She was one of the leaders of the German branch of the International Abolitionist Federation, which sought to abolish regulations and criminal laws directed against prostitutes, and proposed instead to eliminate prostitution through moral education of young men and women, and through providing alternative ways by which young women could earn a living.

Anna was given sufficient education at home by governesses and the local pastor for a future career as a wife and mother.

[8] The IAF had been founded by Josephine Butler in England, who chose the term "abolitionism" to refer to freeing prostitutes from forced registration and testing for venereal diseases.

[12] Pappritz joined the League of German Women's Associations (Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine: BDF) and was secretary from 1907 to 1914.

[11] Pappritz met with the Prussian minister of the interior in 1907, and as a result a circular was issued to the police to treat suspected prostitutes more leniently and to ensure that advice or free treatment of sexually transmitted diseases was available.

Pappritz described a draft of a new criminal code published in 1909 as expressing "unconscious male sexual egotism" and said she feared "our 25 years of work has been for nothing."

[14] In the fall of 1911 a new Prussian law on cremation was reported, which contained a provision that female corpses must be examined to determine if they were virgin.

By early January 1912 the Prussian secretary of the interior had repealed the offending clause, but the effect of the scandal was to increase agitation for suffrage in the women's press.

She remained head of the Berlin chapter of the IAF, later called the League for Protection of Women and Youth (Bund für Frauen- und Jugendschutz) until it was dissolved in 1933, despite suffering from ongoing health problems.

[17] There was fierce debate among feminists in Germany about how to handle prostitution, seen as the source of venereal diseases and thus a major health problem.

[10] Concerned about the spread of venereal disease, during World War I the military organized its own brothels with "safe and clean" women, and cracked down on illegal prostitution.

Even Pappritz agreed that the growing numbers of informal prostitutes were a grave threat to the welfare of soldiers, and therefore to the nation.

At the DGBG conference in 1903 Pappritz described at length expert medical opinion that there were no physical or psychological risks to those who abstained from sexual activity.

In 1906 Pappritz supported "regulation" of births so a mother could space them out by at least two years, but in 1911 an article in the Abolitionist criticized contraception as egotistical, weakening the nation demographically and therefore militarily.

[12] However, Pappritz strongly opposed efforts by morality campaigners to tighten up censorship legislation, saying they wanted to censor everything that was politically or religiously liberal.

She thought the drive for censorship revealed "inner unchasteness" that made them "suspect every form of nudity and naturalness of being indecent.

[1] She worked hard to exclude Stöcker's League for the Protection of Mothers from the feminist mainstream, saying it added nothing new either in theory of practice.

[31] Pappritz considered homosexuality "reprehensible, repulsive and disgusting", but also believed that "private relationships between adults are not subject to the criminal law."

The BDF passed a resolution saying "sexual aberrations without injury to legal rights of third persons must remain unpunished.