Allgemeiner Österreichischer Frauenverein

[3] After the Revolution of 1848, a minority of women who owned significant property or a business had been given the right to vote in some local municipalities, and from 1861 also for the Landtag (Austria-Hungary) [de], but not for the actual legislative assembly, the Imperial Council.

From the middle of the 1890s, the club campaigned for a reform of marital and family law, and championed the issues of middle-class working women and female civil servants.

Between 1893 and 1897 the monthly party paper Das Recht der Frau (The right of the woman) was published with the help of liberal politician Ferdinand Kronawetter and his Voksstimme (The people's voice).

After a fallout between Fickert and Mayreder and their associate Marie Lang, publication was ceased, and the new magazine became Neues Frauenleben (New lives of women) which was circulated between 1902 and 1918.

But Auguste Fickert demanded that the AÖFV be represented in the new organization's executive committee, and wrote critical articles for the Neue Frauenleben, in which she accused the BÖFV of being too unpolitical.

[2] Already in 1895, on initiative from Fickert a consulting service called Rechtsschutzstelle had been established in Vienna, which gave (especially poor and unmarried) women pro bono legal advice.

Originally this counseling was done in Fickert's private home, but later the city of Vienna allowed the use of an office in a public building; by 1901 the service operated from three separate places, and a year later it had grown so much that it was organized as its own section of the AÖFV.

This prompted the AÖFV to leave the umbrella organization, which in turn resulted in the protest and resignation of 24 members of the Allgemeiner Österreichischer Frauenverein, amongst them Marianne Hainisch.