She received a large inheritance in 1906 and became, in addition to her own campaigning, significant as a benefactress to the Neurology Institute set up by her husband, and a few years later integrated into the newly established University of Frankfurt.
[2] In 1886 Anna Goldschmidt married the young anatomist-neurologist Ludwig Edinger, a scientist of talent, energy and influence, who would develop an international reputation in connection with a number of specialisms.
She was then able creatively to adapt and where appropriate implement medical and socio-political ideas acquired through her close involvement in her husband's career in some of her own activities, also opening up areas of public work and engagement for other woman.
[3] Sources make little mention of Anna Edinger's role as a mother, which in wealthy families would generally be delegated to senior household servants, to the extent practicable.
As a member of the executive committee of the Frankfurt group she immediately stood out, along with the tobacco heiress Marie Pfungst,[11] on account of her ambitions for the association.
It was also in 1895 that Erdinger published a ground-breaking article in the monthly women's news magazine "Die Frau" ("The Woman") on the subject of home-care for the poor ("Hausarmenpflege").
[2] In 1900 she was among the co-founders of the Licht- und Luftbad Niederrad (loosely, "Light and air bath"), a stretch of green parkland alongside the south bank of the River Main set up as a prophylaxis against tuberculosis, initially, at her own expense in Frankfurt-Sachsenhausen.
A decade earlier she had been concerned with social welfare in Frankfurt but now, reacting to the way in which the same pressures and issues arose across the country, her own approach became more and more supra-regional and, on occasion, international.
Both through the sheer power of her charitable commitment and on account of her personal knowledge of the desperate social plight of many women, she continued to focus her attention on the fight against female poverty.
In addition to attending to her public social welfare and family responsibilities, Anna Erdinger continued to support her husband in his work to the full extent possible.
[2][13][14] Balancing family duties with support for her husband's research work and her co-ordination and management activities involving local welfare charities, along with the BdF, was presumably a challenge.
In an age of increasingly untrammeled jingoism, her uncompromising commitment pacifism (in combination, frequently, with her feminism) attracted hostility from many backers and members of the more mainstream women's organisations.
Despite the travel difficulties presented by a war in which most of the countries from which the delegates came (though not, in military terms, the Netherlands) were engaged, this Hague Conference was duly held between 26 April 1915 and 1 May 1915.
The shared objectives of the conference delegates were to provide a forum for energetic protest against the war and to establish a set of binding principles for a new and better world order.
[2][16] The stresses of war had led to political polarisation in Germany as elsewhere, and the BdF refused to have anything to do with the Hague Conference, arguing that participation would run counter to national duty.
The Social Democrat ladies suddenly rediscovered their "patriotism" and, in a development which both echoed and contrasted with the split within the SPD itself, it was now the BdF's "middle-class peaceniks", such as Edinger, who were pushed into positions of opposition.
This rigidly exclusionist approach was greeted by Edinger with incomprehension and exasperation: she was unable to comprehend hos it could be construed as "not patriotic" to participate in a conference that opposed a war that "nobody wanted".