Verena Rodewald

Verena Rodewald (5 August 1866 – 4 December 1937) was a German women's rights campaigner and politician (DVP).

Biography Family provenance Henriette Marie Verena Rodewald was born (and slightly more than seventy-one years later died) in Bremen. She was born into one of the city's leading mercantile families, the third of her parents' six recorded children. Hermann Georg Rodewald (1814–1891), her father, like his father before him, was an internationally connected businessman. Her mother, born Marie Christine Verena Gildemeister (1840–1914), came from another of the city's leading families, and was a cousin of the journalist-politician (and four times mayor of Bremen), Otto Gildemeister (1823–1902). As she grew up the family lived at Kohlkökerstraße 10, close to the city centre. Verena's younger brother, Hermann Rodewald, later came to prominence as a merchant and senator. Her dissertation concerned the use of the "aside" as a device in German theatre. Rodewald was one of the first women anywhere in the German Empire to be permitted to receive a doctorate.

Politics The so-called November Revolution (1918/19) started in the Imperial Navy at Wilhelmshaven and Kiel, quickly spreading across to the cities and towns of the newly republican German state. In Bremen it found expression in a soldiers', sailors' and workers' soviet which exercised a form of democratic control over the city territories for 25 days during January and February 1919, by means of a "Bürgerausschuss" ("Citizens' Committee"). Within the "Bürgerausschuss" were represented not just the revolutionaries but also conservative and liberal citizens. These demanded a "military ending" to the political uncertainty on which the revolutionary elements had evidently embarked. Many observers were surprised by Verena Rodewald's election to the citizens' committee. One explanation is that men from Bremen's prosperous middle classes, fearful of losing their privileged position in the face of revolution, suddenly found it expedient to create an ad hoc alliance with politically noisy middle-class women, if only to give greater numerical weight to their own political demands. The irony is not lost on commentators that it was precisely these same middle-class men who had hitherto vehemently opposed women's participation in politics. Nevertheless, everything about Verena Rodewald provided her backers with reassurance that in the event of a full-blown German re-run of Russia's October Revolution, she would be strident and effective in opposing any tides of Bolshevism from the east. During her fourteen years as a member of the Bremen state parliament she engaged with commitment in matters touching on women's rights and equality of rights and entitlements, but these were not the only topics in which she took an interest.

In her 37 substantial contributions to Bürgerschaft debates her comments were mainly on problems of the health system, culture and the arts, and on education and training. Although she was not a member of the parliamentary education group, she focused strongly on professional training for women and girls, and spoke out against one-dimensional role-allocations deriving from educational precepts. She warned that girls whose only training and experience was focused on housekeeping would never advance beyond a very one-sided orientation. One specific campaign in which she involved herself was for the preservation of women-only bathing establishments along the river. She campaigned for the inclusion of women delegates on the government boards of schools and for the provision of state aid to theatres. She was a strong advocate of religious education in the city's schools and called for the authorities to look after prostitutes who had become infected with sexually transmitted diseases through their work. She contributed a number of articles to "Roland", a regional party newspaper, dealing with women's right to vote, in which she criticised the attitudes of all the political parties, analysing the position as it then stood, and not fearing to impute some of the responsibility for the situation she criticised to women themselves.

At the beginning of 1933, exploiting the intensifying political polarisation and the resulting parliamentary deadlock, the Hitler government took power, and lost no time in transforming Germany into a one- party dictatorship. The DVP was now the "wrong party". Many of her party colleagues joined the National Socialist Party to sustain their political careers. Verena Rodewald preferred to withdraw from politics completely, retreating to lead a private life during her final years.

Evaluation To a twenty-first century observer Verena Rodewald's views provide a singular blend of extreme conservatism and the strikingly progressive. She was a highly intelligent, well-educated and combative woman, at once confident in her views and capable of singular humility, stubborn in pursuit of her objectives. It was a combination which, perhaps, marked her out from the outset for a career in politics and women's rights activism.