Gertrud Bäumer

From 1898, Bäumer lived and worked together with the German feminist and politician Helene Lange.

Gertrud Bäumer was born in Hagen-Hohenlimburg, Westphalia, to a Reformed Protestant family and moved to Cammin, a former episcopal town in Pomerania at the age of three. Her father, Eduard Bäumer, served as a Protestant pastor. Her great-grandfather, Wilhelm Bäumer, was also a pastor in Bodelschwingh near Dortmund where he served as a church politician. He supported the continuation of the presbyterian-synodal constitution established in the Prussian province of Westphalia in 1815, and later in other parts of Prussia. After her father’s early death, ten year old Gertrud moved with her mother and her two siblings to her grandmother's house in Halle (saale). Her mother, Anna Bäumer, raised Gertrud and her siblings while encouraging her education and intellectual development despite limited financial means. Bäumer wrote about the emptiness in her mother's life and her economic dependency on relatives in her memoirs as a sad, but educational experience. Concerning the emptiness at her grandmother's house, she writes: "Was this what women's life was like—this spiral around one's own axis?" According to her own account, her desire to pursue a career was determined early on: "I wanted to—and for economic reasons had to—become a teacher." She attended the Higher Girls' School in Halle and subsequently completed her teacher training at the Magdeburg Teachers' Seminary. She taught at elementary schools in Halberstadt, Kamen, and Magdenburg starting in 1894. Soon after, she became involved with the General German Women Teacher's Association (ADLV, German: Allgemeiner Deutscher Lehrerinnenverein), whose head, Helene Lange, left a significant mark on her both professionally and personally. Gertrud Bäumer studied in Berlin at the Humboldt University of Berlin and received her Ph.D. in 1905. This was an impressive accomplishment for women at that time in Imperial Germany. There she studied philology, German studies, theology and economics. Adolf von Harnack, a church historian, and Wilhelm Dilthey, a philosopher, were two influential academic lecturers while she studied at the Humboldt University of Berlin. Her dissertation was on Goethe's Satyron. Bäumer edited the Handbuch der Frauenbewegung [Handbook of the Women's Movement] from 1901–1906. From 1916–1920 she was in charge of the Social Pedagogical Institute with Marie Braun. Bäumer was a member in close contact with the board of the national umbrella group of German women's organizations, the Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine (Federation of German Women's Associations) and during World War I she helped found the Nationaler Frauendienst (NFD, National Women's Service). As such, Bäumer was aggressively opposed to the feminist-pacifist women supporting internationalism in Germany and elsewhere; stating: "We mustn't ever forget that it is not just military training that is being put to the test out there in the trenches and at sea, at the gun emplacements and in the air, but also German mothers' upbringing and German wives' care."

Bäumer was associated with difference feminism, a school of thought emphasizing distinct contributions of women to society, often described in contemporary sources as a "feminine principle" aimed at the humanization of life. Politically, she aligned with the social liberal ideas of Friedrich Naumann and other members of the German liberal movement, with whom she began collaborating in 1906. From 1912, she oversaw the cultural section of Naumann’s journal Die Hilfe and, following his death in 1919, briefly served as its sole editor. Sources also describe her as maintaining both a professional and personal friendship with Naumann. After the 1908 amendment to Prussian association law allowed women to join political parties, Bäumer and Helene Lange became members of the Free-minded Association, which later evolved into the Progressive People’s Party (FVP). In 1919, Bäumer helped to found the German Democratic Party (DDP and served as its deputy chairwoman between 1920 and 1930. In 1919, she was elected to the Weimar National Assembly and held a seat in the Reichstag from 1920 to 1932, serving from 1930 to 1932 as a member of the German State Party (DStP), of which the German Democratic Party had recently merged. Together with her fellow party member Theodor Heuss, she championed the 1926 Law for the Protection of Youth from Obscene and Immoral Publications. This met with considerable criticism from artists, writers, and the left-liberal press, who feared censorship. Writers such as Kurt Tucholsky mocked Bäumer referring to her as, "Old Bäumerhand, the terror of democracy" mocking her supposed defence of democracy as hypocritical for support the perceived censorship of arts and media. She did not run for re-election to the Reichstag in 1932 due to this backlash and waning relevancy of the German State Party after its declining voter base, along with failure to secure alliances with the SPD, Centre, and DVP. Furthermore, in 1920 she was appointed Ministerial Councilor in the Reich Ministry of the Interior, where she was responsible for the departments of youth welfare and education. From 1926 to 1933, she also served as the Reich government's delegate to the League of Nations in Geneva. Before 1933, Gertrud Bäumer used Die Hilfe to comment on the rise of National Socialism, which she viewed with deep skepticism. When rumors of a Beer Hall Putsch spread in 1923, she condemned events in Bavaria as “a ruthless struggle for power…for whom the Reich is only worth something insofar as they rule it,” fueled by a gullible bourgeoisie. After the failed Putsch, she lamented that nationalist agitation had even weakened republican parties, noting that Germany’s economic elites were “at best, republicans in principle.” As Nazi popularity grew, Bäumer warned that their victory “would be the collapse of Germany,” criticizing Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf as a “surprisingly confused book.” She acknowledged that National Socialism attracted supporters not only through manipulation but by addressing real ideological and psychological needs, yet she condemned its antisemitism, demagogy, and falsification of facts as she described it "National Socialism, whatever valuable aspects it may have, is more destructive than constructive as long as its leaders act irresponsibly." She hoped instead for a renewed democratic center grounded in “civil liberties in the spirit of the Reich Constitution.”

In Berlin, Gertrud Bäumer became closer to Helene Lange, the head of the teacher's movement. Bäumer learnt from an acquaintance shortly after her arrival in 1898 that Lange's work was being progressively impeded by an eye problem, and she volunteered her skills as an assistant. Largely due to Lange's efforts, Bäumer contributed to the women's movement through her work with the BDF (Association of German Women's Organizations) and the monthly journal Die Frau (The Woman) which aimed to appeal to the broad mass of middle-class women. She replaced Marie Stritt as chairperson in 1910, serving until 1919 and being the association's unchallenged most powerful figure even after that.