Louise Otto-Peters
Louise Otto-Peters was a significant figure in 19th-century Germany, recognized as a key pioneer of the German feminist movement. Born into a middle-class Saxon family, her early life was marked by personal tragedy, losing multiple family members to tuberculosis. This led her to embrace self-sufficiency through writing rather than marriage, moving to Leipzig in 1846, where she became a prominent women's rights activist. Otto-Peters founded the newspaper Frauenzeitung, which uniquely championed women's rights from 1849 to 1853, despite facing governmental opposition that ultimately led to her exile from the newspaper industry. She married August Peters in 1858, and after his death in 1864, she intensified her advocacy, establishing the Allgemeiner deutscher Frauenverein, Germany's first organization dedicated to women's rights. Under her leadership, initiatives like the Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine emerged, focusing on enhancing educational and career opportunities for middle-class women. Otto-Peters also authored vital texts, including Das Recht der Frauen auf Erwerb, and contributed to literature to support her activism. Her life and work continue to influence the discourse on women's rights in Germany and beyond.
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Louise Otto-Peters
- Born: March 26, 1819
- Birthplace: Meissen, Germany
- Died: March 13, 1895
- Place of death: Leipzig, Germany
Biography
Louise Otto-Peters was born into a middle-class Saxon family and received a solid education, which included instruction in French, German, and Latin. Her first twenty years were not uniformly happy ones, since tuberculosis killed many of her family members; her sister died when Louise was twelve years old, her mother when Louise was sixteen, and her father when she was seventeen. Five years later, in 1841, even Louise’s fiancé succumbed to the disease. Louise subsequently decided to forgo marriage for self-sufficiency, supporting herself through writing, and in 1846 she moved to Leipzig, where she earned a reputation for her revolutionary position as a women’s rights activist.
Otto-Peters is considered the progenitor of German feminism, and she was one of several women to found newspapers advocating for women’s rights around the 1850’s. Otto’s paper, Frauenzeitung, however, enjoyed a longer run than the other papers, continuing from 1849 to 1853, and Otto continued to publish the progressive paper even in the face of frequent threats and house searches. Under governmental pressure, Otto moved to Gera in 1851 and continued with her newspaper until officials drove her out of business, even prohibiting women from the newspaper business by law.
Louise had met August Peters in 1849, and she married him in 1858; the couple then worked together on a second newspaper effort, Mitteldeutsche Folkszeitung (central German people’s newspaper). After Peters died in 1864, Louise Otto- Peters remained single for her last thirty years.
She recommitted herself with even more vigor to women’s rights in 1865, when she founded the first German organization dedicated to the cause, the Allgemeiner deutscher Frauenverein (general German women’s organization). She also created the organization’s associated journal Neue Bahnen (new paths). The Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine (alliance of German women’s organizations) followed in 1894, and both groups focused on the situations of middle-class women, working to expand the opportunities in education and career for them.
Otto-Peters published a primary text for the movement, Das Recht der Frauen auf Erwerb (the right of women to employment), in 1866 and began writing her autobiographical work Frauenleben im deutschen Reich: Erinnerungen aus der Vergangenheit mit Hinweis auf Gegenwart und Zukunft (women’s lives in the German empire: memories from the past with references to the present and future), which was published ten years later. The advocate also wrote numerous novels, short stories, and poetry volumes, but it seems likely that she wrote in these genres chiefly to bring in income that would allow her to pursue her other work