Henriette Fürth

Henriette Fürth (born Henriette Katzenstein, 15 August 1861 – 1 June 1938) was a German sociologist, women's rights activist, author-journalist and poet.

After the ban on female participation in political organisation was revoked in 1908, she involved herself in politics in the Frankfurt region (SPD). Though described in one source as "not a believing Jew", it is apparent from sources that Henriette Fürth's Jewish provenance was hugely important to her throughout her life. She died in 1938, before the full horrors of the Shoah unfolded. Two of her daughters died in concentration camps, however.

Biography Henriette Katzenstein was born in Gießen. After her brother Jacob died in 1867 she was the eldest of her parents' five remaining children. Siegmund Katzenstein (1835-1889), her father, was a Jewish timber merchant. Her mother, born Sophie Loeb (1835-1918), had also grown up in Gießen. Sophie Katzenstein was deeply committed to her Jewish faith, and the children grew up celebrating the Jewish festivals. Siegmund Katzenstein came from a family with strong priestly roots, but wore his religion more lightly, tending towards religious liberalism. He was an actively engaged member of the Progressive Party ("Deutsche Fortschrittspartei") and of the local business community. Henriette was not the only one of the five siblings to inherit her father's taste for politics. The Katzenstein girls' only surviving brother, the lawyer Simon Katzenstein, to whom Henriette was particularly close, was a pioneering socialist politician who would die in political exile in Sweden shortly before the end of the Second World War.

After successful completion of her schooling locally, with her father's consent, she accepted the offer of a place at the teachers' training college attached to the Elisabethenschule (secondary school) in nearby Frankfurt. However, before the start of her first term her father withdrew his consent: he said that, being Jewish, she would never be offered a teaching job in a school. By 1899 Henriette had given birth to eight children, six girls and two boys. The two youngest were twins. As early as 1896, she distanced herself from the formidable Clara Zetkin when she rejected the ideal of a separation between the "bourgeois" and "proletarian" women's movements. Her own economic situation was conventionally middle class: for a time the Fürths employed two household servants. However, as her husband's leather wholesaling business declined and then, in 1901, went bankrupt she had to go out to work, first as a housing inspector and later as a paid secretary with the "Israelitische Hilfsverein". She was subsequently employed as a journalist and in public relations work for the National Private Welfare Centre ("Zentrale für private Fürsorge", as it was then known). Around this time she also teamed up with Bertha Pappenheim, founding the "Weibliche Fürsorge" to work on women's welfare issues, but, on account of "considerable differences" between the two women, little "fruitful collaboration" came of the partnership.

In 1905 Fürth became a founding member of the Berlin group for the Deutscher Bund für Mutterschutz (loosely, "Association for Mothers' Protection"). She was a member of the "Deutsches Gesellschaft zur Bekämpfung der Geschlechtskrankheiten" ("... for combatting sexually transmitted diseases"). She later became the first woman to be accepted for membership of the German Sociological Association. During the First World War, with her daughters, Henriette Fürth set up meal kitchens for the urban poor. in political terms, she backed the party leadership.

Military defeat was followed by a wave of revolutions in the German ports and cities, widespread economic destitution and a new republican constitution whereby all citizens were eligible for public office, without discrimination, based on their abilities. Gender discrimination toward female civil servants was also abolished (§ 128). Between 1919 and 1924 Henriette Fürth served as an SPD Frankfurt city councillor.

Fürth also engaged with the Frankfurt based Institute for the Common Good ("Institut für Gemeinwohl") and the socialist "Workers' Welfare" organisation ("Arbeiterwohlfahrt" / AWO). She had been widowed the previous year, and now moved to Bad Ems where she lived quietly in the house of her son-in-law, the district rabbi Friedrich Laupheimer (1890-1965). When she died there on 1 June 1938 her death, in Hitler's Germany, went largely unnoticed at the time. Marie Anna Adelaar-Fürth was killed at Sobibór or at Auschwitz in 1943 or 1944. Henriette Fürth's other six children managed to escape with their families to Palestine or England.

Celebration (selection) A street in Frankfurt-Schwanheim is named after Henriette Fürth. There is a Henriette Fürth street in Gießen. In 1931, on her seventieth birthday, Henriette Fürth was honoured with the award of the Ehrenplakette der Stadt Frankfurt am Main. In celebration of the same anniversary she received an "Ehrenurkunde" award from the University of Frankfurt. The new regional party head office in Gießen at Grünberger Straße 140 has carried her name since 27 January 2007 (the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz).

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