She attended a school for young ladies and, as deemed appropriate for a middle-class girl, received instructions in piano and music theory.

[2] She finished gymnasium in Stuttgart, where she took violin lessons from Edmund Singer, and was a schoolmate of Elly Ney.

"[4] Although her father stated that "nothing of the sort can happen in my family", Rüling started a relationship with a woman by 1904 and took up activism.

She was eager to see an alliance between LGBT campaigners and the growing women's rights movements, calling upon the latter to point out "how very destructive it is for homosexuals to enter into marriage.

"[4] The Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, the world's first LGBT advocacy group, invited Rüling to speak at its conference in Berlin on 9 October 1904.

[6] On 27 October 1904, Rüling gave a speech to Friedrich Radszuweit's Bund für Menschenrecht, another organisation working advocating gay rights, and was briefly a member.

[2] From 1914 until the mid-1920s, her writings were regularly published in Neue Deutsche Frauenzeitung, a right-wing paper with moderate views on women's rights.