Marie Tůmová

Marie Tůmová (12 June 1866 – 1 May 1925) was a Czech women's suffragist and a teacher. In 1908, using a legal loophole, Tůmová was among the first three women to unsuccessfully run to be elected to the Bohemian Diet.

Career

Teaching Marie Tůmová worked as a teacher and, during World War I, became the principal of a municipal girls' school in Žižkov – a first woman to helm a municipal school in Bohemia. In 1919–1925, she worked on behalf of the Czechoslovak Ministry of Education in Carpathian Ruthenia and Slovakia, but malnutrition and bad living conditions led to a fatal illness. Tůmová represented the committee abroad, traveling to Stockholm, Rome, Bucharest, Budapest and London. She ran in the Vysoké Mýto-Skuteč-Hlinsko voting district and received around 200 votes. None of the women candidates secured a seat in the assembly, but the general public was shocked by how many votes had been cast in their favour. Her parents were the journalist, writer and politician Karel Tůma and Marie Čelakovská, whose father was the poet František Čelakovský.