Margarete Berent

Margarete Berent (on the right) amongst other founders of the Association of German Women Academics, 1926.

Margarete Berent (July 9, 1887, in Berlin – June 23, 1965, in New York), also known as Margareth Berent or Grete Berent in the United States, was the first woman lawyer in Prussia. She was the co-founder of the Association of Women Jurists and Association of German Women Academicians. As a Jew, she suffered from persecution during the Nazi Regime and fled via Switzerland, Italy, and Chile to the United States, where she finally arrived in 1940. After studying American law, she opened her second own law firm, now in the US, in 1951.

Biography Early life and education Margarete Berent was the daughter of Max and Natalie Berent (née Gabriel), a family with bourgeois background. Culture and education were of great value to the family; besides going to school, she had private language and music lessons. After graduating, she studied to be a teacher from 1903 to 1906, one of the few jobs considered suitable for women at that time. Afterwards she started to prepared to take the Abitur enabling her to study at a German university, while working as a teacher at her former school in Berlin at the same time. She visited courses offered by Helene Lange, a contemporary feminist. It was still not common for women to pass the Abitur and studying at universities in Germany in the 1890s.

In October 1910, she passed the exam and was allowed to study law at the University of Berlin. Only about 0.2% of law students were women at her faculty. Although women were admitted to study and obtain a doctorate in Prussia, which Berlin was then part of, they were not allowed to pass the bar and work as lawyers. Hence, Margarete Berent moved to Erlangen in Bavaria in 1912, and finished her studies in 1913 with a study on the "Community of Goods for Married Partners" ("Die Zugewinngemeinschaft der Ehegatten"), which was implemented in the reformation of German inheritance laws in 1958. Margarete Berent was especially involved in changing discriminatory laws about women and was an active member of several associations such as the Federation of German Women Associations (Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine), the League of German Female Lawyers (Deutscher Juristinnenbund), and in the International Organization of Women Lawyers. She belonged to the League of German Academic Women (Deutscher Akademikerinnen-Bund) and a professional club for women, the Soroptimist Club. She founded her own law firm as the first female lawyer in Berlin in 1925. Although there were also doubts and discrimination against women in law, her firm became a success quite quickly.

Years under the Nazi regime On the 7 April 1933, the Nazi government released a new law that prohibited Jewish lawyers to work as such (Gesetz über die Zulassung zur Rechtsanwaltschaft). Although having engaged in voluntary work and for benevolent causes already before, Margarete Berent now had to shift her professional activities a lot since she lost her law firm. Before 1933, she had mostly engaged in feminist, secular organizations - with the beginning of Nazi Gleichschaltung politics in 1933, many of those started to dissolve in order to avoid being controlled. With her keen interest in women's rights and legal expertise, she was of great importance for Jewish organizations. So in the summer 1933, she first started to work for the Central Committee for Jewish Economic Aid (Zentralstelle für jüdische Wirtschaftshilfe) in Berlin and later, in October 1933, she became the head of the Jewish Welfare association in the Rhine Province. Until 1938, she worked both in Cologne and in Berlin. She was especially responsible for coordination of assistance to small Jewish communities. In 1939, when the new Reich Association of Jews in Germany was founded as a means of controlling and discriminating against Jews (and those defined as such by the Nazi government), Margarete Berent became the head of the Rhine region in this new association, too.