Legal Protection Centres for Women
Another large initiative involved Legal Protection Centres for Women.[402] During industrialisation, an increasing number of women went into the labour market, primarily in the textile and clothing industries, where wages were low.
Employees in restaurants, hotels, laundries, and other workplaces dominated by female workers, faced insecure employment and low wages. Furthermore, many women, especially teenage girls, worked as domestics. Most of them served a household alone, under strenuous conÂditions.[403] Women workers were also underrepresented in the trade unions because of the renunciative and even hostile attitudes of male workers. In addition, women mostly worked in sectors in which it was difficult for workers to organise. As a result, many women workers could not seek help from workers’ associations. Women’s associations, supported mainly by middle-class women, attempted to fill this gap.[404]The Legal Protection Centres for women were founded through the initiatives of members of women’s rights associations, including moderate and radical wings. Prominent figures among them were Marianne Weber, wife of sociologist Max Weber, and Camilla Jellinek, wife of renowned public law professor Georg Jellinek in Heidelberg.[405] A direct motivation for this legal protection movement for women was the discussion about the legislation in the German Civil Code (BGB), especially concerning family law, in which women, especially married women, were at a severe legal disadvantage. However, the movement for women’s legal protection criticised the whole legal system, not only the Civil Code. For instance, social insurance disadvantaged married women. Activists also argued that women had fewer legal rights than men and more difficulty exercising the rights that they did have. The direct inspiration for the establishment of Legal Protection Centres for Women came from a series of lectures given by Emilie Kempin[406] in 1893 in Dresden on the legal position of women.
In the following year, the first Legal Protection Centre for Women was founded in Dresden through the initiative of Marie Stritt.[407] Using the Centre in Dresden as a model, new Legal Protection Centres were set up throughout the German Empire.The main aim of the Legal Protection Centres was to provide individual legal advice for women. However, they also emphasised the need for action to gain both legal rights for women and to provide women with legal literacy. Thus, the centres held public lectures on legislation related to women and even organised an occasional law class. Moreover, the female staff at the Legal Protection Centres, through their practice, saw and understood that many of their clients were strongly disadvantaged because of their lack of legal knowledge. Therefore, Marie Raschke, an educated legal expert[408] and leader of the movement for the Legal Protection Centres, insisted on providing women with legal knowledge, even introducing a mandatory law class at a girl’s schools.[409] The motto “legal knowledge is the best legal protection” expressed the philosophy of the centres.[410]
An important principle of the Legal Protection Centres for Women was “legal advice for women by women” or “women help women.” Consequently, in most of the organisations, the legal advisers were excluÂsively women in voluntary positions; in other words, they were lay lawyers. In practice, some male lawyers also supported the centres’ legal advisers. The experiences in Dresden showed that the female volunteer counsellors increasingly provided more complicated legal advice on questions such as alimony, without enlisting the help of male lawyers.[411] The volunteer counÂsellors acquired skills through their practice as well as a number of formal and informal educational opportunities. Every year, a few women took part in the above-mentioned training course in Frankfurt am Main.[412] Moreover, the Legal Protection Centres for women exchanged general information and provided legal advice to each other on concrete cases.
The Union of Legal Protection Centres (Vereins-Centralstelle fur Rechtsschutz), founded in 1900 in Berlin, gave the counsellors consultaÂtions and advice regarding actual cases.[413] Furthermore, the Legal Protection Centre in Frankfurt reported that a practising lawyer cooperÂated with the Centre and supported female volunteer counsellors in acquiring basic legal knowledge and information about new and relevant legislation.[414] In addition, as of 1907, they employed women trained in law to consult clients together with volunteers.[415]In this context, the founders of the Legal Protection Centres began to discuss “professionalisation.” Some asserted that only women who had studied law should provide legal advice.[416] However, there was strong critiÂcism of this opinion, on the ground that the voluntary involvement of women in providing legal support for women was important in order to build relationships of trust. Critics emphasised that women volunteers were able to better understand their clients’ lives.[417] According to Marie Stritt, co-founder of the first Centre in Dresden, the experiences of the volunteer counsellors showed that, in most cases, special legal knowledge and skills were not necessarily required. A healthy understanding about people, legal knowledge acquired through their hard self-study and pracÂtice, and their rich experiences were enough to advise women of all classes in most cases as they were due to women not knowing their rights or being unable to exercise them.[418] Dr. Alix Westerkamp, an employed legal counsellor in Frankfurt, gave a speech at the second conference of the Legal Protection Federation for Women (Rechtsschutzverbandfur Frauen): “[A]s for female patients, the beneficence of female doctors can no longer be withheld. So too, must women facing difficult legal circumstances, and often broken both physically and mentally, be given the opportunity to get help from female legal advisors.”[419]
Statistics of the Legal Protection Centre for Women in Frankfurt, the biggest centre at the time in Germany, allow us further insight.
First, it should be mentioned that the circumstances at the Legal Protection Centres differed from city to city. The Legal Protection Centre in Frankfurt had a cooperation agreement with the large-scale legal advice centre of the Social Museum, and their offices were located in the same building.[420] In 1913, the Legal Protection Centre dealt with 5556 new cases, while the Social Museum dealt with 6155 (out of 19,807) cases with female clients and the Workers’ Secretariat with 9346 (of 34,535) such cases.[421] Divorced and separated women made up 16.4% of the clientele, 13.3% were widÂows, and 36.3% of the clients were unmarried. Regarding the occupations of clients, 35.8% belonged to the non-working population (many were probably housewives), 28% were servants or domestics, 2.7% daily paid workers, and 16% self-employed workers.[422] Among the clientele of the Legal Protection Centre, workers in the industrial sectors were underrepÂresented. Regarding legal areas, issues related to the workers’ insurance (one of the main legal areas for extrajudicial legal aid at the time) made up only 3.1% of cases.[423] On the other hand, in 11% of the cases, clients conÂsulted with the Centre regarding labour contracts. Further, 16.5% of the cases were related to the law of obligations, including tenancy (8.4%). These legal areas can be regarded as important for clients from the lower class. In contrast, 34.3% of cases concerned family and inheritance law, and among them 9.8% involved divorce. Fifty-seven per cent of cases were resolved after oral legal advice and 37% through mediations. Furthermore, during this year, no case was sent to a practising lawyer. This result coinÂcides with the principle of the Legal Protection Centres: to prevent legal disputes and if there was a dispute to mediate between the parties.[424] In 1913, the Legal Protection Centre collected 68,537.20 Reichsmarks from debtors and disbursed them to their clients.[425]How can these numbers be interpreted? Female workers in the indusÂtrial sector might have visited the Workers’ Secretariat, especially for legal advice on workers’ insurance and labour law. An alternative for this instituÂtion was the Social Museum. Non-working people, self-employed workÂers, and workers in typically female occupations might have avoided the Workers’ Secretariat and gone either to the Legal Protection Centre or to the Social Museum. At that time, female clients often hesitated to consult with male lawyers or legal counsellors. In such cases, female clients might have preferred the Legal Protection Centre for Women. Furthermore, the clients were often socially disadvantaged and ill-informed of their rights. They needed the special care and social support of the Legal Protection Centres.[426]