Maria Montessori is usually remembered as an educational pioneer. Yet long before she ever opened a classroom, she was already breaking barriers for women.
In the 1890s she entered medical school in Italy at a time when women were largely excluded from scientific and professional life. In 1896 she became one of the first women in Italy to graduate as a physician from the University of Rome. Even then she was not treated as an equal. Social conventions dictated that women could not dissect cadavers alongside male students, so Montessori carried out much of her anatomical study alone at night in the university morgue.
It is a striking image: a young woman pursuing scientific study in the quiet hours simply because society had not yet made space for her in the daylight.
At the same time she was stepping onto international stages to speak about women’s rights. In 1896 she represented Italy at the International Women’s Congress in Berlin, calling for equal pay and greater access to education and professional work for women. She later continued this advocacy at congresses across Europe, speaking about economic inequality and the barriers women faced in professional life.
Yet it was not within mainstream medicine that Montessori would make her most enduring contribution.
A Different Way of Seeing the Child
After graduating she was directed toward work that seemed more socially acceptable for a woman: caring for children with disabilities. She was placed at an orthophrenic school for children who at the time were described as “deficient” or “uneducable.” The assumption was that this was a suitable nurturing role that would keep her somewhat on the margins of the medical profession.
The young Montessori had other ideas.
Instead of approaching the children as patients to be managed, she began observing them carefully. She watched how they interacted with objects, with movement and with their surroundings. What she noticed was not deficiency, but potential. The children responded to certain materials, repeated actions with concentration and seemed to flourish when given purposeful activity.
These observations led her to study pedagogy and psychology alongside medicine. She immersed herself in the work of earlier reformers such as Jean-Marc-Gaspard Itard and Édouard Séguin, and in broader educational thinking influenced by Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi. Montessori began to see that education might be approached scientifically, through careful observation of the child rather than through rigid systems imposed by adults.
Around this time Montessori was also navigating something deeply personal. In 1898 she gave birth to a son, Mario, outside of marriage. In the social context of the time this created an almost impossible situation for a woman building a professional life. Mario was therefore raised by relatives and introduced publicly as her nephew for many years.
We cannot know exactly how she experienced that separation. But it is difficult not to wonder whether this chapter of her life deepened her sensitivity to the emotional lives of children and to the complicated realities adults sometimes face when trying to build meaningful work in the world.
Looking back, it is striking how closely Montessori’s advocacy for women sits alongside her later educational thinking.
Montessori’s scientific study of the child grew from the same conviction that appears in her work for women’s rights: that human potential is often limited not by nature, but by the expectations society builds around us.
Children, in Montessori’s view, were another group whose capabilities were routinely underestimated. They were spoken about, managed, instructed and corrected, but rarely truly observed. By studying children carefully and preparing environments that allowed their natural drives to emerge, Montessori was challenging those assumptions.
Later in life she described children as “forgotten citizens”, individuals whose voices and rights were largely absent from the structures of society.
Seen this way, Montessori’s educational work and her advocacy for women’s rights are not separate stories. Both emerge from the same impulse: a belief that human beings flourish when their potential is recognised rather than constrained.
Her legacy is not simply a set of materials or a teaching method. It is an invitation to look more closely at the people in front of us and to question the assumptions that shape how we treat them.
More than a century later, these questions remain surprisingly current.
Continuing the Conversation
At EMAS we often reflect on the many ways Maria Montessori’s work contributed to conversations about human rights, including the rights of women. Her life reminds us that education does not exist in isolation from society; it sits at its centre.
Much has changed since Montessori stood before audiences in Berlin and London speaking about equal pay and educational opportunity. Yet the questions she raised have not disappeared. In some ways they have simply become more complex.
Women today participate in professional life in ways that would have been almost unimaginable in Montessori’s time. Yet the arrival of children still reshapes the lives of women in profound ways. Research from the Institute for Fiscal Studies in the UK shows that mothers’ earnings are on average around one-third lower than men’s by the time their first child reaches the age of twelve. This so-called “motherhood penalty” reflects not a lack of ability or ambition, but the reality that raising children demands time, energy and presence.
Here we encounter one of the enduring contradictions of modern life. Women rightly seek professional identity, intellectual fulfilment and meaningful careers. At the same time, children have developmental needs that cannot be hurried or outsourced without consequence. Montessori’s work constantly returned to the importance of the early years, the sensitive periods of development and the deep human need for security, rhythm and connection.
When these realities collide, the tension is often carried privately by families, and most often by mothers.
Support for women in professional life is frequently framed as enabling women to participate in the workforce in the same way men traditionally have. Historically this has meant stepping away from family life in order to pursue career. But Montessori’s thinking invites us to look at the question from another direction.
What if the answer is not simply helping women adapt to existing structures, but reimagining the structures themselves?
Montessori believed that the wellbeing of the child was not solely the responsibility of individual parents, but of society as a whole. When children are truly recognised as citizens, the systems around family life begin to shift.
This invites a more creative question: how might schools become places where community gathers around children and families?
If children are to grow without constant overwhelm, care must be thoughtfully wrapped around them. Families cannot carry that responsibility alone. Schools, neighbourhoods and communities all have a role to play in creating environments where children feel secure and adults feel supported.
Perhaps this means rediscovering something closer to the idea of the village. A culture in which the work of caring for children is shared, where family life is not an isolated struggle but a collective effort. A place where the responsibilities of home are more evenly held and where both women and men can participate fully in the work of nurturing family, community and meaningful careers.
In small ways, this is something we try to nurture at EMAS. Through shared spaces, outdoor learning, community gatherings and the rhythms of daily life at the school, we see how children thrive when they feel held within a wider network of relationships. The presence of animals, gardens, shared work and mixed-age communities reminds us that learning and living have always been communal human activities.
Montessori herself rarely offered simple answers. But she offered a way of thinking that continues to challenge us: to look closely at the needs of the child and then ask whether the systems around us are truly serving them.
For schools, this may be one of the most important questions of all. Not only how we educate children, but how we help rebuild the communities that allow both children and adults to flourish.
And perhaps our work today is simply to continue walking in the footsteps of giants; asking brave questions about the kind of world we are preparing for the children in our care.
Further Reading
Academic and Historical Sources
Babini, Valeria P. Science, Feminism, and Education: The Life of Maria Montessori.
Kramer, Rita. Maria Montessori: A Biography.
Standing, E. M. Maria Montessori: Her Life and Work.
Trabalzini, Paola. Maria Montessori: Through the Seasons of the Method.
Lillard, Angeline Stoll. Montessori: The Science Behind the Genius.
Montessori, Maria. The Montessori Method.
Montessori, Maria. The Absorbent Mind.
Montessori, Maria. Education and Peace.