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.

[2][3] From the start of the century Maria Schmitz placed herself in the front-line of the struggle for access to a comprehensive range of properly designed and respected study options for women.

This approach, which was clearly at the heart of her own pedagogical activism, was in many ways not too far removed from the distilled wisdom, on the subject of education, to be found in many of the more progressive parts of the church.

Schmitz was elected as a Catholic Centre Party member to the Weimar National Assembly, convened to agree a post-imperial German constitution.

[1] Schmitz worked collaboratively (for the most part) with other (female) parliamentarians, such as Agnes Neuhaus, Christine Teusch, Helene Weber and Marie Zettler on the schools legislation.

She ended up in Recklinghausen (north of Essen and Dortmund) where she reorganised what briefly became a new (West) German national headquarters for the VkdL.

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.

[1] 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for women teachers, even if it met with the approval of the church establishment, was already beginning to look rather out of date by the end of the 1950s.

[1] (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.)