page_title: Henriette Fürth
section_title: Biography
hierarchical_section_title: Henriette Fürth / Biography
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Henriette Fürth, "Wohnbedarf und Kinderzahl", Buch, Leipzig 1907. Foto des Buchs im Bestand des Archivs der deutschen Frauenbewegung, Kassel. Fotograf: Horst Ziegenfusz im Auftrag des Historischen Museums Frankfurt. Veröffentlicht in Dorothee Linnemann (Hrsg.): Damenwahl! 100 Jahre Frauenwahlrecht. Begleitbuch zur Ausstellung. Societäts-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2018, ISBN 978-3-95542-306-3, S. 93. English: Henriette Fürth, "Wohnbedarf und Kinderzahl", Book, Leipzig 1907. Photo of book in repository of Archiv der deutschen Frauenbewegung (Archive of German Women's Movement), Kassel. Photographer: Horst Ziegenfusz on behalf of Historisches Museum Frankfurt (Historical Museum Frankfurt). Published in Dorothee Linnemann (ed.): Damenwahl! 100 Jahre Frauenwahlrecht. Begleitbuch zur Ausstellung. Societäts-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2018, ISBN 978-3-95542-306-3, p. 93.
context_page_description: Henriette Fürth was a German sociologist, women's rights activist, author-journalist and poet.
  After the ban on female participation in political organisation was revoked in 1908 she involved herself in politics in the Frankfurt region. Though described in one source as "not a believing Jew", it is apparent from sources that Henriette Fürth's Jewish provenance was hugely important to her throughout her life. She died in 1938, before the full horrors of the Shoah unfolded. Two of her daughters died in concentration camps, however.
context_section_description: Henriette Katzenstein was born in Gießen.   After her brother Jacob died in 1867 she was the eldest of her parents' five remaining children.   Siegmund Katzenstein (1835-1889), her father, was a Jewish timber merchant.   Her mother, born Sophie Loeb (1835-1918), had also grown up in Gießen.   Sophie Katzenstein was deeply committed to her Jewish faith, and the children grew up celebrating the Jewish festivals.   Siegmund Katzenstein came from a family with strong priestly roots, but wore his religion more lightly, tending towards religious liberalism.   He was an actively engaged member of the Progressive Party ("Deutsche Fortschrittspartei") and of the local business community.   According to more than one source, Henriette was her father's favourite among his four daughters:  she was clearly influenced by his liberal beliefs.  Ludwig Börne and the famously liberal Frankfurter Zeitung (newspaper) framed the family's politics.   Henriette was not the only one of the five siblings to inherit her father's taste for politics.   The Katzenstein girls' only surviving brother, the lawyer Simon Katzenstein, to whom Henriette was particularly close, was a pioneering socialist politician who would die in political exile in Sweden shortly before the end of the Second World War.
  After successful completion of her schooling locally, with her father's consent, she accepted the offer of a place at the teachers' training college attached to the Elisabethenschule (secondary school) in nearby Frankfurt.  However, before the start of her first term her father withdrew his consent:  he said that, being Jewish, she would never be offered a teaching job in a school.   Another issue which would have arisen if she had been able to find a job as a teacher in a state school was the convention of those times whereby women teachers were expected to remain celibate or, if they married, to abandon their teaching careers.   A few years later Henriette Katzenstein, still aged just nineteen, married a distant cousin, Wilhelm Fürth.   He was a businessman, seven years her senior, and related through her mother's family.  The couple lived initially in Wilhelm's home town, Darmstadt, and then moved to Frankfurt in 1885.   By 1899 Henriette had given birth to eight children, six girls and two boys.   The two youngest were twins.  However, family matters did not fully consume her energies even at this stage, and she was able to resume the truncated progress of her education.
  She attended the Freies Deutsches Hochstift (educational institution), studying at the applied economics section ("volkswirtschaftliche Sektion").   Encouraged by her brother, in 1890 she began to publish articles of "social criticism", and over time was able to contribute usefully to the household budget from her talks and written pieces.   Using the pseudonym G.Stein, she also began to contribute articles on "Jewish themes".   Other topics that she favoured included (but were by no means restricted to) mother and child protection, household economics, population reduction, combating sexually transmitted diseases and compulsory celibacy for certain classes of career women, along with votes for women.   Overall she is believed to have published around 200 articles and 30 more substantial works.
  Henrietta Fürth represented that part of the proletarian women's movement that was oriented towards the SPD.   As early as 1896 she distanced herself from the formidable Clara Zetkin when she rejected the ideal of a separation between the "bourgeois" and "proletarian" women's movements.   Her own economic situation was conventionally middle class:  for a time the Fürths employed two household servants.   However, as her husband's leather wholesaling business declined and then, in 1901, went bankrupt she had to go out to work, first as a housing inspector and later as a paid secretary with the "Israelitische Hilfsverein".   She was subsequently employed as a journalist and in public relations work for the National Private Welfare Centre ("Zentrale für private Fürsorge", as it was then known).   Ar
caption: Henriette Fürth, "Wohnbedarf und Kinderzahl", Leipzig 1907.
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