Käte Duncker

Käte Duncker
Käte Duncker, the teacher
Born	Paula Kathinka Döll (1871-05-23)23 May 1871 Lörrach, Baden
Died	2 May 1953 Bernau bei Berlin, GDR
Occupation	political activist feminist activist politician writer
Political party	SPD KPD
Spouse(s)	Hermann Duncker () (1874-1960)
Children	Hedwig (12 Aug 1899 - 1996) Karl (2 Feb 1903 - 23 Feb 1940) (5 Feb 1909 - 20 Nov 1942)

Käte Duncker (born Kate Döll: 23 May 1871- 2 May 1953) was a German political and feminist activist who became a politician in the Social Democratic Party of Germany and then the Communist Party of Germany.

On 15 October 2013 Germany's "Die Linke" ("The Left") party renamed its meeting room at the Regional Parliament in Thuringia (where she sat as a Communist Party member in the 1920s) the Käte Duncker room ("Käte-Duncker-Saal").

Paula Kathinka Döll was born in Lörrach (Baden), directly across the border to the north of Basel. Her father was a businessman and the family lived reasonably well, but when she was seven her father died and her mother took them to live at Friedrichroda on the edge of the Thuringian Forest, and where her mother ran a small guest house for summer holidaymakers.

She attended an all-girls' school in Friedrichroda and the commercial school in Gotha before moving on to the Teacher Training College in Eisenach between 1888 and 1890. Her ambition to become a teacher had encountered initial opposition from her guardian and her mother, but she nevertheless persisted, passing her qualifying exams in 1890 and teaching, initially, in Friedrichroda. By 1893 she had moved to Leipzig where she taught in a girls' school. In November 1893 she attended a political meeting which was addressed by Clara Zetkin by whom she was greatly impressed. The next year she herself started teaching at evening classes organised by the Leipzig Workers' Education League. It was here that she first met Hermann Duncker (), studying to become a music teacher, and later her husband. However, in 1895 or 1896 she lost her job at the Leipzig school because of her Socialism ("wegen sozialistischer Gesinnung"). She moved to Hamburg where she taught at another all-girls' school. In Hamburg she became involved in the dockworkers' strike which occurred between November 1896 and February 1897. As a result of her support for the strike she was, as before, dismissed from her teaching post. The realisation that the career teaching children which she loved and for which she had struggled, was going to be incompatible with her political involvement, was a heavy blow. She returned to Leipzig where, despite not being enrolled at the university, she was able to attend certain lectures on a "guest basis", notably those delivered by Karl Bücher. It was, she later asserted, as a result of her studies at this time that she produced her first publication, "On the participation of the female sex in employment" ("Ueber die Beteiligung des weiblichen Geschlechts an der Erwerbsthätigkeit"). Her study concluded that industrialisation would expand employment openings for women, and that it would become impossible to restrict women's professional careers.