Feminist protest alone on the street would not have been enough. It took someone like Rita Süssmuth to initiate social change within the institutions. When Süssmuth expanded her house to include the “Women’s Policy” department in 1986 – a year after taking office as Minister for Youth, Family and Health – it was tantamount to a revolution. This not only officially initiated the cultural change in the gender structure, which was not yet verbally shaped at the time, it was the beginning of the Federal Republic’s institutional women’s policy. And at that time it was characterized by hegemonic masculinity: politics, economics, culture, society – there was no area in which men did not “rule”.
For women in the West at the time, this had the well-known consequences: an existence primarily as housewives, a ban on abortion, and no say in politics, the economy, or social issues. The “new women’s movement” that emerged at the end of the 1960s called for more female participation in all areas of life, the legalization of abortions and the criminalization of intimate partner violence. In addition, the first women’s centers existed from the beginning of the 1970s – but it was Rita Süssmuth who manifested a so-called women’s policy where it belonged: in the Bundestag. And initiated what was soon referred to as the tiresome “march through the institutions.”
This led to heated arguments, especially with Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who had appointed her as Minister for Family Affairs, but who probably had no idea that Süssmuth would become the first German Minister for Women’s Affairs with a female empowerment that was previously unknown in federal politics.
As this, she provoked the conservatives in the CDU and the traditionalists in the country simply by not focusing her family policy solely on married people, but by classifying civil partnerships without a marriage certificate as equal. She knew of no taboos when it came to “moral” questions, including Naming sexual practices in the fight against the immunodeficiency disease AIDS. In the uptight 1980s, that required courage and resilience, especially as a woman. “If you don’t fight, you’ve already lost,” she always said. And that’s how she acted when she was praised as President of the Bundestag in 1988, but was actually bullied away.
For the right to abortion
So disputed them in the male union she was so popular among women in the country. And not just for her campaign against abortion paragraph 218 and sentences like “Let’s finally stop thinking women are incapable and not responsible.” But also later, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when she campaigned for more women in leadership positions. Rita Süssmuth knew – theoretically and from her own experience – that more women are needed in decision-making positions in order to break male power and violence in favor of rights for women and minorities.
And so, as head of the Women’s Union, she fought for the CDU to fill a third of important political positions with women – and thus took a completely different line than Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who rejects parity electoral lists. With Rita Süssmuth, with her polemic in 2022 “Parity now! “Against the inequality of women and men”, which showed a clear direction, the probably only and last feminist of the federal CDU (who had never described herself as) has gone. None of the active Christian Democrats – be careful, steep thesis – has what it takes and the interest in an equality policy like the one Rita Süssmuth had called for and partially implemented.