Men and women have equal rights (Art. 3 Para. 2 GG)
by Susanne Selbert
It was that oneJanuary 18, 1949, when this formulation was adopted by the Main Committee of the Parliamentary Council before the Basic Law was passed and promulgated as a whole in May 49.
January 18th was the great moment of one of the mothers of the Basic Law, the great moment – as she described it herself – of Elisabeth Selbert.
Creating this important, constitutionally anchored basis for all future demands for equal rights for women was anything but self-evident at the time.
In October of the previous year, the Policy Committee of the Parliamentary Council planned to incorporate equal rights into the Basic Law – based on the wording in the Weimar Constitution – in such a way that men and women should have the same civil rights and obligations.
Elisabeth Selbert intervened. This would have meant that only civil equality would have been achieved, but not equality covering all areas of law. She called for clearer and more unambiguous wording.
OnNovember 30, 1948Their formulation is then submitted to the policy committee: “Men and women have equal rights”. Completely clear and unmistakable. At the same time, a proposal from the CDU was put forward, which reads: “All people are equal before the law. The law must treat the same equally, it can treat different things according to their characteristics.” Different things according to his own characteristics! You can already sense the different characteristics of women in relation to men. By the way, there are also differences among our own party members.
There were fears of legal chaos if E.S. proposal would be accepted.
So it happened that Elisabeth Selbert’s formulation was rejected, which the CDU accepted and passed on to the main committeeDecember 3, 1948submitted for further resolution. Elisabeth Selbert is again submitting the motion with her wording at this meeting. Again she lost by 9 votes to 11.
Elisabeth Selbert explains at that time:Never in my wildest dreams did I expect this application to be rejected. It is a given that today we have to go further than in Weimar and that women have to be given equal rights in all areas.Women should not only be equal in civic matters, but must also be equal to men in all areas of law. The woman who stood on the rubble during the war years and replaced the man in the workplace has a moral right to be valued in the same way as the man.Now Elisabeth Selbert is looking for allies, regardless of party boundaries. She also doesn’t shy away from reaching out to the public. A fine line: you don’t turn to the public to achieve a goal, at least not as individual MPs. Differences are clarified in a small group with the group leader.
Elisabeth Selbert travels up and down the country, gives lectures in Hamburg, Munich and Frankfurt and mobilizes non-partisan women’s associations, trade unionists and politicians from all parties. The protest letters are said to have arrived in Bonn as laundry basket evidence. The campaign was not without effect. On January 18, 1949 – in that great hour – the main committee accepted their formulation.
By the way, E.S. In that year (1949) not only a member of the Parliamentary Council, but also a member of the Hessian state parliament, a member of the federal executive board of her party and a city councilor in Kassel.
Previously, in 1945/1946, she was a member of the state constitutional assembly of Hesse and played a key role in drafting the Hesse constitution.
In February 1949 the question in a leaflet was:“Who is E.S.?”At the time, this question was purely rhetorical. At the time, everyone knew who E.S. was.
In the years that followed, people forgot that the mothers of the Basic Law even existed. People only talked about the fathers of the Basic Law. But there were – in addition to the 61 men – also 4 women. In addition to Elisabeth Selbert, her parliamentary group colleague Frieda Nadig, Dr. Helene Weber from the CDU and Helene Wessel from the Catholic Center Party. A large-format poster from 1984 made ironically clear the fact that women no longer appeared in the history of the creation of the constitution for a long time. It said aboveThe fathers of the Basic Lawand underneath it was this photo.
It is particularly thanks to the new women’s movement of the 1970s that E.S. was brought back from oblivion. But back to Elisabeth Selbert: Who was this woman and what was the situation of women in her time? Join me on a little journey back in time, 100 years into the past:1911/1912IT. is 15 years old. She comes from a very simple background (father, judicial sergeant….)
It was the time when Elisabeth Selbert experienced, for the first time in her life, the full extent of discriminatory treatment based on her gender.
After attending elementary school, her parents enable her to attend middle school (Amalienschule in Kassel).
The curriculum for the girls is based on the abilities and needs that were attributed to women at the time.
In addition to learning foreign languages, this included shorthand, typing and sewing.
She is an excellent student, but in 1912, after her school career ended, she did not receive her secondary school leaving certificate.
Unlike the boys, she has to leave school without a certificate. It lacked – as one would probably put it today – the so-called mint compartments.
This was a profound insult and the first time that she had experienced such serious unequal treatment because of her gender.
This early insult awakened her interest in women’s issues and made her aware of Louise Otto-Peters, who had already died (1895), and Helene Lange, both of whom played a key role in the reorganization of the “higher girls’ school system” and in the admission of women to studies.We now jump to 1926. Elisabeth Selbert is now 30 years old, now married to Adam Selbert and has two small children aged 4 and 5. Adam Selbert is now a local civil servant and Elisabeth Selbert has prepared for the Abitur on the second level of education. That year (1926) she became the first woman in Kassel to take her Abitur as a so-called external student. In the same year she began studying law in Marburg. She can’t remember another woman among the law students in Marburg. She does not attend the lectures on sexual crimes. The older professor feels unable to discuss this topic in the presence of a woman. She takes his condition into consideration.
Since she couldn’t find a doctoral supervisor in Marburg, she later moved to Göttingen. There are four more women among the 350 students, including a Catholic nun. None of the four other women finished their studies.
In 1930 Elisabeth Selbert received her doctorate. Her dissertation is entitled “Marriage breakdown as a reason for divorce”. She is way ahead of her time. It was only almost 50 years later – in 1977 – when Elisabeth Selbert was already over 80 years old, that “her principle of disruption” was introduced into marriage and family law in the West and the old principle of fault was abolished.
Their marriage is unusual for this time. They swap roles. He mainly looks after the children and supports them because he sees them as having better opportunities for personal advancement. And other family members step in to look after the children, including Elisabeth’s grandparents and an unmarried sister. Adam Selbert also continues his education and becomes deputy mayor of Niederzwehren.
In theOctober 1934Elisabeth Selbert takes the 2nd state law examination in Berlin, in front of the Reich Justice Examination Office. The chairman of the examination committee is none other than Otto Palandt, who alone had to evaluate the performance as chairman. All other members only had an advisory role. And now you have to know:
Otto Palandt is not only the best-known commentator on the BGB, he was also the “master builder” of the unjust state and formulated in 1939 that it was fundamentally “a man’s job to uphold the law”.
He let E.S. still not fail the exam. He was clearly impressed by her.
Following the 2nd state examination, E.S. immediate admission to the legal profession, as it has now become known that the National Socialists no longer want to grant women access to professions in the judiciary. She’s lucky: the National Socialist Higher Regional Court President is on a business trip. His two deputies, older judges of the Higher Regional Court who knew Elisabeth Selbert, will hand her the license onDecember 15, 1934out of.
This was a very courageous act, as the Gauleiter, the Bar Association and the Nazi Lawyers’ Association had spoken out against it. Now their license could only be revoked through an honor court procedure. From January 1935, only male applicants’ applications for admission were approved.By the way:In any case, women have only been able to practice the profession of judge or lawyer since mid-1922. Although they had had the opportunity to study law and even obtain a doctorate since 1919, they were denied the necessary legal clerkship followed by the second state examination. Conservative lawyers had always argued that the admission of women to judgeships or the legal profession would damage the administration of justice. Due to the influence of “certain events” – meaning menstruation, pregnancy and menopause – “professional judicial objectivity” is not guaranteed.
Elisabeth Selbert is losing weightEnd of 1934the family alone until the end of Nazi rule. Because of his office and elected office, her husband had previously been forced into early retirement by the National Socialists at the age of 40. In June 1933 he was interned in the Breitenau concentration camp near Kassel, but was released again and was under Gestapo supervision for the next 12 years.
During the times of Nazi rule, E.S. tried to maintain up to four law firms of colleagues in Kassel (Georg August Zinn and Jewish colleagues).But let’s go back to 1949.Now one would think that with the implementation of equal rights in Article 3 Paragraph 2 of the Basic Law, unequal treatment of men and women would only be a matter of time, at least from a legal point of view, and that all laws that did not correspond to the requirement of equal rights would be quickly adjusted, at the latest by 1953, the end of the transition period that the Parliamentary Council had granted. But far from it. This was not the case. Every advance in the women’s issue was met with persistent resistance.
Even after March 31, 1953
- The man had the final right to make decisions in all marital matters.
- He alone disposed of the assets, including those of the woman, including her income from work.
- He could terminate the woman’s employment, even against her stated wishes.
- Female civil servants, especially teachers, may have had to give up their jobs if they got married. At the time, this was understood as protection of marriage and family. This legal regulation is also known as so-called “teacher celibacy”.
These regulations were only repealed with the law on equal rights for men and women, which came into effect on January 1, 1958 – i.e. only 5 years after the end of the transition period and almost 10 years after equal rights were included in the constitution.
But even after 1958 it continued
- a legally prescribed division of tasks, namely the so-called housewife marriage,
- There was the so-called paternal deciding vote, i.e. the father could ultimately decide alone about the child’s welfare and woe,
- the father was still the sole legal representative of the child,
- and single women were officially given a so-called “official guardian” for their child.
These regulations were only abolished 28 years after the introduction of Article 3 Paragraph 2 of the Basic Law, namely with the 2nd Marriage Law Reform Act in 1977.
Equality in naming rights was only realized in the mid-1990s and marital rape has only been a criminal offense since 1997.
Even in her old age, Elisabeth Selbert told women to “organize and get involved more politically in order to achieve equal rights to an increasing and necessary extent. We can’t expect this from men – it’s a woman’s job.”
Incidentally, she worked as a lawyer and notary in her own law firm in Kassel until she was 85 years old, with perfect mental freshness.
In 1986, when Elisabeth Selbert died at the age of almost 90, I was 26 years old. We had very close contact, both during my childhood and when I was a young woman and studying law.
Elisabeth Selbert was certainly not the kind of grandmother you might imagine as a child or perhaps you would like to be. She didn’t teach me how to crochet or knit, I never learned from her how to bake an apple pie and she certainly didn’t tell me Grimm’s Fairy Tales in the evenings.
But: When you grow up, you realize how much important things she passed on to our grandchildren, and this includes, in particular, an understanding of democracy, commitment to our society and courage.
IT. Through her commitment, through her understanding of democracy, but also through her courage and her certain persistence, she laid the decisive foundation stone with Article 3 Paragraph 2 of the Basic Law, which has enabled me and thousands upon thousands of women in the following years to complete training or study with complete confidence.
