League for the Protection of Mothers and Sexual Reform
독일 모성보호·성개혁 동맹
A German women’s and sex-reform organisation founded in Berlin in 1905 on Helene Stöcker’s initiative. It helped unmarried mothers and their children, called for maternity insurance, taught sex education and contraception against a hypocritical sexual morality, and was among the first to demand the repeal of Paragraph 218. A third of its members were men, and in the Weimar years it campaigned with Hirschfeld’s institute for the decriminalisation of homosexuality. Its work ended when the Nazis came to power in 1933.
In depth
A League for the Protection of Mothers was founded in Leipzig on 12 November 1904 by the poet Ruth Bré and others, and refounded in the Architektenhaus in Berlin on 26 February 1905 on the initiative of Helene Stöcker. Its founding appeal was signed by Lily Braun, Ellen Key, Hedwig Dohm, Friedrich Naumann, Werner Sombart, Max Weber and the eugenicist Ludwig Woltmann, among others. In 1908 it took the name German League for the Protection of Mothers and Sexual Reform. It had 4,000 members in 1909 and held public general assemblies every two years on themes such as “Reform of conventional sexual morality” (1907) and “Women and venereal disease” (1909).
It championed unmarried women and their children and a sexual reform aimed against the reigning “lies and hypocrisy” about sexual life; in 1912 it ran 36 homes for unmarried mothers, and it called for maternity insurance, today’s maternity pay. As its chairwoman Stöcker was among the first, from 1905, to demand the abolition of Paragraph 218, though her case mixed in racist ideas of “breeding up” and lives unworthy of life. Its progressive sexual ideas kept it out of the Federation of German Women’s Associations. Most members came from the radical wing of the bourgeois women’s movement, but there were also the SPD-oriented Henriette Fürth, freethinkers and pastors, and a third of the members were men, unlike in any other women’s organisation of the time; August Bebel (from 1906), Auguste Forel, Ernst Haeckel, Franz von Liszt and the eugenicist Alfred Ploetz were members.
In 1911 it held the first International Congress for the Protection of Mothers and Sexual Reform in Dresden, where Hirschfeld and Stöcker spoke, and founded an international association; in 1912 it joined the Weimar Cartel of freethinking organisations. In the Weimar Republic it never regained its former membership but shifted its emphasis from the “protection of mothers” to the “protection of people”, campaigning with Hirschfeld’s institute for the decriminalisation of homosexuality, and in 1925 it joined a cartel for penal reform. Its journal was Mutterschutz (1905–1907), then Die Neue Generation (1908–1933), edited by Stöcker until 1933. After the Nazis came to power in 1933 Stöcker fled through Switzerland to Sweden.