''Courage'' was a German feminist newspaper published monthly from 1976 to 1984.

History

''Courage'' was founded in 1976 by a group of ten

Berlin Berlin ( , ) is the capital and largest city of Germany by both area and population. Its 3.7 million inhabitants make it the European Union's most populous city, according to population within city limits. One of Germany's sixteen constitue ...

women from the

Kreuzberg Kreuzberg () is a district of Berlin, Germany. It is part of the Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg borough located south of Mitte. During the Cold War era, it was one of the poorest areas of West Berlin, but since German reunification in 1990 it ha ...

Women's Centre who wished to create an autonomous

leftist Left-wing politics describes the range of political ideologies that support and seek to achieve social equality and egalitarianism, often in opposition to social hierarchy. Left-wing politics typically involve a concern for those in soci ...

- feminist newspaper. Although they had little prior journalistic training and no start-up capital, their aim was to encourage other women to advocate for increasing power and political responsibility. The title was inspired by the central character of

Bertolt Brecht Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht (10 February 1898 – 14 August 1956), known professionally as Bertolt Brecht, was a German theatre practitioner, playwright, and poet. Coming of age during the Weimar Republic, he had his first successes as a pl ...

's 1939 play ''

Mother Courage and Her Children ''Mother Courage and Her Children'' (german: Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder, links=no) is a play written in 1939 by the German dramatist and poet Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956), with significant contributions from Margarete Steffin. Four theatrical ...

'', whom the editors saw as a "self-directed woman ... not a starry-eyed idealist but neither is she satisfied with the status quo". To raise funds for the printing of the first issue, the editors held a women's festival in Berlin. For the first year of publication, the staff of ''Courage'' worked as volunteers but by 1978 the newspaper's sales were high enough that they were able to earn a reasonable wage for their work. ''Courage'' published articles about a number of taboo topics, and aimed to represent a diverse variety of opinions from within the feminist movement. Some of the issues addressed by ''Courage'' writers included abortion, forced prostitution, women's sexuality, systematic exclusion of women in male-dominated fields, sexual violence, child abuse, women in the military, menstruation, and

female genital mutilation Female genital mutilation (FGM), also known as female genital cutting, female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C) and female circumcision, is the ritual cutting or removal of some or all of the external female genitalia. The practice is found ...

. The newspaper's circulation began at 5,000 and had increased to 20,000 by the third issue; it peaked in the late 1970s with a readership of over 70,000. Four months after the first issue of ''Courage'' was released, another group of German women created '' Emma'', another feminist newspaper (later published as a magazine, and still in publication as of 2011). Before ''Emma'' first publication, the editors of ''Courage'' offered to work together to create a single newspaper but were turned away. Tensions were high and disputes common between the editing teams of both newspapers as they competed in the same market and often published opposing interpretations of feminism. Faced with criticism from ''Emma'' and the male press, conflicts arose amongst the ''Courage'' editors as the newspaper's readership fell. In 1984, they declared bankruptcy and ''Courage'' ceased publication. The title Courage (French for "courage") refers to the main character of Grimmelshausen's novel Trutz Simplex or biography of the arch fraud and country troublemaker Courasche "as a symbol of the militant, independently acting woman".

References

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History

References

Further reading