Lily Braun

Lily Braun (born July 2, 1865, Halberstadt, Prussia—died August 9, 1916, Zehlendorf, Ger.) was a leading German feminist and Socialist writer.

(Read George Bernard Shaw’s 1926 Britannica essay on socialism.)

Passionate and enthusiastic, Lily was converted to atheism, pacifism, and feminism by Georg von Gizycki, whom she married in 1893. After his death (1895) she joined the Social Democratic Party. Never a conformist, she was criticized by orthodox Social Democrats and eventually left the party. She collaborated with her second husband, Heinrich Braun (married 1896), in publishing a weekly periodical, Die neue Gesellschaft (“The New Society”), and she and Minna Cauer founded the feminist newspaper Die Frauenbewegung (“The Women’s Movement”).

Perhaps her most important book was Die Frauenfrage, ihre geschichtliche Entwicklung und wirtschaftliche Seite (1901; “The Women’s Question, Its Historical Development and Its Economic Aspect”), in which she argued that capitalism, by employing women in industry, destroyed the family and thus made Socialism inevitable.