An activist for the rights of women and children, she sat in the Reichstag of the Weimar Republic for a total of eight years under the Social Democratic Party of Germany.

She attended boarding schools in Stuttgart and Paris, and began writing from a young age about social issues and especially women's rights.

[4] During her time at the Red Cross, she established recreation centres for children and represented the organisation at international conferences.

She, along with 33 other women, was elected a member of the German Reichstag for the periods 1920–1924 and 1928–1932;[5] in the intervening years she undertook an extensive lecture tour in the United States and France.

[1] On 5 March 1933, the day of the parliamentary elections that brought the Nazi Party into power, Schreiber fled Germany to Switzerland.