Art and Gender

Equal Rights for All! – Equality?

What did women want from Bauhaus? Nothing different than the men: recognition and an equal chance. They wanted to choose the workshops freely - their talent should decide, not their gender. 

And for that, things looked good at the Bauhaus at first: After women were allowed to vote from 1918, the Bauhaus began admitting women to study in 1919 - for example, the weaver and textile designer Gunta Stölzl, the photographer, painter and sculptor Marianne Brandt, the Austrian painter, craftswoman and architect Friedl Dicker, or the (toy) designer Alma Siedhoff-Buscher. The Bauhaus was thus one of the first educational institutions in Germany to do so officially. Apart from a few pioneers, women were at least allowed to attend lectures as guest students from 1906 onwards or in Thuringia from 1907. 

Sometimes laughed at and often underestimated

Bauhaus wanted to be a place for a new togetherness. Women and men worked and lived together. Gunta Stölzl, for example, was the first woman to take on a leading position: as master of the weaving mill. However, she was not equal – at least not in terms of pay. Her salary was noticeably lower than that of her male colleagues. 
In 2015, the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt highlighted these first efforts towards equality in art with the exhibition »STURM-FRAUEN. Frauen der Avantgarde in Berlin 1910-1932«. 


Not only in the arts, but also in other professional fields, women are still generally paid less than men, and they are approached differently than men in job interviews. Mostly less trust is placed in them, as the designer Hanne Willmann describes in an interview with DEAR MAGAZINE: »They argue, for example, that men are responsible for the sofas and that I should design an end table instead. I believe that men are trusted to design larger and more complex products from the beginning.«