Waltraud Schoppe

Waltraud Schoppe has served as a teacher and politician in Germany. She left school at a young age and worked as a secretary, later marrying and earning a teaching certificate. She became involved in university politics and the anti-nuclear and women's movements in the 1970s. A founding member of the West German Green Party, she made a taboo-breaking speech in the Bundestag in 1983 on the subject of abortion and marital rape, challenging for the first time the sexism women encountered in the legislature. She was one of the members of the first all-woman party directorates in Germany, when the Green Party elected six women to head the party in 1984.