and social equality. This was received with dismay from more conservative women's organisations in Imperial Germany.[1]
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DuringWorld War I and theWeimar period, Stöcker's interest shifted to activities in thepeace movement. In 1921 in Bilthoven, together withKees Boeke andWilfred Wellock, she founded an organisation with the namePaco (theEsperanto word for "peace") and later known asWar Resisters' International (Internationale der Kriegsdienstgegner, WRI). She was also very active in the Weimar sexual reform movement. TheBund für Mutterschutz sponsored a number of sexual health clinics, which employed both lay and medical personnel, where women and men could go for contraception, marriage advice, and sometimes abortions and sterilisation. From 1929 to 1932, she took one last stand for abortion rights. After a papal encyclical, theCasti connubii, issued on 31 December 1930 denounced sex without the intent to procreate,[7] the radical sexual reform movement collaborated with theSocialist andCommunist parties to launch one final campaign against paragraph 218, which prohibited abortion. Stöcker added her iconic voice to a campaign that ultimately failed.
When theNazis came to power in Germany, Stöcker fled first to Switzerland and then to England when theNazis invaded Austria. Stöcker was attending aPEN writers conference in Sweden when war broke out and remained there until theNazis invaded Norway, at which point she took theTrans-Siberian Railway to Japan and finally ended up in the United States in 1942. She moved into an apartment on Riverside Drive in NYC and died there ofcancer in 1943.
The most prominent personality in the German League was Helene Stöcker, a campaigner for sex reform and feminist causes, whose campaign for a new sexual ethics caused outrage in the conservative press, as well as consternation amongst the women's organisations of Imperial Germany.
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