page_title: Henriette Goldschmidt
section_title: Activism
hierarchical_section_title: Henriette Goldschmidt / Activism
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Henriette Goldschmidt im Schillerjahr 1859
context_page_description: Henriette Goldschmidt was a German Jewish feminist, pedagogist and social worker. She was one of the founders of the German Women's Association and worked to improve women's rights to access education and employment. As part of that effort, she founded the Society for Family Education and for People's Welfare and the first school offering higher education to women in Germany.
context_section_description: Goldschmidt equated the move to the university town of Leipzig with an awakening to freedom and humanitarian spirit. She quickly became involved in the German-Jewish community and was exposed to the ideas of Friedrich Fröbel, founder of the early-childhood kindergarten education system. Encouraged by her husband to pursue her interests in education, Goldschmidt studied history, literature, pedagogy and philosophy on her own. In 1865, she, Louise Otto-Peters and Auguste Schmidt organized a conference of German women and founded the German Women's Association (German: Allgemeiner Deutscher Frauenverein) to work towards improving the lives of women. Goldschmidt had initially been hesitant about becoming a board member of the group, as the legal statutes at that time forbade women voting in volunteer organizations, but with her husband's encouragement, she became an active member. Between 1867 and 1906, she served as a member of the board and presented many lectures for the organization.
  In 1867, Goldschmidt organized petition drives for submission to the Reichstag in support of women's rights to access education and employment and she was a signatory to the petition to protect illegitimate children. She also proposed that women be participants in their communities, because women would lend a sensitivity to dealing with culturally divisive issues. The following year, she proposed a mandatory social service initiative requiring women to serve for a year in social work. In 1871, Goldschmidt founded the Society for Family Education and for People's Welfare (German: Verein fuer Familienerziehung und Volkswohl), with the goal of training kindergarten teachers in the Fröbel method. She served as president of the organization for over four decades. By the following year, the organization was sponsoring teaching seminars to a growing number of adherents and had opened a public kindergarten. By 1878, she organized the High School for Ladies (German: Lyzeum für Damen), where professors from the University of Leipzig gave lectures to students. Because women were barred from attending college, and only a few private schools offered inferior education, the lectures were attended by hundreds of women and offered them the chance for not only an education, but employment as a teacher.
  In 1889, the Jewish community sponsored a donation drive and purchased a house for the organization's operations. It was located at 16 Weststraße (later named Friedrich-Ebert-Straße) and became not only Golschmidt's home after her husband's death, but the center of women's education, sponsoring educational courses and lectures, as well as cultural and social events. Members of the association were also allowed to reside in the house and both the writer Josephine Siebe and educator Anna Zabel were known to have lived there. In 1898 Goldschmidt and Auguste Schmidt, on behalf of the German Women's Association prepared a petition to establish the Fröbel educational method as the official municipal and state educational system. The petition asked for kindergartens to come under state standardization and supervision, with mandatory attendance for all children. They were met with waves of opposition from those who saw forced education as supplanting familial rights to children's upbringing and accused the women of trying to destroy the family. There were also opponents who saw the measure as forcing children of different social classes to mix. Though Goldschmidt defended the plan, publishing a response to her critics Ist der Kindergarten eine Erziehungs- oder Zwangsanstalt? (Is kindergarten an educational institution or forced?) in 1901, it was ultimately defeated.
  Goldschmidt did not give up and continued writing and giving speeches on the need for kindergartens and women's education. In 1906, women were finally admitted to university study in Germany, but the coursework did not prepare women to meet their societal obligations, as Goldschmidt believed that the natural calling of woman was to transform society through their cultural involvement. She strove to fill a 
caption: Henriette Goldschmidt, circa 1859
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