Helene Stöcker

The eldest of eight children of a Calvinist textile merchant in Elberfeld (now Wuppertal), she moved to Berlin in 1892 and joined the women’s movement, studied at the University of Berlin when women could attend only as auditors, and took her doctorate at Bern in 1901. In 1905 she founded the League for the Protection of Mothers (from 1908 the German League for the Protection of Mothers and Sexual Reform), which helped unmarried mothers and their children and spread sex education and contraception; she led its international organisation from 1912 to 1933. In Die Neue Generation she advocated a “New Ethics” under which women and men could live their sexuality freely outside marriage, and demanded birth control and an end to the punishment of male homosexuality. Her motto was “Nietzsche and socialism”, and like other sex reformers of her time she tied the right to abortion to eugenics. The bourgeois Federation of German Women’s Associations refused to admit her league because of its radicalism. A pacifist through the First World War, she joined Kurt Hiller’s League of War Resisters in 1926 and was a founding member of the World League for Sexual Reform in 1928. In 1933 she fled via Switzerland to Sweden, then through the Soviet Union and Japan to the United States, where she died penniless of cancer in New York in 1943.