Lida Gustava Heymann grew up in an affluent, bourgeois merchant family and attended a higher girls' school in Hamburg and a boarding school in Dresden. She returned to Hamburg in 1885, taught at a school for underprivileged children, and managed a sewing school. After the death of her father in 1896, she lived a financially self-sufficient life thanks to her inheritance. She financed social projects such as a women's center with childcare and a lunch service. She established a women's counseling center and organized presentations and musical performances.
In 1896, she met her future partner Anita Augspurg at the first international women's congress in Berlin. The two women would go on to fight for women's equality together from the turn of the century onwards. In 1902, Heymann was one of the founding members of the German Society for Women's Right to Vote. From 1914 to 1918, she publicly demanded an immediate cessation of the war.
She took part in the 1918-19 revolution as a member of the Provisional National Assembly in Bavaria. Starting in 1919, she was Vice-President of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (IFFF) and co-editor of the journal Frau im Staat, which firmly warned against the anti-semitic terror of the Nazis. Meetings of the IFFF were also violently disrupted as a result. In 1923, Heymann, along with a women's delegation, made an unsuccessful demand for the expulsion of Adolf Hitler. More and more, Heymann and Augspurg felt estranged in the "former city of art". Munich has developed into a "dying city": "sick, war- and beer-dulled" (Frau im Staat, July 1928). The two ladies frequently traveled abroad. The last IFFF peace demonstration was held in Munich in January 1933.
Heymann was abroad with Anita Augspurg in late January 1933. She did not return to Germany after the Nazis seized power. The Munich office of the IFFF was vandalized in March 1933, the collected materials of the German women's movement were destroyed, and their property confiscated. She moved to Switzerland with Anita Augspurg. In 1941, she wrote the memoirs Experienced – Observed, which, despite periods of resignation, are remarkably optimistic: "Our possessions and wealth could be taken from us, but not the work we did in the fight for liberty, justice, and peace" (Heymann, p. 314).
Lida Gustava Heymann died of cancer in 1943. Until the reissue of her memoirs in 1972, she and her work were almost forgotten. Only recent studies since 2001 have acknowledged the significance of this dedicated feminist.
