Provenance and early years Meta Heinrichs was born, as she would later put it, "in a small apartment belonging to the local
'Arbeiterwohlfahrt' (''workers' welfare association'')", alongside the main street connecting the little towns (as they were at the time) of
Höchst and
Nied, a short distance to the west of the city of
Frankfurt am Main (into which the entire area has subsequently been incorporated). She was still very small when the family relocated, to the
Dalberger House, a substantial residence directly opposite
the historic castle-palace in nearby Höchst. The
Dalberger House came with a long history and with its own large plot of land, on which her father found the space to establish a business manufacturing and marketing gelatine for the fast growing photographic and pharmaceutical industries. The
Dalberger House in which Meta grew up with her family was located in the old heart of
Höchst, which was expanding rapidly at the time, and where she attended primary school till 1874. There was no secondary school that accepted girls in
Höchst, so she transferred to the prestigious
"Elisabethenschule", an all-girls secondary school on the
north side of
Frankfurt itself. Unusually for school girls at that time, between 1874 and 1880 she commuted to and from school each day by train. After
successfully completing her schooling, Heinrichs spent a year in
Belgium during 1879–80.
First marriage Meta Heinrichs married the chemist, Wilhelm Hammerschlag (1853–1889), while she was still, by the standards of her social class at that time, relatively young, probably in 1885. The couple made their new home together at
Elberfeld in the industrialising region surrounding
Wuppertal. Her husband was employed nearby at the research centre of the dye-stuffs company known at that time as
"Farbenfabriken vorm. Friedrich Bayer & Co". The couple's daughter, Luise Ernestine (1886–1974), was born at Elberfeld on 26 April 1886. In 1887, she returned to the
Frankfurt region with her husband and child when Wilhelm Hammerschlag became co-owner of "Friedrich Weisbrod & Co.", a company manufacturing
photographic dry plates (which were manufactured using gelatin emulsions such as those produced by Wilhelm Heinrichs, Meta's father). One source states that she acted in this way because she was influenced by her father's social commitment, while another states that she was probably motivated through becoming aware of the hardships endured by her father's factory workers: the two interpretations are not necessarily mutually exclusive. The 1890s were a period during which women – generally from the haute-bourgeoisie – across
Germany were forming organisations to energise a range of causes including those as those which concerned Meta Hammerschlag. In 1894 she became a member of the
"Frankfurter Frauenbildungsverein" (''"... women's education association"). The next year she joined the Frankfurt branch of the newly founded
"Allgemeiner Deutscher Frauenverein" ("... general women's association"''). In 1898 she accepted the chairmanship of the Frankfurt branch of "Frauenbildung–Frauenstudium" (devoted to women's education issues). The next year she co-founded a Frankfurt section of the
"Frankfurter Vereine für Armenpflege und Wohltätigkeit" ("... association for poverty relief and welfare action"). Members called for the perceived increase in prostitution to be addressed not with criminal law solutions, but by improved welfare and medical support for the women involved. At the same time, between 1910 and 1912 Meta Hammerschlag chaired the Hessen-Nassau Provincial Association for Women's Voting Rights, alongside which she was a member of the extended executive committee of the "Prussian State Association" for "Women's Voting Rights". (Frankfurt and most of the surrounding region, including the
Duchy of Nassau, had been incorporated into the
Kingdom of Prussia in
1866.) She was one of three co-publisher-producers of the short-lived monthly journal "Frauen-Zukunft" (''"Women's Future"'').
SPD Before 1908 women had been banned from participation in politics. It is fair to add that the constitutional prohibition had
not been inferred with and enforced with equal conviction in every part of
Germany. Nevertheless, across most of Germany, and especially in
Prussia, national and state-level constitutional provisions been had widely been interpreted as a ban on membership of a political party for those German citizens who were also women. Just three year later, in 1911, Meta Hammerschlag joined the
Social Democratic Party (SPD). The move would have been considered an unusual one in view of her middle-class origins. The SPD was still outside the political mainstream in the eyes of Germany's political establishment which, thanks to unevenly configured voting districts and impressively
unequal voting systems and rules across – especially –
Prussia, still
dominated the
Reichstag (national parliament) in Berlin. Closer to home, Hammerschlag had by this time become one of the leading women progressives in the Frankfurt political firmament.
Second marriage Through her party membership Meta Hammerschlag very quickly came across the journalist-politician
Max Quarck. Over the next few years they would work closely together on a shared political and social agenda which included the rights of women. Dr.
Max Ernst Quarck was a long-standing
SPD activist who had been attending national party congresses as a delegate from
Frankfurt am Main regularly since 1894. He had been a member of the Frankfurt
City Council since 1901 (initially as the only SPD councillor). In
January 1912 – after a series of electoral disappointments – he had been elected to membership of
the Reichstag (national parliament), representing the Frankfurt electoral district. Initial impressions, when Meta Hammerschlag met Max Quarck for the first time in 1911, were anything but cordial, however. In the course of a meeting held to prepare for the
general election of January 1912, the two of them argued passionately about various women's political issues. It took a carefully drafted "letter of rapprochement" to forge a wary truce: sources indicate that Dr. Quarck was won round to Mrs. Hammeraschlag's point of view. Five years later, in December 1916, the two of them married. Despite the 22-year difference in their ages, the two women had much in common in terms of their political beliefs, objectives and achievements. They formed a close friendship and collaborated tirelessly to restore the quality of welfare-related benefits provided to workers in Frankfurt. Financial pressures were eased in April 1952 when the Frankfurt city authorities agreed to provide Meta Quarck-Hammerschlag with a "small honorary pension". Further recognition followed in November 1952, when the government of the recently inaugurated
"German Federal Republic" (West Germany) awarded Quarck-Hammerschlag the
"Order of Merit" ("Verdienstkreuz am Bande"). On 11 August 1954, in the presence of her daughter, Meta Quarck-Hammerschlag died at Frankfurt am Main, a few months short of what would have been her ninetieth birthday. == The family home and the coach house ==