Although they had little prior journalistic training and no start-up capital,[1] their aim was to encourage other women to advocate for increasing power and political responsibility.
The title was inspired by the central character of Bertolt Brecht's 1939 play Mother Courage and Her Children, whom the editors saw as a "self-directed woman ... not a starry-eyed idealist but neither is she satisfied with the status quo".
[2] Courage published articles about a number of taboo topics, and aimed to represent a diverse variety of opinions from within the feminist movement.
[2] Four months after the first issue of Courage was released, another group of German women created Emma, another feminist newspaper (later published as a magazine, and still in publication as of 2011).
Tensions were high and disputes common between the editing teams of both newspapers as they competed in the same market and often published opposing interpretations of feminism.