Marija Jambrišak
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Marija Jambrišak (September 5, 1847 – January 23, 1937) was a Croatian writer, educator, and women's rights activist. She worked to improve women's status in Croatian society, including through producing biographies of notable female figures, launching the women's magazine Domaće ognjište, and helping found a girls' school in Zagreb.
Marija Jambrišak was born in Karlovac, in what is now Croatia, in 1847.[1][2][3] At age six, she moved with her family to Zagreb. Her father died shortly after the family's move, and her mother struggled to support the family. It is thought that this experience motivated Jambrišak's later advocacy for women's empowerment.[3]
She attended a two-year teachers' school run by the Sisters of Mercy of St. Vinko Paulski in Zagreb, graduating in 1863. She then taught in Varaždin and Krapina through the end of the decade.[3][4]
By 1871, Jambrišak had already become a forceful advocate for secular education for women. At that year's General Teachers' Assembly in Zagreb, she spoke in favor of equal pay and equal treatment for female teachers, who worked under very different conditions than their male counterparts. She also raised the need for financial support for teachers' professional development, and the problems with placing nuns in secular teaching positions.[3][4][5][6]
She subsequently traveled to Vienna, where she became the first Croatian woman to study at Friedrich Dittes' Pedagogium, a teachers' college there.[2] She had been personally invited to study there by Dittes, who had been impressed by her speech at the General Teachers' Assembly.[7] In 1874, she became the first woman to graduate from the school.[2][4] Her education was of the utmost importance to her, and she would often go without food to be able to afford her textbooks.[3]
