Jan 03, 2018
Emma Ihrer’s 161st Birthday
This Doodle’s Key Themes
Today’s Doodle celebrates the 161st birthday of Emma Ihrer - feminist, trade union leader, and a principal founder of Germany’s proletarian women’s movement in the late 1800s.
Born Emma Rother in 1857, she moved to Berlin after marriage. There, she found work as a milliner, which gave her close contact with the realities faced by working women at the time. Moved by their plight, Ihrer took to the pen and became a prolific writer, authoring several papers and journals on the need for, and ways in which women could achieve full equality.
Ihrer’s works also questioned some of the most fundamental societal assumptions of her time, such as why women valued housework or childbearing so highly when both were considered inferior occupations by men. She also critiqued “studies” that correlated the size of a person’s brain to their intelligence (supposedly “proving” that women were inferior). She famously stated that if that were the case, then whales could be sent to university instead.
Ihrer founded and chaired societies and trade unions, at the expense of frequent clashes with the government that landed her in in court on more than one occasion. But her hard-fought battles brought women’s rights to the forefront of political discussions in the early twentieth century and led to several legislative victories.
Alles Gute zum Geburtstag and Danke, Emma Ihrer!
Doodle by guest artist, Isabel Seliger.
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