ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces Margarethe Hilferding, a key figure in the early history of psychoanalysis in Austria, as a revolutionary feminist and socialist thinker, and a leading women’s rights activist of her era. Hilferding is typically insufficiently remembered as the “first”: one of the first women to graduate from the Viennese medical school (often mistakenly remembered as the very first), the first woman to become a full member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, finally the first female president of the Vienna Association for Individual Psychology. The chapter follows the theme of motherhood that took a central role in her psychoanalytic theories, her work with working-class patients, her writings and lectures, as well as her personal life. Hilferding had tirelessly advocated for women’s rights since the early 1900s, particularly for access to birth control and to safe, legal abortions—issues that remain in large parts of the world under a heated debate and unresolved.
