Religion, emancipation, and politics in the confessional women's movement in germany, 1900–1933 *

In his famous 1844 essay on Georg Friedrich Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Karl Marx asserted that the critique of religion was the prerequisite for any critique, and emancipation from religion the foundation of all human liberation. ¹ Although the philosophical underpinning of Marx's theses, which reduce religion to a mere phenomenon of projection and reflection, is disputable, certain historical developments—in particular the formation of the labor movement and the women's movement in Germany—seem to bear out his statement.