Women’s Letters to Women’s Movement Activists, c. 1870-1930

This project is part of the historiography of the first women's movement and focuses on German, Hungarian, English and French language areas and source material. The aim is to examine a specific part of the public, namely those women who felt addressed by the first women's movement. Who belonged to this group? How did these women see their situation? What topics and debates moved them? These questions are examined on the basis of an analysis of letters that "unknown" women wrote to prominent protagonists of the women's movement. The estate of Käthe Schirmacher (1865-1930), an activist in the radical women's movement and a nationalist agitator, contains numerous such letters and therefore forms the starting point for the source research. This project will investigate whether and which estates of other women's movement activists also contain such letters.

Using a transnational and comparative approach, the characteristics of this previously unexplored source corpus will be analysed, including by contrasting this specific letter collection with similar letter cultures and supportive practices within and outside the women's movement. Specifically, the aim is to examine these letters from women to women's movement activists, particularly in the context of the practice of "citizen letters" to political decision-makers, the practice of readers' letters in the women's movement press, and the institutions providing legal and professional advice to women during this period.