Helene Stöcker and the Bund fuer Mutterschutz (The Society for the Protection of Motherhood)

The Society for the Protection of Motherhood (BfM) was the first organization in Germany to concern itself with a reform of sexual ethics and the transformation of the relationship between women and men—not only on a theoretical level but by actually providing support for single mothers and their children and initiating counselling centres to deal with sexual problems. At the same time, the BfM demanded legal equality for illegitimate children, the decriminalization of abortion and the right of women to sue for divorce. In raising these issues, the BfM trod on difficult ground since they were not ‘popular’ topics of discussion within German society around the turn-of-the-century. The chairwoman of the BfM, Helene Stöcker, who was among the first women to study and obtain a doctorate in Germany, put the Society's ideas into practice in her relationship of ‘free love and marriage’ with her partner, the lawyer Bruno Springer. Indeed, it was the policy of the BfM to encourage progressive men to join the organization and work in partnership with the women, while most of the other groups on the radical wing of the bourgeois women's movement chose to work autonomously from men. Over the years, the BfM's priorities changed and its members moved in different directions: while the ‘moderates’ wanted to retain the family as the nucleus of the state, the more radical members went in search of new forms of relationship, attempting thereby to expose society's double standard of morality.