“THE WOMEN’S MOVEMENT is a historical and cultural necessity. Homosexuality is a historical and cultural necessity, and homosexuality is an obvious and natural bridge between man and woman.” With this pronouncement in a speech delivered just one century ago, in Germany, Anna Rüling became the first known lesbian activist.
Until very recently, little had been known about the life of Anna Rüling. She gave her interesting and expressive speech—“What Interest Does the Women’s Movement Have in Solving the Homosexual Problem?”—in 1904 before the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee. The Committee, the first gay organization in world history, was established in Berlin in 1897 by Magnus Hirschfeld. In her speech, Rüling brought homosexual rights and women’s rights together under one umbrella. She congratulated the Committee for its support of women’s rights and for including lesbians, along with homosexual men, in its fight for equal rights.
The involvement of lesbians in the worldwide women’s movement continues to be as important an issue today as it was at the time of Rüling’s speech. At the outset of her speech, Rüling makes the point that women have been considered only as an afterthought in the fight for equal rights. Although she’s not complaining, she suggests that this is due to the general absence of laws against the practice of sexual acts between women—men were not so lucky—that has kept women on the sidelines in the fight for sexual liberty. Rüling uses both the term “homosexuality,” which was coined by Karl Maria Kertbeny in 1868, and the term “Uranism,” which was coined by Karl Heinrich Ulrichs in 1862.
Michael Lombardi-Nash is an independent scholar and translator who has dedicated much of his career to translating early German works related to the LGBT liberation movement.
