(Johanna Friederike Louise Dittmar)
born on September 7, 1807 in Darmstadt
died on July 11, 1884 in Darmstadt
German writer and politician
140th anniversary of death on July 11, 2024
Biography
Johanna Friederike Louise Dittmar was one of the most radical women of the 1848/49 revolution. Her 200th birthday was celebrated in Darmstadt with commemorative festivities on September 7, 2007. It was the extraordinary writings she published between 1845 and 1849 that drew the attention of her contemporaries, and she was widely regarded as a courageous champion of democracy and of women's rights even before the revolution.
Relatively few details are known about her life, especially after 1850. No photograph of her and no diary entries exist; only a few letters have survived.
Louise Dittmar grew up with a sister and eight brothers in a well-to-do family of civil servants. As was common in bourgeoisie families at the time, her brothers attended grammar school and then university, whereas Louise was put to work in the household after only a brief time at school. She later referred to the housework she so disliked as the “imprisonment of women.” She lived with her parents until they died, after which she moved in with her unmarried brothers. She remained unmarried; living alone, traveling or even just going to a café on her own was hardly possible for women in her social class.
Despite these disadvantages, Louise Dittmar read widely and was particularly drawn to academic works. Starting in 1845, she pursued a career as a political writer and — in part to earn a living — she published on political and philosophical topics until 1849. From today's perspective, she was a feminist radical democrat. As the first woman to give a public lecture on May 11, 1847 in Mannheim, she spoke on Vier Zeitfragen (Four Timely Questions) and courageously called upon the women present to participate in the urgently needed social reforms and to not leave the field of politics entirely to men. It was clear to her that only women could win rights for themselves, and she continued to advocate for this during the revolutionary years of 1848/49. She believed that democracy and freedom for women were interdependent.
Her reputation as an early feminist is above all based on her treatise Das Wesen der Ehe (The Essence of Marriage) that was published in early 1849 in the journal Soziale Reform that she edited. In this critique of the bourgeois marriage practices of the time and the legal institution of marriage in general, she argued that it was not only life in the public sphere that needed to be democratized, but also the relationship between the sexes in marriage and within the family. She therefore also called for a reform of marriage law that would repeal the prerogatives of the husband. Her demands went far beyond those of the German women's movement after 1865, in which she no longer played a part.
(Text from 2008; translated with DeepL.com; edited by Ramona Fararo, 2024)
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