Yella Hertzka (née Fuchs; 4 February 1873 – 13 November 1948) was an Austrian women's rights and peace activist, school director, and music business executive.

In 1903, Hertzka co-founded Cottage Girls' Lyceum with Salka Goldman [de] to facilitate women's qualifying for university entrance or professional training.

She was appointed administrator for Universal Edition, receiving full control of the business in 1947 despite fighting legal issues with the building owner until her death.

[6] In 1919, she traveled to Scandinavia, lecturing in Norway and Sweden about the WILPF and seeking support for prisoners of war held in Siberia and Turkestan.

[29] In 1924, she became chair of the East European Commission for WILPF,[6] and two years later was appointed to serve on the International Advisory Council of the National Woman's Party.

In November the club was dissolved when Germany annexed Austria and implemented policies to ban women's organizations involving political activities.

[10][33] The same year, Hertzka ended her service as president of the Austrian chapter of the WILPF, when the organization was banned by the Nazi regime.

[36] In the early years of its operation, however, completing the courses and passing the final examination only allowed graduates to participate in the Philosophical Faculty of the University of Vienna as extraordinary students.

During the 1913–1914 term, Goldman adopted the advanced courses required for the reform-realgymnasium examination, which qualified graduates for standard university admission.

[35] Around this time, as their pro-German nationalist leanings surfaced, Hertzka distanced herself from both Goldman and Schirmacher, with whom she had maintained a correspondence for over a decade.

[2][38] She returned to Austria determined to establish a Höhere Gartenbauschule für Frauen (Higher Horticultural School for Women), but it would be several years before she did so.

[2][20] Hertzka often hosted garden parties, attended by many internationally known composers such as Béla Bartók, Zoltán Kodály, Ernst Krenek, Gustav Mahler, Darius Milhaud, and Arnold Schoenberg.

[42][43] In 1913, Hertzka founded the first secondary horticultural school for girls in Austria-Hungary, also located in Kaasgraben, part of Grinzing in the Döbling district.

[2][20][21] The school offered training in horticulture and landscape architecture, opening the fields to women/[44] It also gave general business and law courses,[2] requiring students to grow and market their produce.

[45] Besides practical work in the garden and greenhouse, students attended lectures on botany, drawing, geology, landscaping, growing flowers and vegetables, and soil science.

[36] The school offered the rare opportunity for women to achieve economic independence with training in horticulture and gardening or landscape architecture in Austria-Hungary in the early decades of the twentieth century.

[2][45] Until 1921, it was closely affiliated with an adjacent home economics school run by Marie Wettstein, a colleague in the WILPF before the organizational dispute.

[51][52] Activist friends, such as Balch and Helene Scheu-Riesz, found potential employment positions and were willing to assist her in relocating to the United States.

[56] For the first six months, Hertzka lived in London at Wyldes Farm with friends, Ethel and Raymond Unwin, while trying to obtain a work permit.

[58] Her idealized middle-class ideas of gardening as a profession vanished during her exile, but she chose to continue the arduous work to maintain her independence.

Often without food, warm blankets, and intellectual stimulation, Hertzka relied on her WILPF network to supply her with basic necessities and literature.

Hertzka had developed a heart condition from poor nourishment and hard labor, as well as a skin disease which caused discomfort.

[60] Hertzka became active in the London branch of the WILPF,[51] traveling to Paris in 1939 to attend a meeting of the executive committee on refugees.

[64] Because their activities were limited by the war, the main focus of the WILPF for the duration was assisting members to escape from Axis nations,[65] but they also campaigned for the rights of conscientious objectors, particularly after changes were made to the British conscription laws in 1941.

[60] She was able to recover control of Universal Edition in March 1947, but because of legal disputes with the building custodian was unable to take possession of the facility and begin rebuilding the business.

[68] Per scholar Corinna Oesch, despite Hertzka's prominence, she fell into obscurity, only partly because many of the records by and about her had been destroyed during the Nazi takeover and all of the institutions she created had been Aryanized.

[71] In the twenty-first century, scholars like Elisabeth Malleier [de] began to recover the history of the Austrian activists and the women's movement.

[72] According to scholars Iris Meder and Ulrike Krippner, Hertzka's school played a crucial role in opening the fields of horticulture and landscaping architecture to women.