Alice Zimmern

Alice Louisa Theodora Zimmern (22 September 1855 – 22 March 1939) was an English writer, translator, and suffragist. Her books made a significant contribution to debate on the education and rights of women.

Early years and education Zimmern was born at Postern Street, Nottingham, Nottinghamshire. She was the youngest of three daughters of the lace merchant Hermann Theodore Zimmern, a German Jewish immigrant, and his wife Antonia Marie Therese Regina Zimmern, née Leo, sister of Carl Leo, a syndic of Hamburg. The scholar and political scientist Alfred Eckhard Zimmern was one of her cousins.

Zimmern was educated at a private school and at Bedford College, London, before entering Girton College, Cambridge in 1881 to read Classics.

In 1893, she and four other women were awarded Gilchrist scholarships to study the US education system. They were: Miss A. Bramwell, B.Sc., Lecturer at the Cambridge Training College; Miss S. A. Burstall, B.A., Mistress at the North London Collegiate School for Girls; Miss H. M. Hughes, Lecturer on Education at University College, Cardiff; Miss Mary Hannah Page, Head Mistress of the Skinners Company's School for Girls, Stamford Hill. Each woman received £100 to pursue their studies in the US for two months.

This resulted in her book Methods of Education in America (1894), in which she praised the articulacy of American school students and their enthusiasm for classic English literature, but noted that their written work and their textbooks were of a poor standard and the teaching of American history ludicrously patriotic.

Zimmern ceased to teach in schools in 1894, but continued to tutor private students. In the contrary, she was a pacifist. Other works by Zimmern include Demand and Achievement, The International Women's Suffrage Movement (1912), a translation of Paul Kajus von Hoesbroech's Fourteen Years a Jesuit (1911), and Gods and Heroes of the North (1907). Zimmern also supported the creation of the first library of international feminism as she oversaw the library at the International Women's Franchise Club in Grafton Street in Central London. She was limited by her arthritis.