Women's Activism NYC

Maria Montessor

1870 - 1952

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Maria Montessor was known as an educator as well as an Italian physician. She is best known for her philosophy of education and her writing on scientific Pedagogy. Maria was an innovator and had created ways where children can naturally learn. She had opened her first school called Montessori school, the Casa dei Bambini, which can otherwise be called the children's house. Maria had traveled the world and wrote about different methods of education to learn by, there has also been more than 22,000 schools that have opened up in at least 110 countries. Maria grew up in Rome, which she was surrounded by education all the time and her mother valued education, Rome was a paradise of libraries, museums, and fine schools. At the age of 13, Maria had entered an all-boys school and had wanted to prepare for a career in engineering. She had however changed her mind, and then she decided to become a doctor, where when she had graduated in the year of 1896 and was one of the very first Italy’s first female physicians. She also had a focus on Psychiatry and had an interest in education and had different methods of teaching children with intellectual and developmental disabilities. In 1900, she had a chance to improve on these methods and she became the new co-director of a new training institute for special education teachers. In 1907, she had opened a childcare center in one of the poor-inner city districts. Maria had written articles and books and was preparing teachers in the Montessori Method. The Montessori Method was accepted worldwide. Maria was a public figure by then, and she had also campaigned on behalf of women's rights. She was a leading feminist voice for better opportunities for women in Italy and beyond.

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