Herta Gotthelf

Herta Gotthelf (6 June 1902 – 13 May 1963) was a German journalist and politician (SPD).

Before 1933 she was editor in chief of the SPD women's magazine Genossin. After 1945 she worked in the Schumacher Office, set up in 1945 by Kurt Ernst Carl Schumacher to recreate the party. Within the party executive, between 1946 and 1956, she can be described as "the main voice of SPD women's policies ... as the women's officer (Frauenbeauftragte)".

Life Herta Gotthelf was born on June 6, 1902. She grew up in Wrocław, then called Breslau. Recalling her childhood, she later wrote that politics were never discussed in her parents' house, but she herself was already politically engaged even at school. In 1918 she joined the Social Democratic Party ("Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands" / SPD). She embarked on training to work in a bank which she pursued as a career, first in Breslau and later in Cologne. However, she increasingly placed her political interests ahead of her career, and by 1924 she found herself unemployed. She spent a year attending lectures at the Labour Academy in Frankfurt as a "free listener", while supporting herself by working in a perfume factory. Lectures she attended included by the labour lawyer Hugo Sinzheimer and his then assistant, Ernst Fraenkel. In 1925, after attending lectures for a year at the Labour Academy, Gotthelf volunteered to work for the SPD party executive, which was embarking on a recruitment drive in a search for party officers and journalists of the future. This involved moving to Berlin. She initially supported herself with cleaning work and child care work, and undertook various other jobs, including providing German language lessons, writing articles, and working as the secretary of her fellow exile, the novelist Ernst Toller. She also co-founded with other exiles from Germany, Czechoslovakia, the Netherlands, Poland, Italy, France and Norway, a small London based "Women's International" group, which she subsequently described as a piece of "self-evidently socialist solidarity in the middle of bomb-destroyed London", an enterprise on which she would later look back with great satisfaction. On 9–11 May 1946, at the invitation of Dr. Schumacher, she attended, as a "foreign guest", the first postwar SPD party conference held in Hanover. In July 1946, Gotthelf took charge of the party's national women's secretariat. The next year, at the 1947 party conference held in Nuremberg, she was also given charge over the party's women's newspaper, relaunched in 1947 with the old title "Genossin" ([female] "Comrade" ), and rebranded in 1950 as "Equality. Publication of the working woman" ("Gleichheit. Organ der arbeitenden Frau").

Gotthelf was instrumental in helping Elisabeth Selbert be named one of the four female delegates to the Parlamentarischer Rat, thereby indirectly helping to ensure that equal rights for women and men became anchored in the new German constitution (Art. 3 -- Equality before the Law -- in the Basic Law). Although there was considerable resistance to this idea, Gotthelf and Selbert organised nationwide protests in support of this article.

At the national level, the SPD remained a party of opposition throughout the 1950s and most of the 1960s. Their particularly disappointing 1957 election result triggered widespread discussion within the party as to its causes, which led to the 1959 Godesberg Program at which the party, for the first time, unambiguously defined its objective as the reform of capitalism rather than the replacement of capitalism. The likely direction of travel was already apparent at the 1958 party conference, held in Stuttgart, at which Herta Gotthelf was one of two members not re-elected to the party executive. The other was Fritz Heine. Gotthelf nevertheless continued as editor of "Gleichheit" and a member of the party's women's committee for the rest of her life.