Guste Schepp

Guste Schepp (born Auguste Merkel: 23 August 1886 - 23 July 1967) was a German politician (Deutsche Staatspartei / DStP) and, over many years, a women's rights campaigner.

Biography

Auguste "Guste" Schepp was born in Bremen, the city in which she would live and, more than eighty years later, die. Her father, Carl Merkel (1847-1911), was a successful businessman of Spanish-American provenance. Her mother, born Carlotta Clausen (1853-1928), came originally from Mexico. Guste was one of her parents' seven recorded children: she had four sisters and two brothers.

She attended Anna Vietor's Lyceum (girls' secondary school) till 1901. After that she was sent away for a year to a boarding school in Dresden, followed by a few months in England where she stayed with the family of an English pastor. She then enrolled at the Gustav Janson seminar (teacher-training college). Any ambitions to become a teacher were thwarted, showever, since she was forced to abandon her course unfinished by serious illness.

In 1907 Guste Schepp married Hans Schepp (1879-1918), a young Bremen lawyer. The marriage was followed over the nexct ten years by the births of the couple's four children. Hans Schepp servd as chairman of the local "Vereinigung Liberaler Rechtsanwälte" ("Association of Liberal Lawyers") from 1912. However, in 1914 war broke out. Hans Schepp enlisted or was conscripted into the army and was engaged in fighting on various fronts. He was killed in action near Rheims at the start of June 1918, a few months before the war ended.

Brutal bereavement proved the launch pad for a creative widowhood. Guste Scheppe-Merkel teamed up with Lisa Bachof and other Bremen war widows to establish, in 1919, the "Kriegshinterbliebenen-Vereinigung" (loosely, "Association of those left behind after the war") which very soon, with more than 900 members, became one of the largest women's organisations in Bremen. She took a leading role in running the association over the next fifteen years, arranging and providing material and spiritual support, while organising collections, Christmas parties and other treats for war orphans. She acquired, in the process, a reputation as a well-known provider of social support in the city region. President Carstens, who himself grew up during the 1920s and 1930a in Bremen as the child of another war widow and a friend of Hans Schepp, Schepp-Merkel's son, would later describe "Gustel Schepp" in an autobiographical work as "an important, courageous and persuasive woman".

In 1927 she took over the leadership of the "Bremer Frauenverein" (BDF)", which had been founded in 1910 by the women's rights campaigner Verena Rodewald (and others) as the "Frauenstadtbund" (loosely, "Women's City Assocation"). The name change had come about in 1923. In her new role Schepp now emerged as an effective campaigner for an end to the situation whereby women were disadvantaged on account of gender. Then as now, other topics at the top of the agenda were Peace Resolution adherence and the selective criminalisation of abortion under § 218 of the German criminal code.