독일 여성운동의 시원, 루이제 오토

Abstract

Louise Otto-Peters was widely acknowledged as the mother of the German women’s movement. She was the editor of the “FrauenZeitung”, the first political women’s newspaper in Germany, which was founded in the aftermath of the democratic revolution of 1848/49 and the founder of “Allgemeiner Deutscher Frauenverein”, the first “German” women’s rights association. Germany in the second half of the 19th century was pretty much a conservative society. Hence, her campaigns were under serious surveillance. The government of the federal state of Germany, Sachsen which was her home state, issued “Lex Otto” which prohibited women from being the editors of newspaperssince it was concerned that Louise OttoPeters would mobilize the women against the government. As a result, the “Frauen-Zeitung” was relatively short-lived: it had been published only between 1849~1951. She restarted her campaigns by organizing the “Allgemeiner Deutscher Frauenverein” in 1865. Her association did not turn into true suffrage, but focused on female education and increasing job opportunities for women. Louise OttoPeters grounded her feminist cause on the women’s difference from males, in other words, the maternity. Her relational approach, rather than individualist one, was widely viewed or even criticized as the symbol of the passivity of German feminism. However, it was not uncommon that feminists grounded their campaigns not only on the individual’s rights and personal autonomy but also equality-in-difference, and many sought entitlement as citizens in terms of sexual difference. In that sense, Otto’s feminism cannot be dismissed simply as a deviation from the “right” course of feminism. Although many feminist activists of the first generation firmly believed that their suffrage should be the first step or gateway to the achievement of the genuine feminist goals, it turned out that there could not be one decisive solution on the way to achieving gender equality. Against this backdrop, we can say that Louise Otto’s relational and gradualist approach to the gender equality mattered just as much.