Our Maryśka was born in 1805 and was a girl eager for knowledge, learning with ease. She did not intend to marry at the age of 13 (like Mary of Nazareth). She wanted to study. For a girl like that in those times, the only path was entering a convent. Fortunately, she came from a wealthy family and the accounts suggest that she had a father who was open to her desire to gain knowledge. Entering a religious order allowed her to fulfill her dreams of learning and teaching other women.
Maryśka opened more than seventy communities (in Italy, England and Germany), and in each of them she taught women. She also spoke in church, even though such a practice was strictly forbidden to women.
Being a woman in those times was very difficult. Across Europe, it was the norm for a wife to be legally dependent on her husband, unable to freely dispose of her property, and to have unequal parental rights. Until 1863, the “weaker” sex was not admitted to French universities (Switzerland, England and Germany admitted women in 1864, 1869 and 1908, respectively). Opponents of educational reforms feared the moral decline of young women, the destabilization of family life and, consequently, the disintegration of society.
At the end of the 19th century, Charles Darwin described men in comparison with women as follows:
(...) better than woman results in everything he undertakes, whether it require deep thought, reason, imagination, or merely the use of the senses and hands, which ultimately made him a more highly developed individual than woman.
C. Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, New York 1900, pp. 586–587
Cesare Lombroso, the Italian founder of criminal anthropology, added his own “wisdom” about women:
Tolerance for physical pain is a remnant of lower animal species, which had to cope with the loss of a body part. This trait occurs among the lower human classes, the lower social classes, women and children.
C. Lombroso, G. Ferrero, The Female Offender, New York 1897, p. 98, [cyt. za:] S. J. Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny, Cambridge 1977, p. 23.
In summary: being a woman in the 19th century who wanted an education meant, bluntly speaking, “being completely screwed.”
Maryśka had a very tough time. Believe me. In one of her letters, she described an interesting story connected with the ban on addressing the faithful, simply because she was a woman. A canon ordered her to be silent during one of her sermons. She meekly fell silent, but the priest’s words amused her. She did not accept that it was forbidden. She believed that both sexes were equal and that only what she said mattered, not the fact that she was not a man. So she fell silent and waited, and the people themselves asked her to continue the sermon, so the canon allowed her to speak, compelled by the congregation’s demand.
Her catecheses attracted many people, and men—mainly shepherds, whom the customs of the time did not allow to attend the meetings she organized—listened to her in secret. In time, she became a great and renowned preacher, valued by both ordinary and educated people.
Maryśka founded schools for girls at a time when the “sharpest” male minds of her era believed that educating girls directly led to… infertility. Edward Clarke, a lecturer at Harvard Medical School, made the principle of the conservation of energy the main reason for excluding women from education:
The system will never do two things well at the same time. Thus, digesting a meal forces the stomach to work, temporarily slowing the brain. A growing girl therefore has to devote the work of her mind to the benefit of the reproductive functions for which she is designed. Since nature assigned her such an energy-consuming task, it is easy to understand that little energy remained for schoolwork.
That is why Maryśka, who taught girls, deserves respect. It made her laugh to tears when a man in a cassock ordered her to be silent while she was speaking.
Really, girls, we have a very cool patron saint. Maryśka was strong. And that is why we like her!
