Born in Prague Žižkov, Betty (Božena) Karpíšková (1881–1942) began her public life in Kolín, working in social care while joining the Social Democratic movement. After 1919 she became a municipal social worker in Prague. Karpíšková combined her political and social commitments with journalism. She was an editor of the social democratic outlet for women Women’s Newspaper (Ženské noviny) starting in 1919, and between 1921 and 1938 she served as its editor-in-chief. She campaigned consistently for the political education of women and used the press to connect labour politics with everyday issues faced by women and their families.

Betty Karpíšková, 1920 (Source: Archiv © NADACE LANGHANS PRAHA)

Her parliamentary career began in 1920 when she was elected to the Chamber of Deputies for the Czechoslovak Social Democratic Workers’ Party. She was re-elected in 1925 and moved to the Senate in 1929, serving until 1939. Within the party she held senior positions: she sat on the Central Executive Committee, was part of the Board of Directors, and acted as vice-chair between 1927 and 1938. She also presided over the Central Association of Social Democratic Women.

Karpíšková’s activity extended beyond Czechoslovakia. She represented Czech Social Democracy in the women’s branch of the Labour and Socialist International, joining its five-person presidium in 1927 and chairing it from 1936 to 1938. In the first half of the 1930s, she was also a member of the International Labour Organization’s Correspondence Committee on Women’s Work. Transnational debates about women’s work, social rights, and equality informed her work in Czechoslovakia.

As a parliamentarian, Betty Karpíšková promoted reforms aimed at improving the position of women workers. In 1921 she co-sponsored, together with Czech and German Social Democratic deputies, a draft law on the protection of mothers and infants. The proposal included the establishment of maternity insurance that would provide assistance at childbirth, sickness benefits for twelve weeks before and after birth, and breastfeeding premiums. It also envisioned shelters for unmarried mothers and maternity wards in district hospitals, as well as legal obligations for mothers to attend advisory services, with penalties if these were ignored. The bill stressed financial support for poor mothers, and suggested that the costs be covered by reducing military expenditure. In 1924 Karpíšková supported the landmark law on insurance for employees in case of illness, disability, and old age, underlining that for the first time, domestic servants and women in irregular employment were included. She emphasized the recognition of widowers’ pensions for insured women workers, ensuring that men, like women, could continue to receive their deceased spouses’ pensions. She viewed this as a step toward acknowledging women’s labour as equivalent to men’s. Karpíšková also introduced a resolution requiring state vocational schools to provide free educational courses for working-class women, helping to lift the barriers that kept many of them from accessing training. Some stances of Karpíšková proved so radical as to stir controversy even among those who supported women’s political emancipation. She was a firm supporter of women’s right to bodily self-determination and unfettered access to legal abortion – a stance that alienated other activists of the women’s movement outside of the socialist circles.

After the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1939, Karpíšková remained part of the social democratic circles and was in contact with resistance networks. She was arrested in May 1941, held in Pankrác prison and later in the Theresienstadt ghetto, before being deported to the concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. She was murdered there on 31 October 1942.