200 years ago – on June 12, 1821 – the women’s rights activist Luise Büchner was born in Darmstadt. She campaigned for better educational and professional opportunities for women
The bronze head of Luise Büchner (June 12, 1821 to November 28, 1877) looks friendly, but determined, directly at the former grammar school in Darmstadt’s old town. Her brothers went to school there, including Georg Büchner. She was only allowed to enter the building for school celebrations. Girls were excluded from higher education at the time. Luise Büchner soberly put it in a nutshell that there was “a great advantage of boys over girls” in society. She did not want to accept this injustice – and spent her entire life working to ensure that women received a better education and were able to work.
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The Union The Luise Büchner Society aims to keep the work of the writer and other pioneers of the women’s movement alive. To this end, the Darmstadt Association regularly organizes readings, lectures, city tours, exhibitions and study trips.
In addition, the company lends regularly the Luise Büchner Prize for Journalism. It is awarded to women who reveal in articles or books the inequality between the sexes in the present and point out ways to a gender equitable society.
First prize winner was the journalist and later editor-in-chief of the Frankfurter Rundschau, Bascha Mika, in 2012.
Last was the award to Margarete Stokowski. In her laudation, she recalled what feminist pioneers like Luise Büchner had achieved in earlier times. “I couldn’t write the way I write them, and I couldn’t stand here either,” said the award winner, “if it hadn’t been for the huge number of women campaigners who campaigned for women’s rights at a time when that took a lot more courage than today. ”
Margarete Stokowski posted Back then on Twitter a photo of herself next to the bust of Luise Büchner, with a leather jacket and a broad smile, the author leaned casually against the monument. As a comment emblazoned underneath: “Sisters in Crime”.
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Luise Büchner is one of the first German women’s rights activists. The daughter from a middle-class medical family was traditionally only intended to play the role of wife, housewife and mother. But the young woman was far too inquisitive for that. So Luise Büchner quickly taught herself everything with great zeal. Whether literature, mythology, history or foreign languages: Luise Büchner acquired an extensive education. She wrote poetry at a young age, followed by lyric texts, stories, travelogues, dramas, portraits and novels. After the death of her parents, she lived with her sister Mathilde, who was also single, in the household of her brother Ludwig.
Luise Büchner made a name for herself as a writer. In 1855, she published her bestseller “Women and their Profession” anonymously. “General education, which makes people free and capable, must under no circumstances be withheld from women,” it says. Luise Büchner found a close colleague in Grand Duchess Alice of Hesse and near the Rhine. Together they founded several women’s associations.
The Alice Women’s Association for Nursing, for example, set itself the goal of training young women to become nurses even without religious affiliation – and to turn charitable care into a paid female profession. Luise Büchner’s commitment was highly valued. At a conference of the Prussian Ministry of Culture, she was the first woman to be asked to submit a position on questions of teaching and upbringing in girls’ education. Luise Büchner died in Darmstadt in 1877. The sentence carved in stone is emblazoned on her monument: “What we want is more than a woman’s question, it is a question of humanity.”
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