Maria Schmitz

Maria Schmitz (5 February 1875 – 9 July 1962) was a German teacher, a persistent campaigner for women's education, and a politician of the Catholic Centre Party. She served as a member of the Weimar National Assembly ("pre-parliament"), convened to agree a post-imperial German constitution, during 1919/1920.

Biography Maria Schmitz was born into a Catholic family in Aachen. Carl Hubert Matthias Schmitz (1842–1921), her father, was an architect and an Aachen city councillor. Her mother, born Pauline Bohlen (1848–1917), was the eldest of four siblings, of whom two had become nuns. In 1903 she was offered and rejected a post as a private tutor to the daughter of Archduchess Marie Valerie of Austria, thereby turning down the opportunity to educate a granddaughter of the Emperor of Austria. She was a member of its executive board between 1907 and 1962, and its chair or deputy chair between 1907 and 1921. With others, she campaigned strongly in favour of full voting rights for women. She was also a member of the National Conference on Schools in June 1920. Under Schmitz the VkdL developed from being an advocacy body to becoming an educational institution in its own right, creating programmes for training, education and schools policy. A particular priority for Schmitz involved the establishment of pedagogic academies as places for teacher training and, more specifically, backing the academic education of women.

The consistency and wisdom with which Maria Schmitz backed the preservation of Christian values in education earned her great respect from pupils and colleagues alike. However, her continuing advocacy of "celibacy" for women teachers, even if it met with the approval of the church establishment, was already beginning to look rather out of date by the end of the 1950s. (For an earlier generation, across and beyond Catholic Europe, it would have been completely normal for women teachers to abandon teaching and concentrate on their duties as wives and mothers in the event of marriage.)

Honours and awards