Bertha Pappenheim (1859–1936)

Bertha Pappenheim was born to a prosperous Jewish family in Vienna, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. She attended a girls' school, and upon leaving she was expected only to learn what was need to attract and keep a husband. She led a boring life, helping her mother, reading, and doing needlework. She would later urge other middle-class girls to demand vocational training and higher education. Between 1880 and 1882, Pappenheim was treated for a variety of nervous symptoms by the physician Josef Breuer. Dr. Breuer kept his then-friend Sigmund Freud informed about the case. She was designated "Anna O" to protect her identify, and Dr. Breuer's talking treatment with her became the first known case of psychoanalysis. Dr. Breuer hypnotized Pappenheim and encouraged her to explain how her symptoms first appeared. During the treatment, her symptoms began to disappear; Freud's biographer Ernest Jones considered Pappenheim to have discovered the benefits of catharsis. In 1889, she moved with her mother to Frankfurt and began to do social and volunteer work. She organized Women's Welfare, one of the first modern Jewish social welfare organizations. Women's Welfare set up a day care center, an employment service, and a commission to protect children. In addition, it initiated international outreach programs to help Jews in Eastern Europe. The success of Women's Welfare encouraged Pappenheim to start the League of Jewish Women (JFB in German) in 1904, which she served as its first president. She went on to found kindergartens, community homes, and schools. Her writing, which began in the 1890s, reflected her feminist and Jewish concerns. In 1899, she published a play entitled Frauenrechte (Women's Rights) and a translation of Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Women. She also produced a volume of novellas, In der Trodlerbude, and other works under the pseudonym Paul Berthold. Her best-known book, Sisyphus Arbeit (The Work of Sisyphus), describing the traffic in women and prostitution in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, appeared in 1924. Although she had originally opposed Zionism and the emigration of Jews from Germany, Pappenheim changed her mind after the Nazi regime enacted the anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws in 1935. In the spring of 1936, very ill with cancer, she took to her bed and never left it. She died just in time to escape the Nazis.