Frida Perlen (born Frida Kauffmann: 4 April 1870 - 22 December 1933) was a German Women's Rights campaigner, journalist and anti-war activist. During the first part of the twentieth century she fought for gender equality in respect of civil rights. After the First World War she was a co-founder of the "Internationale Frauenliga für Frieden und Freiheit" (IFFF), which became the German section of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF).
Life Frida Kauffmann was born at Ludwigsburg, a mid-sized town in Württemberg. She was the eleventh of her father's twelve recorded children. (She was a child of his second marriage.) The year following her birth the family relocated to nearby Stuttgart where Carl Kauffmann, her father, and her elder brother, Jakob, together set up an industrial cotton weaving business. Frida was only 13 when her father died. She nevertheless grew up in the comfortable circumstances appropriate to her haute-bourgeois family background, and benefitted from the schooling and general education designed to prepare her for marriage and motherhood. She never undertook the final couple of years at a senior school which, had she been a boy, would have prepared her for university admission.
When she was 19, Frida Kauffmann married Eugen Perlen, a young businessman from Esslingen am Neckar. He was ten years older than his bride, and already a partner in the fabrics shop "Perlen & Cie" in Stuttgart, which Abraham Perlen (1824-1892) his father had established in 1871. The couple's sons Karl Hans and Alfred were born in 1891 and 1894. Both would fight in the First World War. Alfred would be killed in March 1918 in northern France. The older son, Hans, would return from the war alive but badly wounded, and with medals including the "Iron Cross 2nd Class".
Eugen and Frida Perlen were Jewish. By the time the Hitler government took power, in January 1933, Frida Perlen's prominent role as a humanist and pacifist activist and organiser was a matter of record. For reasons both of race and of her political commitment, she became an obvious target for fascist persecution. She fled to Geneva and from there, in April 1933, to Zürich, where a number of her fellow anti-militarists had already arrived as political refugees. In Zürich she stayed for a time with Clara Ragaz, the head of the Swiss section of the IFFF. As the summer drew to an end she returned to Germany, by this time desperately ill. She died on 22 December 1933 at the Freudenstadt sanatorium of Dr. Carl Beer. Some sources state that the cause of her death is not known, but many of her friends abroad suspected that she had taken her own life. Others simply record as a fact that she had committed suicide.
Political engagement A radical in the middle-class movement for women's civil rights and voting rights Frida Perlen engaged actively in the middle-class women's movement from 1904. Within the movement she was regarded as a left-winger or "radical" participant. While moderate members were concerned with establishing girls' secondary schools, Perlen was already promoting the idea of university access for women, and the basic possibility to enter a profession in order to be able to look after themselves in financial terms. She demanded the right to co-determination with men and the right to equality under the civil law. The precondition for that was the right to vote. As a member of the "Deutscher Verband für Frauenstimmrecht" ("... association for women's voting rights"), Perlen also campaigned for that.
The demands of the radical campaigners for women's rights encountered not just from the hitherto privileged men, but also from the women's own organisation, the "Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine" (BDF / "Association of Women's Organisations"), an umbrella organisation for all women's associations, set up in 1894 to represent the combined interests. But the BDF quickly distanced itself from radical demands that might involve reconfiguring social relationships. The leadership of the BDF, dominated by a so-called moderate majority, tended to end up backing the chauvinistic tendencies of the still deeply conservative German state, even while the radical elements demanded a firm commitment to working for international peace and women's suffrage. Several of the more radical women's associations therefore took to pursuing their objectives outside the embrace of the BDF, founding journals and newssheets to provide news of the peace movement and publish articles against war and militarism. For a number of women's rights activists, as the European arms race continued to intensify, the struggle against militarisation and the anticipated international war was an integral element in the fight for women's right. That became the position taken by Frida Perlen.
The German Peace Society and the founding of its Women's Association In 1913, while governments prepared for war, Frida Perlen joined the "Deutsche Friedensgesellschaft" (DFG / "German Peace Society"). The society's national headquarters had been located near her home, in Stuttgart, since 1899. Just a few months after joining, she co-founded the DFG's "Frauenbund" (loosely, "Women's Association"). She announced her intention to found it early during 1914, writing in "Völker-Frieden", the journal produced for the Peace Society members. The launch was set for the seventh German Pace Congress, scheduled for May 1914. On consultation with members of the Peace Society's executive board, of which Mathilde Planck was also a member, she teamed up with another pacifist activist from Stuttgart to organise, within the seventh Peace Congress, a one-day "Conference of Pacifist Woman". They succeeded in gaining the support of a number of high-profile backers for their association including Bertha von Suttner, who in 1905 had become the first woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize and only the second female Nobel laureate.
Eventually the launch date for the "Women's Association" of the "Peace Society" was fixed for 24 May 1914, little more than two months before the outbreak of the next so-called "Great War". The founding statutes spelled out that association members were also, automatically, included as "Peace Society" members. At least initially, the "Women's Association" executive worked very closely with the (almost entirely male) "Peace Society" members. As an active member of the "Women's Association", Frida Perlen also sat as a member of the "Peace Society" executive. A carefully targeted public relations campaign undertaken in a desperate effort to rescue the peace met with little success. Women had no right to vote: many were still content to take their lead from men when it came to matters involving national politics. With war fever rampant, especially across the western military "great powers" of Germany, England and France, the efforts of the pacifists were widely seen as a national disgrace. Most women saw it as their duty to stand by their menfolk and call for war.
Faced by this dismal situation, in desperation, on 30 July 1914 the "Women's Association" of the "Peace Society" sent a personal telegramme directly to the emperor, urging him, on behalf of millions of German mothers, to preserve the peace. It reached the emperor's desk only on 3 August. Bertha von Suttner had fallen ill and died the previous month: the telegramme was signed with the names of Frida Perlen and Mathilde Planck. It is believed that the impulse for sending it had come from Perlen. She had taken the idea from an initiative by the "Votes for Women" movement in London who had written to the British Foreign Minister and all the important ambassadors in London urging them to do everything possible to avert the looming "... catastrophe without parallel".Gerit von Leitner: Wollen wir unsere Hände in Unschuld waschen? Gertrud Woker (1878–1968), Chemikerin – Internationale Frauenliga (1915–1968), Berlin 1998, p. 99
Pacifist activism during the First World War, and the breach with the "German Peace Society" The pacifists' appeal was ignored. Enthusiasm for war was unstoppable. But the pacifists never gave up, and continued to try and spread their message through education and publications. In September 1914, "Völker-Frieden" featured an insert entitled "In ernster Zeit" (loosely, "Serious Times") in which the writer, Frida Perlen, renewed the appeal to politically progressive women, and again asked for support. Europe's mothers were called upon not to surrender to the hatred of the war mongering folk, but to stand up both for an end to the war and for women's voting rights.
Political opposition to the war grew progressively between 1914 and 1918, but in the immediate term even Perlen's impassioned appeal in "Völker-Frieden" had no perceptible impact. The BDF resolved to support "our boys in the field", and through its various individual women's organisations, set up the "Nationalen Frauendienst zur Kriegsfürsorge" (loosely, "national women's war welfare and support). The small group of radical anti-war member associations immediately found themselves totally isolated. The government banned antiwar meetings: pacifist statements became criminal offences. Even the "German Peace Society" (DFG), having identified the entire affair as a "Defensive War" ("Verteidigungskrieg") undertook to provide "humanitarian assistance". Within the DFG, however, the "Women's Association", with Frida Perlen on the National Executive, refused to offer "assistance" for the war effort, and stood by their demand for an immediate end to the fighting.
In October 1914 Perlen petitioned the chancellor, calling for an end to the war and an understanding between the governments leading it, irrespective of the war's course. The executive board of the DFG did not support this initiative from their "Women's Association". Meanwhile, the "Women's Association" continued to be intensely critical of the parent society's willingness to offer "humanitarian assistance" in respect of the allegedly "defensive war". The breach between the two came during the early part of 1915, as the "Women's Association" prepared for an International Women's Peace Conference, to be convened at The Hague. The (male) leadership of the DFG rejected the idea of such a conference and banned members from taking part. Frida Perlen refused to be dissuaded, however. As early as February 1915 she was working with Anita Augspurg and Lida Gustava Heymann - both leading German women's rights campaigners and peace activists, but neither of them ever a member of the DFG - on preparations for the German contingent's participation at the conference. The International Women's Peace Conference duly took place at The Hague in April 1915. In the end Frida Perlen was unable to attend, since the German authorities refused to provide her with the necessary travel documents. One suggested explanation for this concerns the resolution which she had already drafted at a preparatory meeting, entitled "Demand for an Armistice" which she had intended to bring to a vote at the Hague Conference.