Lydia von Wolfring

Lydia von Wolfring (born 27 March 1867: died after 1920) was a Polish-born social reformer. She lived in Vienna for slightly more than ten years, between 1899 and 1910. During that time she emerged as a highly effective pioneering advocate for child protection.

Life and works Lydia von Wolfring was born in Warsaw, the elder of her father's two daughters by approximately two years. Warsaw at this time was an ethnically diverse city of some 250,000 inhabitants, and the administrative capital of "Congress Poland", a semi-detached state of the Russian Empire. Of Lydia's mother nothing is known. Her father, Dr. Emil von Wolfring (1832–1906) was a professor of Ophthalmology at the University of Warsaw. His name suggests that the family may have been members of the city's German-speaking minority, but there are references to Lydia having spoken German, Russian, Polish, English and Italian. (She wrote articles in French, which many in Europe still regarded as the universal language at this time.) Vienna citizen registration records for 1910/11 (by which time her father had died) show her occupations as "Gutsbesitzerin" ("property owner") and "Schriftstellerin" ("author"): she described herself as a "Kosmopolitin auf dem Gebiete der Philanthropie" ("cosmopolitan [woman] in the philanthropy sector"). There are indications that her health was never robust. Her first contact with Vienna came about through Michael Hainisch whom she met and got to know while both of them were undergoing a hydrotherapy cure at Kaltenleutgeben. Michael Hainisch, who later embarked on a successful career in national politics, was a son to the leading women's rights activist Marianne Hainisch. Much later, in a memoire, he would recall Lydia von Wolfring as "a girl both beautiful and brilliant". Ferriani was an Italian prosecuting magistrate based in Como. He had been troubled by cases he had encountered. Von Wolfring reacted by getting in touch with Ferriani, whom she visited in March 1899. Under his guidance she studied the relevant literature and undertook an eight-month research tour of northern Italy, Switzerland and France. She visited prisons, asylums, so-called correctional institutions and orphanages. She spoke to parents who had been convicted of child abuse. She went on to make a detailed study of child protection associations which had already been set up in the United States and in England in order to benchmark these for the future creation of a child protection office in Vienna integrated into the justice system. This auto-didactic approach to study and the acquisition of knowledge more broadly was not untypical among well informed young women impatient to learn more, at a time when university attendance was, in almost every case, accessible only to males. Today it must nevertheless be recognised that certain actions within the family which today would be widely seen in western Europe as abusive were still completely normal during the final decades of the nineteenth century. Parents had a "right to punish" bad behaviour by their own children: physical punishment was most frequently carried out by fathers.

On 7 November 1899 Lydia arrived in Vienna armed with an impressive collection of facts and statistics. Sophie had met her husband while she was studying at the university medical faculty. Lydia had already, in June 1899, undertaken a culture-oriented trip to Paris during the course of which she had met the pioneering Vienna feminist Marianne Hainisch. From reports provided by Hainisch it is clear that the lengthy conversations that they held that summer, Lydia von Wolfring had already formulated a clear and detailed action programme to be implemented once she moved to Vienna. She arrived with the statutes and organisation plan for an Austrian child protection association fully worked through. Implicitly, she seems to have taken the view that some of those calling the shots at the "Kinder-Schutz- und Rettungsgesellschaft" were excessively accepting about the status quo, and she began to gather friends around her in order to set up a new organisation. The "Pestalozziverein zur Förderung des Kinderschutzes und der Jugendfürsorge in Wien" ("Vienna Pestalozzi Association for the promotion of child protection and youth welfare") was launched in 1903. Residential care for abused and neglected children again became the priority, but expansion seems to have been driven by need rather than by criteria based on affordability: finding the funds for the organisation's activities was a constant struggle. For as long as her health held out, von Wolfring was tireless in her fundraising efforts, while also pursuing her researches into the causes of social alienation affecting children. In August 1907 she organised and led the first Austrian Child Protection Congress, which was held in Vienna.

Lydia von Wolfring's contributions did not go unnoticed abroad. Particular joy accompanied her acceptance of an honorary membership of the respected New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. It was an honour accorded to very few.