Born at Diekirch, Luxembourg on 29 April 1879, Marie Julie Frauenberg married the Belgian financier Joseph Haps and moved to Brussels.

In 1914, she set up a soup kitchen, and in 1920 was one of the founders of a seaside resort for working-class women in De Panne.

Rather than provide professional education for women, as was available in teacher training colleges and nursing colleges, Marie Haps wished to establish an institution that would provide general education to middle-class women whose futures would lie in their social roles as wife and mother.

She regarded educated homemakers, the intellectual equals of their husbands, as having an important contribution to national reconstruction after the First World War.

Her institute only began to provide professional education after the Second World War, first in training psychological assistants (from 1946) and then translators and interpreters (1955).