Ida Hoff (8 January 1880 - 5 August 1952) was a medical doctor and feminist activist in Switzerland. She was the first woman to be employed as a school doctor in Bern. In a traditionalist city in a conservative area of Switzerland, Ida Hoff was one of Bern's first regular female motorists.
Life Family provenance and early years Adelaide "Ida" Hoff was born in Moscow. Her father, Siegfried Hoff (ca.1845-1896), had been born into a prosperous German Jewish family, and had emigrated to the United States, taking US citizenship. According to one source, Siegfried Hoff was regarded by family members as the "black sheep" of the family. At some stage he had trained as a dentist. However, he had left the United States and, from the perspective of his respectable brother Leopold who lived near Hamburg and ran the family manufacturing business, Siegfried had "disappeared" into czarist Russia where he supported himself as a businessman. The family business had been established by Ida's grandfather, Johann Hoff, and involved manufacturing a Malt Extract health tonic which sold well in the German speaking world. It also sold well in Russia, where "Hoff's Elixir" even got a mention in the 1880 novel The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881). As a child Ida Hoff grew up in circumstances of some material comfort, possibly reflecting her father's success as a health tonic salesman.
Anna Naschatir (1861–1901) was the "impoverished cousin" of Siegfried Hoff's landlord. She had been born in Daugavpils which today is in Latvia but at that time would have been regarded as a prosperous city to the south of St. Petersburg in the western part of the Russian Empire. Anna was at least sixteen years younger than Siegfried. It is not clear whether they married out of love or from dynastic calculations. The marriage ceremony, conducted towards the end of 1878 in St. Petersburg, was a lavish affair. The couple's only child, Adelaide "Ida" Hoff, was born a little over a year later. However, the marriage was a joyless one. Anna and Siegfried separated in the mid 1880s, although they were formally divorced only in 1890. It was possibly a reflection of the stigma surrounding divorce that later Ida would explain that she had grown up in a one-parent family in the context of her father's early death, which was not completely untrue. (Her father died in 1896.) Despite being a one parent family, it appears that the divorce settlement left Anna and her daughter well provided for financially.
Escape to Switzerland Before Ida reached school age, in 1886 Anna, still not quite 25, moved with her daughter to Switzerland. Hundreds of other young Russian women were making the same journey at this time, especially those from an intellectual milieu or with a record of political awareness. The czarist regime in Russia was becoming increasingly despotic and paranoid, persecuting opponents where it identified them, placing Jews under pressure and blocking the way to higher education for women. Many of the young women fleeing Russia settled in the Zürich districts Fluntern and Hottingen, on the city's eastern side. Anna Hoff was one of these, although unlike most of them she had very little interest in politics or in fermenting revolution in Russia: the focus of her life was more on her own personal development and on looking after her little daughter. The woman running the guest house in which they lived described her – with evident approval – as an educated, quiet and reliable person ("[eine] gebildete, stille und solide Person").
Despite the landlady's evaluation, Anna's school education had been relatively basic, and not sufficient as a basis for enrolling as a university student. She was able to listen to lectures as an "Auskultantin". She attended philosophy lectures given by Ludwig Stein. Anna was determined that her daughter's path to serious study should not be blocked in the way hers had been.
Citizenship for Anna: Bereavement and Education for Ida During the final days of 1892 Anna Hoff and her daughter moved to Bern. It is not clear whether the move from Zürich to Bern had anything to do with Ludwig Stein's move to the University of Bern which took place at about the same time. Stein, like the Hoffs, was of Jewish provenance and he was also, according to at least one source, a dazzling figure. He lived in high bourgeois style in a city villa where guests were always welcome. He was supportive of his friends, but in academic circles he was controversial, and in 1909 he would be forced to give up his teaching chair at the university, after which he moved to Berlin. While Ida was growing up, her mother was a frequent visitor to Stein's Bern villa. In 1896/97, when Anna applied for Swiss citizenship for a second time, Stein went out of his way to champion her application. On the occasion of her first application, in 1893, the city authorities had accepted that she was not involved in politics, but had nevertheless determined that having lived in Switzerland for six years was insufficient to justify citizenship. It was not till 1897, after news came through that her ex-husband had died the previous year, that the authorities gave Anna Hoff the green light for naturalisation. For reasons that remain unclear it was now Anna who did not pursue the matter, however.
Anna Hoff was by now increasingly affected by chronic kidney disease. In 1901 she visited Küssnacht in search of a cure. It was here, in October 1901, that Anna Hoff died, aged around 40Death announcement in: Der Bund, 12 October 1901. The burial had already taken place on 11 October. The «Villa Clara» at Grepperstrasse 22 was run by Dr. med. Josef Vonmoos as a healing and care establishment, especially for nervous illnesses. The cause of death reported by Vermoos in the local death registry was «Nephritis chronica». in the guest house "Villa Clara" where she was staying. Ida was greatly affected by her mother's death, and it is clear that the mother:daughter bond between them had been exceptionally close. Landlocked Switzerland was unusual in western Europe with regard to the vanishingly low levels of naturally occurring iodine in the national diet, a deficiency that has subsequently been addressed by adding iodine to salt sold in the shops. Later, in a medical dissertation, Ida Hoff addressed issues involved in kidney disease in a piece of work entitled "On the question of salt retention in kidney disease" ("Über die Frage der Kochsalzretention bei Nephritis [...]").
As a school student Ida Hoff was already actively concerned with women's rights. Activism was not the only thing that marked her out from fellow students. She attended a Gymnasium (school with an academic focus) in Bern. It had only been in 1894 that public secondary schools in Bern had started to accept female students. By the time she passed her Matura (school final exams) in 1899 Ida Hoff was one of just two girls in her class at the Bern Literary Gymnasium ("Berner Literatur-Gymnasium'"). The other one, Clara Winnicki (after 1925 Clara Herbrand), also achieved subsequent feminist notability as the first qualified female pharmacist in Switzerland with her own business.
Student years and activism Hoff enrolled as a medical student at the University of Bern in 1899. She would flourish at university where, again, she was something of a pioneer. There were indeed plenty of Russian female students studying at western universities. That reflected the all-male nature of universities in Russia. But most of the Russians stayed Russian, spending their spare time with fellow Russians. Ida Hoff was evidently keen from the outset to become assimilated in Swiss society. In order to avoid becoming isolated, she was one of a group of Bern students who founded the "Bern Female Students' Association" ("Berner Studentinnenverein"). The female students conducted themselves with some confidence, participating as a group in the opening ceremony in 1903 of a new college building in the city's Grosse Schanze quarter which they made memorable by turning up carrying the slogan "Equal rights - Equal obligations" ("gleiche Rechte – gleiche Pflichten"). Subsequently, they defended themselves against sexist attacks.
Within the group Hoff found like minded contemporaries several of whom became firm lifelong friends. One of these was the international peace activist and (later) professor of biochemistry, Gertrud Woker (1878 - 1968). Another was the mathematician Annie Reineck (later Annie Leuch-Reineck) 1880 - 1978) who became the longstanding president of the Swiss league for Women's Voting Rights. The chronicler of the Swiss feminist movement, Agnes Vogel (later Agnes Debrit-Vogel 1892 - 1974), also earned her activist spurs as a member of the "Bern Female Students' Association".
Frida Kaiser (later Frida Imboden-Kaiser 1877 - 1962) was a contemporary of Ida Hoff who later became a pediatrician at St. Gallen and a campaigner against high levels of infant mortality. The two of them first met at the "Aebischlössli" student hostel. Kaiser helped Hoff find a job as an assistant at the medical Uni-Clinic with the intermist, Hermann Sahli. It was also Kaiser who found Hoff a lawyer who advised and backed her in a renewed - and this time successful - application for Swiss citizenship.
The small but determined group of female students used to meet together each Saturday at the homely "Daheim Women's Restaurant" in Bern's Zeughausgasse (literally: "Armoury Alley") to analyse and bemoan examples of anti-feminism. They also organised lectures, readings and stage events. Hoff herself was never short of imaginative ideas, and helped with production of their association news-sheet.
The "Bern Female Students' Association" became a crucible for the Women's Voting Rights movement. To Hoff it never made sense that women in Switzerland should be able to participate in the workplace, the professions, society and family life, but not in politics. She also recognised that her own education was a privilege, and one that she owed to the women's movement, and this provided an impetus behind several years of intense participation in the executive committee of the "Bern Women's Voting Rights Association" ("Frauenstimmrechtsverein Bern"). But she also campaigned on other social and political issues. She called for the introduction of universal old age and disability insurance (which was finally introduced following a referendum in 1947) and involved herself in the 1933 "Women and Democracy" movement which campaigned for the preservation of democracy in the face of the rising tide of right wing populism which was a feature of the times.
Junior doctor: Senior doctor
Ida Hoff passed her national qualifying exams in Summer 1905 and arranged to move to Berlin in order to obtain experience as a medical assistant at the Moabit Hospital there. It was also in Berlin, at the Women's Clinic of the Charité teaching hospital, that she worked on her dissertation "Beitrag zur Histologie der Schwangerschaft im rudimentären Nebenhorn", a gynaecological study on an aspect of pregnancy: this earned her a doctorate from Bern in 1906. Her doctorate was supervised by the pathologist Theodor Langhans.
Following her return to Bern, even her friends found it sensational that Hoff, as a woman, was able to win the confidence of the great internist, Hermann Sahli, who in 1911 appointed her his senior assistant and then as a senior doctor. As matters turned out, her career with the Uni-Clinic was a brief one. Her appointment at the Sahli's medical Uni-Clinic nevertheless represented a double breakthrough. She was both female and Jewish. Hoff did not engage in Jewish religious practices, but she made no attempt to hide her Jewish provenance and stood out uncompromisingly in opposition to any antisemitic manifestations that she encountered.
Self employed medical practitioner