[1][2][3] Albertine Badenberg was born in Steele, at that time a manufacturing town outside Essen (into which it has subsequently been subsumed), at the heart of the rapidly industrialising Ruhr region.
She then attended a (single sex) teacher training college in Koblenz, passing her final exams in 1885, which qualified her to teach at middle and senior schools (for girls).
The sudden death of her father in March 1888 put an end to her career and travel plans, however, and she returned to Germany, finding herself at the age of 22 responsible not just for supporting herself, but also for her widowed (and thereby impoverished) mother and six younger siblings.
[1] Badenberg had already joined the recently formed Association of Catholic Women Teachers ("Verein katholischer deutscher Lehrerinnen" / VkdL), and on returning from Italy she engaged actively with it.
Her proposal as to how the association could acquire a more prominent public profile resulted in the launch in 1900 of "Christliche Frau" ("Christian Woman"), a news-magazine and a mouth-piece of the Catholic women's movement.
[7] However, in the aftermath of national military defeat and the emperor's abdication new constitutional arrangements became unavoidable in 1918, and the provisional government published a declaration that all future elections to public bodies would take place using a system of secret ballots and proportional representation, open to all persons aged at least 20, whether male or female.
In December 1924 she was elected a member of the Prussian parliament ("Landtag"), representing the Düsseldorf-East electoral district, and taking a special interest in wages issues.