Schurz,Agathe Margarethe b.August 27, 1833; Hamburg d. March 15, 1876; New York City
Brought the kindergarten, invented by Friedrich Froebel in Germany, to the United States. From late 1856 to 1858, she conducted the first kindergarten in the United States at Watertown, Wisconsin, teaching her daughter Agathe (b.
1853), a neighbor boy, and four of Agathe’s female cousins according to Froebel’s mature kindergarten pedagogy. In 1859 Margarethe and Agathe acquainted Elizabeth Palmer Peabody (1804-1894) with Froebel’s work and helped inspire her to open a kindergarten. Peabody, soon the country’s most influential kindergarten advocate, called Margarethe “an adept in the theory, and expert in practice” (Boone 1889, 333) of kindergarten. Despite her always difficult health and often difficult life as the wife of Carl Schurz, Mar- garethe supported the kindergarten cause until her death.Margarethe was the daughter of Agathe Margarethe Meyer (nee Beusch, 1794-1833), who spent her eighteen years of marriage in seventeen pregnancies and fragile health. She died at age thirty-nine of excessive blood loss, hours after Mar- garethe’s birth. Heinrich Christian Meyer (1797-1848), Margarethe’s father, transformed himself in just a few years from an uneducated peddler of walking sticks into one of Hamburg’s wealthiest and most powerful businessmen. He funded civic projects, created welfare and insurance funds for his workers, and supported progressive causes, including the freethinking German Catholic movement led by Johannes Ronge, the charismatic, excommunicated Roman Catholic priest called by some the “Luther of the nineteenth century.” The often-repeated assumption that Margarethe Schurz came from a Jewish family cannot be substantiated by the available sources.
Margarethe’s interest in education developed under the guidance of her remarkable elder siblings, who honored their parents’ humble beginnings and civic engagement by generously supporting social causes.
Margarethe’s two oldest sisters, Amalie Westendarp (b. 1816) and Bertha Traun (1818—1864), helped to establish significant women’s initiatives to promote the German Catholic movement, Chris- tian-Jewish understanding in Hamburg, and the education of women and children. Bertha helped found the pioneering Hamburger Hochschule fur das weibliche Geschlecht (Hamburg College for the Female Sex), which opened in 1850 with financial backing from Bertha’s husband C. J. F. Traun (1804—1881) and her brother Heinrich Adolf Meyer (1822—1889). In connection with the college, which also trained kindergarten teachers, Bertha helped to bring Friedrich Froebel to Hamburg during the winter of 1849 and 1850 for lectures and practical demonstrations on kindergartening. Bertha saw to it that Margarethe, sixteen years old in 1849 and already struggling with health problems, was enrolled in Froebel’s course and the college as one of its few resident students.There are glimpses of Margarethe during these months. She was one of the most successful and well-liked students. She led classmates in high-spirited pranks and practical jokes. Fascinated by Froebel’s lectures and demonstrations, she took extensive notes that he reviewed and revised, pronouncing them clearer than his own books. These notes later went missing in the mail, a loss that, in Peabody’s words, “can never be sufficiently lamented” (Peabody 1873, 11). At the college, Mar- garethe also underwent a physical and psychological crisis severe enough to require a nurse’s care. She left the college around February 1851 to undergo a “water cure” (hydropathy). Elke Kleinau plausibly sees a cause of this crisis in Bertha’s then scandalous decision, in early 1850, to divorce her husband and begin a liaison with Johannes Ronge.
Bertha Traun and Johannes Ronge exiled themselves to England in October 1850 and married in 1851. They established England’s first kindergarten and led the British kindergarten movement for years.
In autumn 1851 Margarethe’s family let her travel to London to care for Bertha during a serious illness and help run the Ronges’ kindergarten. In London, Mar- garethe deepened her experience in kinder- gartening, thrived in the German exile community, and met Carl Schurz. They married and emigrated in 1852, arriving in New York City on September 16.When Elizabeth Peabody traveled to Europe in 1867 and 1868 to study the Froebelian kindergarten, she carried letters of introduction from Margarethe and Carl Schurz to their well-connected friends and family in Germany. Such letters probably led, in 1867, to Peabody’s fortunate meeting with Emma Marwedel, director of the new Weibliche Gewerbeschule in Hamburg (Industrial School for Girls in Hamburg) and protegee of Margarethe’s brother Heinrich Adolf Meyer. Peabody encouraged Marwedel’s emigration to the United States and later credited Marwedel with showing her “Froebel’s genuine kindergarten” and giving her the courage to spend the rest of her life promoting it in the
United States. During Carl Schurz’s term as senator, Margarethe joined congressmen James A. Garfield and James G. Blaine as a prominent patron of Marwedel’s kindergarten and teacher-training school in Washington, D.C.
Margarethe met her mother’s fate when she died at the age of forty-three of complications following the birth of her fifth child. Daughter Agathe, the kindergarten’s first U.S. pupil, served on the first board of directors of the National Kindergarten Association, founded in 1909.
Jeford B. Vahlbusch
See also Kindergartners; Schurz, Carl References and Further Reading Boone, Richard G. Education in the United
States. Its Earliest History from the Earliest Settlements. 1889. Reprint. Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries, 1971.
Hirsch, Helmut, and Marianne Hirsch. “Stammte Margarethe Meyer-Schurz aus einer ursprunglich judischen Familie? Zur Problematik ihrer ersten Biographie.” In Deutsch-judische Geschichte im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Eds. Ludger Heid and Joachim H. Knoll. Stuttgart: Burg Verlag, 1992, pp. 85-106.
Kleinau, Elke. Bildung und Geschlecht. Eine Sozialgeschichte des hδheren Madchenschulwesens in Deutschland vom Vormarz bis zum Dritten Reich. Weinheim: Deutscher Studien Verlag, 1997.
Peabody, Elizabeth Palmer. “Kindergarten Literature.” Kindergarten Messenger 1, no. 3 (July 1873): 11-17.
------. “The Origin and Growth of the Kindergarten.” Education 2, no. 5 (May-June 1882): 507-527.