Elisabeth Gerdts-Rupp (born Elisabeth Rupp: 23 November 1888 - 18 March 1972) was a German jurist, lyric poet and a respected ethnologist. Life Family Provenance and earlier years Elisabeth "Lisel" Rupp was born in Ravensburg, a mid-sized town which at that time had still not fully recovered its prosperity following the predations of the Thirty Years War more than two centuries earlier, located a short distance away from Lake Constance in the extreme south of Germany. She was the eldest of her parents' three recorded children. Erwin von Rupp (1855–1916), Lisel's father, was a senior judge. In 1896, while she was still young, her father was promoted, as a result of which the family relocated to Stuttgart which is where she successfully completed her schooling at a private all-girls' Gymnasium (secondary school) in 1906. Both her siblings also went on to achieve a measure of prominence in their different fields: Maria Rupp (1891–1956) became a sculptor while Hans Georg Rupp (1907-1989) followed his father into the judiciary, sitting as a member of the West German Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe for a quarter of a century between 1951 and 1975. There are indications in her autobiography that Lisel Rupp was not hugely impressed by the city in which she spent the second half of her childhood. It was nevertheless important to the way that her career subsequently unfolded that in 1904 the school she attended had become only the second in the whole of Germany to start preparing girls for the Abitur. The Abitur was (and still is) the school leaving exam: passing it opened the way to a university-level education which had traditionally been a privilege reserved to men. University She moved on to study Jurisprudence at Straßburg in 1909 or 1910, later progressing to Lepizig and Berlin. She was encouraged to attend university by her mother, even though her father (until persuaded otherwise by his wife and daughter) had foreseen for Elisabeth a future as a wife and mother rather than as an academic. He was somewhat placated by her decision to study for a legal degree, though her own autobiographical writings indicate in the event she was also able to find time for other subjects alongside the law course. There are also hints of a full and active social life, as "the only woman among a hundred men". In 1913 she received her doctorate in jurisprudence for a