Emma Jacobina Christiana Marwedel was a German-born American educator.
Background
Emma Jacobina Christiana Marwedel was born on February 27, 1818 in Münden, near Göttingen, Germany. She was one of five children born to Captain Heinrich Ludwig Marwedel and his wife Jacobina Carolina Christiana Maria (Brokmann) Marwedel. The death of her mother placed a large share of the household work and the care of her brothers and sisters upon her shoulders. It may be that this early experience laid the foundation of her lifelong interest in the welfare of little children and in the training of mothers.
Education
Little is known of her education; whether or not she was a pupil of Froebel, of his widow, or whether her training as a kindergartner was entirely self-acquired are still mooted questions. On the death of her father, left without sufficient means, she was obliged to go to work, thus breaking with the traditions of the social class to which by birth she belonged, but at the same time acquiring an interest which continued throughout her life in the welfare and education of working women. At this time educational facilities for women were meager in Germany and it is certain that what she became was due largely to self-instruction. It was even more difficult for a woman to gain public recognition.
Career
In 1864 she was elected to the board of directors of an association for the promotion of public education in Leipzig, and in 1865 she became a member of the first German association for the advancement of women. In 1867-68 she was directress of the Girls' Industrial School in Hamburg during the first year of its existence. At the same time she conducted a kindergarten of which Elizabeth Palmer Peabody wrote, "It was Miss Marwedel who, in 1867, first introduced me to Froebel's genuine Kindergarten in the city of Hamburg, and inspired me with the courage to make the main object of the remainder of my life to extend the Kindergarten over my own country". While in Hamburg Emma Marwedel spent over a year visiting female industrial schools in France, Belgium, and England, an account of which she published in 1868 under the title, Warum bedürfen wir weibliche Gewerbeschulen? und wie sollen sie angelegt sein?. Soon after this, at the earnest request of Miss Peabody, she emigrated to America. Failing to find the opportunity she had expected for kindergarten work, she established in 1870 near Brentwood, Long Island, a women's cooperative industrial training school. Following the speedy failure of this institution, she went to Washington, D. C. , where for four years she conducted with great success a school of industrial arts, a German-American kindergarten, and a Froebelian training school. Under the combined auspices of the Froebel Union of New England, the United States Bureau of Education, and Caroline Seymour Severance she moved to Los Angeles in 1876 and established there a kindergarten and the first kindergarten normal class conducted in California. Her normal class, which numbered only three pupils, included Katherine Douglas Smith (Kate Douglas Wiggin), Mary Hoyt, and Nettie Stewart. At the end of two years, dissatisfied because of the lack of interest her work had aroused in Los Angeles, she moved her schools to Oakland in 1878, to Berkeley in 1879, and to San Francisco in 1880. In connection with her Pacific Kindergarten Normal School she conducted a primary department and a model kindergarten. After her retirement from active teaching about 1886 until the close of her life, she devoted herself to writing, lecturing, and the improvement of her system of kindergarten materials. In her latter years she suffered increasing financial difficulties and declining health. She died at the German Hospital (later the Franklin Hospital) in San Francisco and was buried in the Mountain View Cemetery, Oakland, Cal.
Achievements
Emma Jacobina is known as apostle of Froebelianism and the kindergarten movement in Germany and in the United States, particularly on the Pacific Coast. She played an important part in the establishment in 1878 of the Silver Street Kindergarten of San Francisco, and in 1879 organized and became the first president of the California Kindergarten Union. The recognition which California early gained as one of the foremost leaders of the kindergarten movement was largely the result of her work. By her educational writings and by addresses delivered throughout the United States she promulgated the ideas not only of Froebel but of Seguin, Preyer, and other educational philosophers and psychologists of her day, and thus became one of the most important leaders in education. Her writings, in addition to those mentioned, include An Appeal for Justice to Childhood (n. d. ), and Games and Studies in Life Forms and Colors of Nature for Home and School (n. d. ).
Views
Emma Marwedel represents the traditional, sense-training type of Froebelianism. Her life was animated by the belief that through the kindergarten and the extension of Froebelian principles to the home and to the higher levels of education, particularly through the industrial arts, lay the path to the prevention of crime and the regeneration of human society. These ideas she embodied not only in her teaching activities but in numerous writings, most notably in Conscious Motherhood, or the Earliest Unfolding of the Child in the Cradle, Nursery and Kindergarten (1887) and in The Connecting Link, to Continue the Three-Fold Development of the Child from the Cradle to the Manual-Labor School (1891).
Connections
There is no exact information about her personal life. Perhaps she was never married.
Father:
Captain Heinrich Ludwig Marwedel
Mother:
Jacobina Carolina Christiana Maria (Brokmann) Marwedel
