Elisabeth Selbert

September 22, 1896 – June 9, 1986

^{“It is a fundamental error to assume equality when it comes to equality. Equality is based on equality that recognizes difference.” (January 18, 1949)}

“Men and women have equal rights” – this sentence would not be in our constitution today without the social democrat and lawyer Elisabeth Selbert, one of the four “mothers of the Basic Law”.

Elisabeth Rhode grew up in a lower-middle-class family. She is the second oldest of four daughters. She went to secondary school until 1912. Because of her good performance, she is exempt from paying school fees. Like all girls of her time, she did not receive a secondary school certificate when she left school. She wants to become a teacher, but attending secondary school is unaffordable. After a year of business school, she initially worked for an import and export company. At the beginning of the First World War she becomes unemployed. It wasn’t until two years later that she found a job as a postal assistant in the telegraph service.

There she met her future husband, the printer Adam Selbert know. Through him, who was a member of the Kassel Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council in 1918, she found access to politics. In the same year she joined the SPD. She calls on women to use the active and passive voting rights they have been granted. In the early 1920s she was the only woman to become a member of the local parliament in Niederzwehren near Kassel. In 1921 she took part as a delegate in the SPD’s first Reich Women’s Conference in Kassel.

As a wife and mother of two sons, she founded the external High school diploma. With the support of her husband and parents, she began studying law at the age of thirty, becoming one of the first women in Germany. In 1930 she received her doctorate on the subject of “marriage breakdown as a reason for divorce.” The move away from the principle of debt, which she called for in her doctoral thesis, was not enshrined in the Federal Republic of Germany until 1977. The political work continues at the same time. In the Reichstag elections at the end of 1932 she ran for the SPD, at least in such a secure position that she would have been next on the list. She was admitted to the bar at the end of 1934, two weeks before women were completely denied access to this profession. Since her husband is removed from office by the National Socialists, temporarily taken to a concentration camp and monitored by the Gestapo, she has to support her family alone.

In 1946 she was sent to the state constitutional assembly of Hesse, appointed to the executive board of the SPD in Hesse and elected to the Hesse state parliament. In 1948 she became a member of the parliamentary council that drafted the Basic Law of the Federal Republic of Germany. There are considerable reservations about the full legal equality of men and women.
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Elisabeth Selbert experienced great resistance when she presented her legal text. She initially received no support even from the three female MPs Frieda Nadig, Helene Wessel and Helene Weber. In order to implement the new wording of Article 3 Paragraph 2, it is choosing the extra-parliamentary route.
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She calls on all women in Germany to protest against the old formulation in the Parliamentary Council. Within just six weeks, during which she went around the country campaigning like a traveling preacher, laundry baskets worth of petitions were received. Under pressure from the women’s public, the parliamentarians finally agree to the principle of equal rights. This means that the misogynistic marriage and family law provisions of the Civil Code of 1896 that were still valid until then become unconstitutional.

In 1958, Elisabeth Selbert resigned from all her political offices and worked in her law firm until the age of 85. She is probably disappointed that during her active time as a politician she is never recognized or appointed by the SPD in accordance with her rank and stature: she will neither become Hessian Minister of Justice, nor a member of the Bundestag or a judge at the Federal Constitutional Court. She doesn’t get beyond her seat in the Hessian state parliament. But her fame is growing. In 2013, ARD will produce a film about the “great moment of her life,” which will be broadcast for the first time on May 21, 2014. (KS)