Meta Quarck-Hammerschlag (born Meta Heinrichs: 21 December 1864 – 11 August 1954) was a German social reformer and women's rights activist. She had a number of 'firsts' to her name: she was the first woman to serve as a member of the Frankfurt city council ("Magistrat"), which she did between 1919 and 1924 and again between 1926 and 1933. Through that period the focus of her work remained, as before, on welfare issues and youth work.
Life Provenance and early years Meta Heinrichs was born, as she would later put it, "in a small apartment belonging to the local 'Arbeiterwohlfahrt' (workers' welfare association)", alongside the main street connecting the little towns (as they were at the time) of Höchst and Nied, a short distance to the west of the city of Frankfurt am Main (into which the entire area has subsequently been incorporated). She was still very small when the family relocated, to the Dalberger House, a substantial residence directly opposite the historic castle-palace in nearby Höchst. The Dalberger House came with a long history and with its own large plot of land, on which her father found the space to establish a business manufacturing and marketing gelatine for the fast growing photographic and pharmaceutical industries. Meta was the eldest of her parents' five recorded children – all girls. Her father, Chrysostomos Wilhelm Heinrichs (1836–1908), was a successful entrepreneur-manufacturer who during her childhood was becoming wealthy. Her mother, born Maria Sophia Luise Saurmann (1842–1932), came from a well-established local family. The Dalberger House in which Meta grew up with her family was located in the old heart of Höchst, which was expanding rapidly at the time, and where she attended primary school till 1874. There was no secondary school that accepted girls in Höchst, so she transferred to the prestigious "Elisabethenschule", an all-girls secondary school on the north side of Frankfurt itself. Unusually for school girls at that time, between 1874 and 1880 she commuted to and from school each day by train. The family home was comfortable, while the family was in some ways non-conformist. Her parents encouraged her love of reading. The Heinrichs, her father's ancestors had been among the first to declare their support for the French Revolution, and had lived through the short-lived Mainz Republic in 1793. It was, perhaps, no more than the result of an inherited family trait that Meta Heinrichs would always cultivate a certain resolute eccentricity. After she grew up and became politically involved she smoked a pipe and cigars, "not because she liked it, but to make a point". Those who knew her were also struck by the extent to which she loved to talk, and was general successful in avoiding being interrupted.
After successfully completing her schooling, Heinrichs spent a year in Belgium during 1879–80.
First marriage Meta Heinrichs married the chemist, Wilhelm Hammerschlag (1853–1889), while she was still, by the standards of her social class at that time, relatively young, probably in 1885. The couple made their new home together at Elberfeld in the industrialising region surrounding Wuppertal. Her husband was employed nearby at the research centre of the dye-stuffs company known at that time as "Farbenfabriken vorm. Friedrich Bayer & Co". The couple's daughter, Luise Ernestine (1886–1974), was born at Elberfeld on 26 April 1886. In 1887, she returned to the Frankfurt region with her husband and child when Wilhelm Hammerschlag became co-owner of "Friedrich Weisbrod & Co.", a company manufacturing photographic dry plates (which were manufactured using gelatin emulsions such as those produced by Wilhelm Heinrichs, Meta's father). The sudden death, following a heart attack, of Wilhelm Hammerschlag on 24 January 1889 left Meta, still aged just 24, unexpectedly widowed. Unlike many single parents she was nevertheless financially independent and, at this stage, secure. Nevertheless, she had become by definition more of an outsider than before. At that time, in the words of one commentator, "being a single parent in the middle class family milieu was less than ideal".
Creative widowhood Despite eventually remarrying, Meta Hammerschlag would continue to use her first husband's surname till she died, nearly seventy years later: widowhood nevertheless opened up certain opportunities. She launched herself as a social activist. In 1892 she was an early member, and according to at least one source a co-founder, of the "Frankfurter Hauspflegeverein" ("Frankfurt Home-care Association"), which provided families in which the housewife-mother was out of action due to childbirth or illness with the services of a qualified home carer. One source states that she acted in this way because she was influenced by her father's social commitment, while another states that she was probably motivated through becoming aware of the hardships endured by her father's factory workers: the two interpretations are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
In the aftermath of her husband's death she returned to living with her parents, for whom 1892 was also a year of changes. Her father was involved in a merger between the gelatine factory he had built up beside his home with a complementary business in Frankfurt, following which the Heinrichs relocated again, this time to a large "Gründerzeit" villa along the Röderbergweg in east-central Frankfurt. Her father, who had now become a wealthy man of leisure but also if considerable energy, involved himself closely in his eldest daughter's welfare work. The relationship was evidently a collaborative one. The new family home had a gardener's/gatekeeper's lodge which Meta repurposed as an office. Her commitment to liberating women and women's voting rights was as intense as her commitment to social justice: she used her office for both causes, setting up a little teaching agency. She was a passionate advocate for girls' education, which at a time when mainstream education reformers were generally interested only in educating boys. Meta Hammerschlag promoted the causes in which she believed. Beyond personal commitment she was also able to back her beliefs with money. Among the causes she backed there was a common theme: "She felt the necessity for socially disadvantaged people to obtain qualifications".
The 1890s were a period during which women – generally from the haute-bourgeoisie – across Germany were forming organisations to energise a range of causes including those as those which concerned Meta Hammerschlag. In 1894 she became a member of the "Frankfurter Frauenbildungsverein" ("... women's education association"). The next year she joined the Frankfurt branch of the newly founded "Allgemeiner Deutscher Frauenverein" ("... general women's association"). In 1898 she accepted the chairmanship of the Frankfurt branch of "Frauenbildung–Frauenstudium" (devoted to women's education issues). The next year she co-founded a Frankfurt section of the "Frankfurter Vereine für Armenpflege und Wohltätigkeit" ("... association for poverty relief and welfare action").
Karlsruhe In 1899 Meta Hammerschlag relocated with her daughter to Karlsruhe in Baden. Her daughter Luise Ernestine ("Liesel") was about to become a teenager, and as long as she remained in Frankfurt would be prevented from sitting the Abitur exam on account of her gender. The Abitur was important because, under normal circumstances, it opened the way to university-level education. By moving away from Frankfurt Hammerschlag made it possible – at least in theory – for her daughter to qualify for admission as a student – or at least as a "guest attendee" at lectures – at Heidelberg University. Between 1899 and 1907, living in Karlsruhe, Meta Hemmaerslag was able to focus on her daughter's education. During 1904 Liesel Hammerslag sat for and passed her Abitur. During 1905 she embarked on a course at Heidelberg in Philology and Art History which according to one source led to her obtaining a doctorate by the time of her marriage, which took place in 1909.
In 1905 Mother and daughter took a lengthy trip to Italy. It was one of a number of visits to Italy – possibly in connection with Liesel's study of art history – while the two of them were living in Karlsruhe. A few years later, in 1909, when Liesel Hammerschlag married Heinrich Ruberl, an engineer, the event was solemnised in Florence, to be followed in due course by the births of Liesel Hammerschlag/Ruberl's children, Meta Hammerschlag's three grandsons.
Return to Frankfurt During the summer of 1907 Meta Hammerschlag returned to Frankfurt, where initially she moved in with the family of her youngest sister, Leonore "Leno" Homberger (1880–1938), who had married a cardiologist. She had evidently never severed her links with the "Frankfurter Hauspflegeverein", in which her sister was also actively involved, and other welfare organisations with which she had engaged eight years before, and now had no difficulty in resuming her sociopolitical activism. A year later, on 15 June 1908, her father died. Her mother continued to live in the east-end family villa along the Röderbergweg. Meta's mother took over the administration of her late husband's remaining business interests, and Meta herself moved in to share the family home with her mother.
Through the "Frankfurter Hauspflegeverein" she became involved in the committee with organisational responsibilities in respect of the Gellertstraße widowers home that had been opened in 1905 on the north side of the city. After 1909, when the home was transferred to a specialist housing association mandated to replace the home for s block of small apartments to accommodate fathers whose wives had died and their children, she remained engaged in the project, chairing its executive committee. Between 1907 and 1911 she also chaired the "Verband Fortschrittlicher Frauenvereine" ("League of progressive [i.e. relatively left-wing] Women's Associations"), which meant she became, in 1907, a member of the executive committee of the nationwide "Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine" ("Federation of German Women's Associations").
Also in 1907 Hammerschlag was a co-founder of the Frankfurt branch of the "League for the Maternity Protection" ("Bund für Mutterschutz"), becoming a member of the executive committee overseeing league activities in the Frankfurt region. The league was committed to improving the condition and status of mothers in legal, economic and social terms. She was also highly active for many years at the start of the century in the International Abolitionist Movement which, in the context of Germany at the time, had little to do with the legacies of Anglo-American slavery, but was a widespread campaigning to put an end to the criminalisation of prostitution. At or shortly before the beginning of 1908 she took on the chair of the Frankfurt branch association, also being a member representing Germany in the International Abolitionist Federation. Members called for the perceived increase in prostitution to be addressed not with criminal law solutions, but by improved welfare and medical support for the women involved. There were many changes in Meta Hammerslag's life over the next couple of decades, but membership of the International Abolitionist Federation was one role that she would retain till 1928. In 1909 she became the first chairwoman of the newly established "League for the Support and Care of the Poor and of Orphans" ("Verband zur Förderung der Armen- und Waisenpflege") of which, according to some sources, she had also been a co-founder.