Baumer, Gertrud

(1873-1954)

   politician; the most prominent woman in the Weimar-era Reichstag.* Born in Hohenlimburg, Westphalia, she grew up in the Pomeranian village of Cammin, where her father was a minister and school inspector. After teaching school during 1892-1898, she studied German language at Berlin,* taking a doctorate in 1904 with a thesis on Goethe's Sa-tyros. Driven to improve educational opportunities for women,* she helped pub-lish Die Frau, journal of the Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine (League of German Women's Societies, BDF) and then served as BDF chairman during 1910-1919. In 1912 she joined Theodor Heuss* and Anton Erkelenz* on the staff of Die Hilfe, a journal that sponsored Friedrich Naumann's* political ideology. In-structing at a women's school when war erupted in 1914, she founded the Na-tional Women's Service (Nationaler Frauendienst) to assist families with men at the front.

   Baumer joined the DDP in December 1918 and was elected in January to the National Assembly.* She retained a Reichstag seat from 1920 through 1932, serving concurrently from May 1920 as the Interior Ministry's counselor (Min-isterialratin) for child welfare. But her attachment to liberalism was increasingly suspect. After drafting the Child Welfare Act of 1922, she led a minority of the DDP who championed the Law for the Protection of Youth against Trash and Filth,* a measure restricting pornography sales. From 1926 she promoted social issues at the League of Nations. A nationalist who favored centralized govern-ment, she embraced the new DStP in 1930.

   Under Baumer's guidance the BDF abandoned its commitment to sexual equality in favor of a view that the sexes are innately different. The Baumer-dominated BDF executive sponsored an increasingly authoritarian and racially oriented program. Over her protest, she was judged politically unreliable by the NSDAP and relieved in 1933 of her Interior Ministry duties. The BDF dissolved the same year. Nevertheless, Baumer reached a modus vivendi with the Nazis and managed to publish an insipid version of Die Frau until 1944. Her publications were temporarily banned by Allied authorities after World War II.

   REFERENCES:Benz and Graml, Biographisches Lexikon; Richard Evans, Feminist Move-ment in Germany; Eyck, History of the Weimar Republic, vol. 2; Frye, Liberal Demo-crats.