Verena Rodewald (5 August 1866 – 4 December 1937) was a German Women's rights campaigner and politician (DVP).
Biography
Family provenance
Henriette Marie Verena Rodewald was born (and slightly more than seventy-one years later died) in Bremen. She was born into one of the city's leading mercantile families, the third of her parents' six recorded children. Hermann Georg Rodewald (1814–1891), her father, like his father before him, was an internationally connected businessman. Her mother, born Marie Christine Verena Gildemeister (1840–1914), came from another of the city's leading families, and was a cousin of the journalist-politician (and four times mayor of Bremen), Otto Gildemeister (1823–1902). As she grew up the family lived at Kohlkökerstraße 10, close to the city centre. Verena's younger brother, Hermann Rodewald, later came to prominence as a merchant and senator.
Training
After starting out at an elementary school Verena Rodewald switched to the girls' school of Helene Laweg und Sophie Petr. She then followed the Gymnasium (secondary school) course for women in Berlin between 1897 and 1899. The Gymnasium (secondary school system) was designed to prepare students – under most circumstances only male students – for admission to a university. In 1901 she passed the Abitur (school final exam) at Bremen's Altes Gymnasium (boys' secondary school). There seems to have been an acceptance, by this time, that she was unlikely ever to marry, and the alternative path would have involved finding a respectable career, such as teaching. With the full support – emotionally and financially – of her family she attended the universities of Berlin, Kiel and Heidelberg, studying Germanistics, Anglistics, Philosophy and Philology. Sources are silent over whether she was every permitted to conclude her undergraduate studies by obtaining a first degree. It is known, however, that in 1908 Verena Rodewald received her doctorate from the University of Heidelberg. Her dissertation concerned the use of the "aside" as a device in German theatre. Rodewald was one of the first women anywhere in the German empire to be permitted to receive a doctorate. It is perhaps a sign both of the hurdles she had to overcome and of the extent to which her parents were willing and able to support her financially that by the time she received her doctorate she was 42.