Digital Feminism
From the Lex Otto to #aufschrei
![Five members of the Verein für Frauenstimmrecht (the Society for Women’s Suffrage), 1896 Five members of the Verein für Frauenstimmrecht (the Society for Women’s Suffrage), 1896](/resources/files/jpg932/vonlex_logo-formatkey-jpg-w320m.jpg)
If you’ve ever wondered who coined famous phrases like “my belly belongs to me” or founded the first feminist newspapers, you now have the answers at your fingertips. Everything you’ve ever wanted to know about the history of the German women’s movement is available online for the first time in the Digitales Deutsches Frauenarchiv (Digital German Women’s Archive).
Who first uttered the simple, yet powerful sentence, “human rights know no gender”? Was it Germany’s best-known feminist Alice Schwarzer, or more likely a younger feminist like Margarete Stokowski? As it turns out, it was Hedwig Dohm, a pioneer of the women’s movement who fought for universal women’s suffrage in the 1910s at the beginning of the past century. And who recognized the danger Hitler represented at the start of 1923 before the Beer Hall Putsch in November of the same year, and demanded his immediate expulsion from Germany? It was Anita Augspurg, a pacifist feminist and open lesbian. Was Emma or Courage Germany’s first feminist serial publication? Neither in fact, because the two magazines, launched at roughly the same time in 1977 and 1976, were only larger editions of the Frauenzeitung – Frauen gemeinsam sind stark (Women’s Newspaper – Together Women are Strong), a collective publication first released in October 1973. But in terms of pioneering achievements, the Frauen-Zeitung, published by co-founder of the German women’s movement Louise Otto-Peters, is way out ahead of the pack. Otto-Peters launched the paper back in 1849, only to be forced to give it up a short time later when the Lex Otto was passed in Saxony, a law drafted specifically to prohibit her or any other woman from publishing or editing a newspaper from 1850 onwards.
Highlighting continuity
All this information is accessible with just a few clicks on the Digital German Women’s Archive website, which went online in September 2018 with the aim of digitising, bundling and visualising data of all kinds about the German women’s movement. As the above examples show, the wealth of material on one of the most important social movements of the last 200 years is extensive, but little more than a blip in the public consciousness. In cooperation with the 40 institutions involved in the Dachverband deutschsprachiger Frauen- und Lesbenarchive, -bibliotheken und -dokumentationsstellen (i.d.a, an organization of German language lesbian/women’s libraries, archives and documentation centres), a red carpet has been rolled out for all those interested in women’s issues and the history of emancipation. Materials gathered from Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Luxembourg and Italy (South Tyrol) are now available on the web, and organised both by topic and by the people involved. The archive entices visitors to spend hours browsing and discovering the countless scanned original documents – photos, newspaper clippings, posters, flyers and entire handbooks – which also create a visual sense of the respective time and place.