Women’s Centres Frankfurt am Main

Women demonstrating in Frankfurt city centre against Paragraph 218, 16 March 1974 (placard „Das Weib sei…“)
Institut für Stadtgeschichte Frankfurt am Main (ISG FFM), S7Wer Nr. 260: 1, Inge Werth

The history of the women’s centres in Frankfurt am Main began with the founding of the Frauenzentrum Eckenheimer Landstraße 72 (Women’s Centre Eckenheimer Landstraße 72) in 1973 by initiatives of the new women’s movement in Frankfurt. It was the second in Germany and, in keeping with the political practice of the new women’s movement, autonomous, grassroots-democratic and independent of state funding. In the course of the 1970s further centres emerged, often with a somewhat more specific focus, such as the Lesbenzentrum (Lesbian Centre) or the Frauenkulturhaus Frankfurt am Main (Women’s Cultural Centre Frankfurt am Main) at Oppenheimer Landstraße 40.

The centres served as points of contact for interested women, who came together in working and consciousness-raising groups to exchange views on subjects that had until then been taboo – such as sexuality, pregnancy and childbirth, violence within the family and wages for housework – and who organised public actions.¹

From the end of the 1970s onwards, these broadly based women’s centres were in many cases superseded by more thematically specialised and professionalised projects and organisations, and closed one after another.

History

Founding history

From 1973 to 1979 the first Frankfurt women’s centre occupied the ground floor of the building at Eckenheimer Landstraße 72 in Frankfurt am Main.
Foto: Karin Kraus

In Frankfurt am Main it was above all activists of the Second Frankfurter Weiberrat (Frankfurt Women’s Council) and of the Bornheim women’s group Revolutionärer Kampf (RK, Revolutionary Struggle) who were involved in broadening the range of topics and in establishing emancipatory content in spaces and fields of action of their own. The Frauenzentrum Eckenheimer Landstraße 72 opened in September 1973 as the second in Germany; the first nationwide had been the Frauenzentrum Westberlin, which had existed since March 1973.²³⁴

The idea of founding a women’s centre in Frankfurt am Main arose in the winter of 1972/73 out of the work done in the context of Aktion 218 („Wir haben abgetrieben!“ – “We have had abortions!”), a campaign against the abortion ban then in force that had been running nationwide since 1970. Following the model of US American organisations, the Frankfurt women’s centre was intended to break through the social isolation of women in their private surroundings close to where they lived and to serve as a meeting point and as a space for information and discussion, offering women a room of their own in which to try out new things and to realise feminist aspirations.⁵⁶ The women’s centre supported the founding of new women’s consciousness-raising and action groups and the networking of those that already existed. The programme included legal advice on questions of divorce, counselling on pregnancy, contraception and abortion, working and action groups (among them the group „Gewalt gegen Frauen“ – “Violence against Women”), women’s literature circles, consciousness-raising groups and self-examination groups.⁷⁸⁹¹⁰¹¹

Political actions and events of the first Frankfurt women’s centre

Women demonstrating in Frankfurt city centre against Paragraph 218, 16 March 1974 (demonstration procession with brooms)
Institut für Stadtgeschichte Frankfurt am Main (ISG FFM), S7Wer Nr. 260: 4, Inge Werth

The political actions included the organisation of the first international women’s congress on 5 December 1974 in the student house of the Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, with around 500 women visitors from 18 nations.¹²

Important actions and demonstrations took place with regard to the abolition of Paragraph 218. After the Federal Constitutional Court ruled by majority decision on 25 February 1975 that the time-limit solution was incompatible with the Basic Law, protests by women’s groups took place across the country. In response, from June 1975 the Frankfurt women’s centre organised publicly announced trips to Holland to abortion clinics that were legal there. The bus trips were carried out on Saturdays for about a year and were each accompanied by two women from the women’s centre.¹³¹⁴¹⁵¹⁶

Information sheet on the trip to Holland organised by the Frauenzentrum Eckenheimer Landstraße, 1975
Foto: Karin Kraus

On 1 July 1975 the Frankfurt public prosecutor’s office and the police homicide squad carried out a raid on the Frauenzentrum Eckenheimer Landstraße and confiscated the card index of doctors and statistical material. On the grounds that addresses for abortions were being passed on, charges were brought against the women’s centre for „criminal association“ and „aiding and abetting abortion“.¹⁷¹⁸ Files on the women’s centre were also seized at the offices of its legal representative, the lawyer Inge Hornischer.¹⁹ An information stand run by the women’s centre in another district, at which leaflets were used to publicise a demonstration trip to Holland, was cleared by police on 10 July 1975. The trip was intended to express solidarity with the women who were travelling to Dutch clinics for abortions.²⁰ On 12 July 1975 the Frankfurt women’s centre organised a protest trip to an abortion clinic in The Hague.²¹

On the initiative of the Frankfurt women’s centre, the Frauenjahrbuch I was published in December 1975 by Verlag Roter Stern, Frankfurt am Main.

In August 1976 the Frauenzentrum, the Lesbenzentrum and the Frauentreffpunkt Niedenau in Frankfurt am Main organised a night-time demonstration Gewalt gegen Lesben (Violence against Lesbians). The occasion for the action was the trial of two homosexual women for causing bodily harm resulting in death. At night the couple had defended themselves against the repeated advances of a man. In their leaflet the initiators of the demonstration demanded the women’s acquittal: „All men who threaten women in any way are criminal. We do not recognise any male justice whose law is injustice against women.“²²

In October 1978 the Sekretärinnen-Gruppe (secretaries’ group) of the Frauenzentrum Eckenheimer Landstraße held the Büroarbeiterinnen-Kongress (congress of women office workers) with around 100 participants from Germany, Austria and France on the subject of resistance within the office and alternatives to it.²³

Further foundings of women’s centres in Frankfurt am Main

The first Frankfurt women’s centre became a great success, because „numerous women and entire groups took part and project and self-help groups were founded.“²⁴ Under the influence of the women’s centre, further initiatives gradually came into being: in 1976 the Lesbenzentrum at Kiesstraße 16, the Frauenbuchladen (women’s bookshop) at Kiesstraße 27, a women’s meeting point with a café in a squatted house at Niedenau 51 and a Frauenkulturhaus at Oppenheimer Landstraße 40; in 1977 a further women’s centre (Bockenheim) at Landgrafenstraße 13 as well as a women’s café at Neuhofstraße 39.²⁵²⁶

Closure of the women’s centres and the emergence of new projects

From 1978/79 onwards the women’s centres in Frankfurt am Main, as in other places, moved into a new phase of the movement: women’s projects became more specialised and professionalised within and through the founding of new feminist organisations such as women’s health centres, women’s emergency helplines, girls’ work, bookshops and publishing houses, cultural and educational institutions and business start-ups.²⁷

In Frankfurt, the association Frauen helfen Frauen Frankfurt e. V. (Women Help Women Frankfurt) opened the autonomous women’s shelter for abused women and their children in 1978; the Feministisches Frauengesundheitszentrum (Feminist Women’s Health Centre, FFGZ) and Germany’s first Mädchentreff Gallus (Gallus girls’ meeting point) were founded. The Frankfurter Frauenblatt appeared with its pilot issue. In 1979, as part of a model project of the federal government, the Mutter-Kind-Beratungszentrum (mother and child counselling centre) began its work supporting women who had emigrated (renamed in 1984 Infrau Interkulturelle Frauen- und Mädchenarbeit e. V.). The Verein zur beruflichen Förderung von Frauen e. V. (Association for the Professional Advancement of Women) set up a counselling service for career planning, returning to work and professional reorientation for women.²⁸

Founders and activists of the Frankfurt women’s centres

Co-founders included Sibylla Flügge²⁹(Second Frankfurter Weiberrat, Frauenzentrum Eckenheimer Landstraße), Barbara Rendtorff and Dörthe Jung (Frauenzentrum Bockenheim, Frankfurter Frauenschule), Jutta Ebeling (Frauenzentrum Bockenheim)³⁰ and Lu Haas (1944–1991) (Frauenzentrum Bockenheim, jumpp – Frauenbetriebe e. V.).

Film and photographic documents of the 1970s on the new women’s movement in Frankfurt am Main

Film document Das hat mich sehr verändert , D 1976, directed and written by Edith Schmidt-Marcello with Beate Scheunemann, Ulrike Krasberg, Gisela Zehm and others, production WDR, colour copy, DVD from 16 mm, 47 min, German original version, Edith Schmidt-Marcello. The film documents the work of the Frauenzentrum Eckenheimer Landstraße in Frankfurt am Main.³¹
Die Wahrheit über Vera Eschkova (1970/1980/2002). Documentary film about the Frankfurt women’s movement (Margit Eschenbach, Uschi Madeisky, Ulla Schickling).³²
Abisag Tüllmann, Barbara Klemm and Inge Werth: photographs on the 1968 movement and the new women’s movement.³³El, Eugen (2018): Ausstellung in Frankfurt: Studentenrevolte und Frauenkampf. In: Offenbach Post, article of 10.08. Online at: https://www.op-online.de/region/frankfurt/ausstellung-frankfurt-studentenrevolte-frauenkampf-10108821.html (accessed 16/08/2021).„(…) the history of this new departure would certainly have been written differently without the photographs of Inge Werth, and those of Barbara Klemm and Abisag Tüllmann should not be forgotten either. It may well be said that the documentation of 1968 in Frankfurt lay in the hands of three women photographers.“³⁴n. a. (2018): Da war noch was. In: Frankfurter Rundschau, article of 15. 08., p. 30.
- Exhibition – „Kunst der Revolte/Revolte der Kunst“. Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt am Main, 9 March to 5 May 2018

- Exhibition – „Paris, Frankfurt am Main und die 1968er Generation. Fotografien von Inge Werth“. Museum Giersch Frankfurt am Main, 8 August to 13 October 2018

Machine translation: This article was translated automatically from the German original.

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„We no longer saw any sense in distributing leaflets in the city centre over and over again […]. We no longer wanted to address appeals to ‚the public‘ or ‚parliament‘. We wanted other women, too, to have the opportunity to join together. We wanted to reach out to women from the district in which we lived and to work together with them. And we wanted to help women who needed an abortion n o w.“ In: Frankfurter Frauen (ed.) (1975): Frauenjahrbuch 1. Frankfurt/M.: Verlag Roter Stern, ISBN 978-3-87877-078-7, p. 47. ↩︎
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14
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n. a. (1986): Flugblätter zu § 218 (1971–1985). In: Janssen-Jurreit, Marielouise (ed.): Frauen und Sexualmoral. Frankfurt/M.: Fischer-Taschenbuch Verlag, ISBN 978-3-596-23766-1, pp. 334–340, here: p. 337. ↩︎
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29
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31
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34
n. a. (2018): Da war noch was. In: Frankfurter Rundschau, article of 15. 08., p. 30. ↩︎