Clara Wichmann
Clara Gertrud Wichmann was a German–Dutch lawyer and anarchist feminist activist, who became a leading advocate of criminal justice reform and prison abolition in the Netherlands.
Biography
In 1885, Clara Wichmann was born in Hamburg, the daughter of Carl Ernst Arthur Wichmann and Johanna Theresa Henriette Zeise. In 1902, she studied philosophy and the works of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. She went on to study law between 1903 and 1905, during which she first became critical of the criminal justice system and started to push for its reform.She developed a theory of criminal law that advocated for the abolition of prisons and punitive justice, which she elaborated in her thesis, graduating as a Doctor of Law in 1912. In 1914, she was employed by the Dutch Statistics Office as a lawyer, but was soon promoted to deputy director of the Social Welfare Institute. She collaborated with Jacques de Roos on compiling criminal statistics, and in 1919, she succeeded de Roos as head of the Judicial Statistics Department.
During her studies, she had joined the Dutch feminist movement in 1908, co-founding the and working as its secretary until 1911. She was also on the board of the . She went on to participate in the opposition to World War I and became an anarchist in 1918. She also studied the history of feminism and, from 1914 to 1918, co-authored the encyclopaedia with Cornelia Werker-Beaujon.
She became an activist in the prison abolition movement and campaigned against punitive justice, which she described as "a blot of backwardness, coarseness, shallowness and harshness." In 1919, she established the Comité van Actie tegen de bestaande opvattingen omtrent Misdaad en Straf and co-founded the Bond van Revolutionair Socialistische Intellectuelen. On 21 March 1920, she gave a public speech in which she asserted that crime was rooted in social injustice, and that equitable social relations would make almost all criminal acts disappear. That same year, she co-founded the . She wrote numerous articles for the organisation's newspaper, De Vrije Communist, in which she called for strike actions as a means of non-violent resistance against social injustice.
In 1921, she married Jonas Meijer, a pacifist conscientious objector. The couple were close to the Dutch anarchists and Bart de Ligt. Wichmann died in 1922, a few hours after giving birth to her daughter Hetty Clara Passchier-Meijer.