August Bebel

August Bebel (1840–1913) was a German socialist leader and one of the founders of the Social Democratic Party. A turner by trade, born in Deutz near Cologne, he joined the workers' movement in Leipzig and in 1869 helped found the Social Democratic Workers' Party with Wilhelm Liebknecht. He sat in the Reichstag for most of his life, opposed the war of 1870 and was imprisoned for treason, and led the party through the years of the Anti-Socialist Laws to its rise as Germany's largest party. His book Woman and Socialism (1879) was widely read in the socialist movement.