„Maternal Activism: Hedwig Dohm and Helene Stöcker.”

In my talk I would like to demonstrate that parallel development of women’s writing to show not only that female belles lettres critically depict important and controversial social issues of their time, but also to show the bandwidth of female social activism and creativity. I will focus on the aforementioned Hedwig Dohm and her trilogy Schicksale einer Seele, Sibilla Dalmar and Christa Ruland as well as her polemical writing on motherhood. I will compare Dohm’s critical re-thinking of the maternal role with the writings of the non-fiction writer Helene Stöcker, in particular her resolutions for the Bund für Mutterschutz of which she was the founder and to which Dohm belonged.