Helene Forster

Helene von Forster (born Helene Schmidmer, 27 August 1859 – 16 November 1923) was a German women's rights activist and author. She is considered the most important representative of the feminist movement's moderate "bourgeois" wing in Nuremberg.

Life Helene Schmidmer was born in Nuremberg, Kingdom of Bavaria, the eldest of her parents' four recorded children. Christian Schmidmer, her father, was a prominent member of the city's business community and the owner of a factory producing wires and cables. Her mother, born Nanette Lotz, was the daughter of a top civil servant from the nearby Duchy of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. She attended the "Portsche Institut zur Städtischen Höheren Mädchenschule" (as it was known at that time), a prestigious school in the city's centre, and then, as was not unusual for daughters of the well-to-do at that time, concluded her formal education at a boarding school in Lausanne. From an early age she was exceptionally interested in literature. whom she had met at literary events. and "Historie einer Urne" ("History of an Urn") in 1913, a "Festspiel" written to celebrate the 44th congress of the German Society of Anthropology, Ethnology and Early History.

Von Forster also deployed her literary talent and reputation in the service of the women's movement in which she engaged during or by 1893. That was when she teamed up with Bertha Kipfmüller and set up, formally on 16 November, the Nuremberg section of the Verein Frauenwohl ("Women's Welfare Association"), committed to improving conditions for women in the city and surrounding region.

In 1894 she also organised a Nuremberg group of the Allgemeiner Deutscher Frauenverein literally, "General German Women's Association", a national umbrella organisation that had been in place since the 1860s, but which was undergoing major expansion nationally during the 1890s.

In 1908 the old (originally Prussian) ban on women's participation in politics, which for some years had been interpreted with varying levels of vigour in different parts of Germany, finally disappeared. Helene von Forster joined the "Fortschrittliche Volkspartei" (FVP / "Progressive People's Party"), remaining a member after 1918 when, following a party merger, the FVP became part of the new "Deutsche Demokratische Partei" (DDP / "German Democratic Party"). During the 1914/18 war she ran her organisation's own Red Cross hospital in Nuremberg. She also set up a women's education institution in the city. With many of the men away at war women were now expected to take a more prominent role in organising matters at home, and like many, by the end of the war she was convinced that women should be entitled to vote in national and local elections on the same basis as men. In the event, the new constitution introduced during the 1918/19 revolution, delivered equal voting rights for women (along with a number of other innovations which generated more discussion at the time), and in 1919 von Forster became a DDP city councillor.

According to one source it was the level of energy that Helene von Forster applied to her role as a campaigning city councillor that hastened her death. She died in Nuremberg on 21 March 1923, predeceasing her husband and survived, also, by the couple's daughter. Published output (selection)