Frauenfragen

Marianne Weber (1870-1954) has been overshadowed by her husband Max Weber for decades, yet without her commitment, he would not have achieved world renown. During her lifetime, however, things were different for Marianne Weber, and she was celebrated in Heidelberg and throughout Germany for her dedication to the women's movement. As a sought-after speaker and author, she campaigned for women's education, their equal rights and pay. In 1919, she made democratic history by being the first elected woman to address a German parliament, and as chair of the German Women's Associations, she was the high-profile figurehead of the bourgeois women's movement. The selection of speeches, essays and newspaper articles presented here reveal her to be a politically combative campaigner for female self-determination, who argued philosophically but always sought a conciliatory balance between the sexes as well as those with differing political viewpoints.