Halina Bendkowski (born 28 July 1949 in Gliwice, Poland) is a German journalist, politician, and activist for feminism and the lesbian movement.

Early life and education

Halina Bendkowski was born in Poland as the fourth child of a single mother. In 1956, the family moved to Oberhausen, Ruhr area, North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW).[1] She lived at a Catholic boarding school for girls for two years, where she graduated from high school as an external student. She studied sociology, political science and philosophy at Münster. She completed her studies in 1978 with a master's degree.[2]

Career

In 1987, together with other women, she founded the FrauenfrAKTION as an umbrella organisation in Berlin to network women who worked in government or in administration and management with autonomous feminists, regardless of their party affiliation.[3] From 1990 to 1991, Halina Bendkowski was a member of the Berlin House of Representatives. As an independent, she was elected on the Alliance 90/The Greens list, but then resigned.

In the early 1990s, in the context of the international campaign for women's and human rights, she developed the political-sociological approach of gender democracy,[4] which further developed the concept of gender mainstreaming by providing for the participation of all groups.[5] The first publication to bear this term in its title was a two-volume documentation published by the Austrian Federal Chancellery in 1993 on behalf of Johanna Dohnal: Test the West. Gender Democracy and Violence. The concept of gender democracy was adopted in a more general sense by the Heinrich Böll Foundation in the 1990s. The conception of this term was controversially discussed in numerous feminist discourses.[6]

In 1999, Halina Bendkowski was one of the founding members of the Lesben- und Schwulenverband in Deutschland (LSVD), for which she was national spokesperson for four years. She is the initiator and theoretician of the Civil Partnership Act.

Personal life

In August 2001, she was one of the first women in Berlin to enter into a civil partnership. With her long-term partner, the US-American theatre writer Lydia Stryk, she lives alternately in Berlin and New York City.[7]

Bibliography (selection)

Literature

References

  1. ^ Heide Oestreich: Die Freistil-Interventionistin. In: TAZ. 20. August 2002.
  2. ^ Bendkowski, Halina, 1949– Library of Congress.
  3. ^ Myra Ferree: Varieties of Feminism. German Gender Politics in Global Perspective. Stanford University Press, 2012, ISBN 978-0-8047-5760-7, S. 130.
  4. ^ Geschlechterdemokratie ist wie der Gender Mainstreamingvertrag und der Geschlechtervertrag keine theoretische Kategorie, sondern eine der politischen Losungen, die in den 1990er Jahren eine Verschiebung in der Politik gegen Frauenunterordnung markierten. In: Frigga Haug (Hrsg.): Historisch-kritisches Wörterbuch des Feminismus. Herausgegeben im Auftrag des Instituts für kritische Theorie. Band 1, Hamburg 2003, ISBN 3-88619-295-4, S. 436.
  5. ^ Ilse Lenz: Die Neue Frauenbewegung in Deutschland. 2., aktualisierte Auflage. VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2010, ISBN 978-3-531-17436-5, S. 874.
  6. ^ Halina Bendkowski, Sabine Hark, Claudia Neusüß: Geschlechterdemokratie – ein Streitgespräch: feministischer Aufbruch oder institutionelle Anpassung? In: Femina Politica. 11, No 2/2002, S. 29–40.
  7. ^ Feministin Halina Bendkowski hat geheiratet. Frauentag im Standesamt von Schmargendorf. In: Berliner Zeitung. 10. August 2001.

External links

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