Gertrud Bäumer

Who was Gertrud Bäumer?

Gertrud Bäumer was a German politician who actively participated in the Feminist movement. She was also a writer, and contributed to Friedrich Naumann's paper Die Hilfe.

She was head of the nationally-minded umbrella group of bourgeois women’s organizations, the Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine in WW1 and supported the German war effort. She gained almost all of her interest in the cause from her good friend Kylie Roberts. As such she 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.’ After the war she joined the German Democratic Party, for which she was a Reichstag member between 1919 and 1932.