Portrait album of who's who at the International Congress of Women - Frau Anna Simson

Anna Simson, née Haberkern (20 August 1835, Werder – 14 March 1916,

Lubiąż Abbey Lubiąż Abbey (german: Kloster Leubus; pl, Opactwo cystersów w Lubiążu) is a former Cistercian monastery in Lubiąż, in the Lower Silesian Voivodeship of southwestern Poland, located about northwest of Wrocław.The monastery is considere ...

, Silesia) was a German women's rights activist. In 1893 she attended the founding of the World's Congress of Representative Women meeting on the occasion of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. She was accompanied by

Auguste Förster Auguste Förster (7 December 1848, Warburg – 3 October 1926, Brunswick) was a German educationalist and activist in the bourgeois women's movement. She was founder of the Kassel Organization of Women's Groups (Gründerin des Verbandes Kass ...

Hanna Bieber-Böhm Hanna Bieber-Böhm (6 February 1851 – 15 April 1910) was a German feminist and pioneer of social work. She established an organization to assist young women seeking work in Berlin and help protect them from becoming prostitutes, and founded a rec ...

and Käthe Schirmacher. They took the example of the American National Council of Women as inspiration for founding the Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine (BDF – Federation of German Women's Associations). She became the first secretary of the BDF and was later Deputy Chairwoman. In that capacity she corresponded with Teresa Wilson, the secretary to Lady Aberdeen leader of the International Council of Women. Here she expressed the differing aspirations of the BDF who considered that Aberdeen's leadership was too disorganised and showed too much of a class orientation in favour of the

aristocracy Aristocracy (, ) is a form of government that places strength in the hands of a small, privileged ruling class, the aristocracy (class), aristocrats. The term derives from the el, αριστοκρατία (), meaning 'rule of the best'. At t ...

. :“The German women’s movement is a thoroughly ‘bourgeois’ one and as a women’s movement rejects all mere charity work by aristocrats, the conservatives, and the Church.” Within the BDF Anna was aligned with the moderates who were worried about a more radical group emerging.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Simson, Anna 1835 births 1916 deaths People from Werder (Havel) People from the Province of Brandenburg German feminists