Charlotte Paulsen

Charlotte's education came largely from governesses: she learned English, French, dancing, piano playing and the social accomplishments appropriate to her expected station in life.

[2] She herself would later recall that through her childhood she was spared from the sight of poverty and deprivation, unaware that more than half of her fellow Hamburg citizens lived on the edge of subsistence.

On 18 August 1814, aged still not quite seventeen, Charlotte Thornton married the Hamburg estate agent Christian Paulsen, in compliance with her father's wishes.

[4] Twenty years older than she was, Paulsen was rather a dull fellow after all the admirers whose company she had enjoyed in London, but he was able to provide her with a relatively comfortable life.

Conservative leaders who imposed a return to their version of the old order at Vienna in 1814 and 1815 had not been able to bury the ideas of enlightenment humanity and rationalism which French revolutionary armies and the administrative genius of Napoleon had disseminated across Europe during the preceding 25 years.

[2][3] In the end, Charlotte Paulsen joined the Hamburg based women's association, "Zur Brudertreue an der Elbe".

The Kindergarten movement was backed particularly strongly both by those advocating democratic structures for Germany and among middle-class women who saw the education of very young children as hugely important.

[2] Additionally, in March 1849 Charlotte Paulsen founded the "Weiblichen Verein für Armen- und Krankenpflege" ("Women's Association for the Care of the Poor and Sick").

However, based on a law dating back to 1732, it was established that homeschooling required no permit, as long as no more than twelve children were taught at a time.

The women now pursued their educational project with smaller groups, using suitably sized rooms in the homes of the more relatively well-to-to backers.

They continued to attract hostility from the authorities because they did not expressly each religion as part of the curriculum, but responded by insisting on the importance of inter-denominational "confessional independence", able to accommodate children from Catholic, Protestant and Jewish families.

After further wrangling, they managed to find and recruit a qualified teacher with the necessary teaching permit and in 1856 opened a "proper" school, centrally located in Hamburg, which at the outset welcomed sixty pupils.

[2][3] Charlotte Paulsen now devoted her life unstintingly to her association for the care of the poor and sick, while campaigning with increasing urgency for religious and political freedom, and advocating women's emancipation.