Marie Popelin

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Marie Popelin (17 September 1846–5 June 1913) was a Belgian feminist, educator, and advocate.

Born in Schaerbeek into a middle-class family—one of her brothers was a doctor, another an army officer—Marie Popelin was well educated by the standards of the time and place. Along with her sister Louise, she worked with feminist educator Isabelle Gatti de Gamond, teaching in Brussels from 1870 to 1875. Disagreements with de Gatti led to the sisters moving to Mons to run a new school for girls there, established with Masonic assistance. In 1882 Marie returned to Brussels, to head the middle school in Laeken, but was removed from her post the following year.

Now aged 37, Marie Popelin enrolled at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, studying law. Completing her studies as a Doctor of Laws in 1888—the first woman to do so in Belgium—Popelin applied for admission to the bar association which would allow her to plead cases in the Brussels courts. This was refused, although no law or regulation explicitly prevented the admission of women to the bar, and appeals to the Court of Appeal and the Court of Cassation were unsuccessful, but widely reported in the Belgian and foreign press. The "Popelin affair" demonstrated to the supporters of female education that simply providing young women with access to studies was insufficient, and that further, legal, changes were required.

Marie Popelin participated in two feminist conferences in Paris in 1889, and established the Belgian League for Women's Rights in 1892 with the assistance of Isala van Diest and Léonie la Fontaine. Popelin was a friend of American feminist May Wright Sewell, who she had met in Paris in 1889, and with Sewell's encouragement, the Belgian section of the International Council of Women was established from 1893. Popelin's efforts to create an independent feminist movement, not linked to the Catholic Party, Liberals, or Socialist Party, were only a partial success, and the Conseil National des Femmes Belges, created in 1905, received only limited support from the women's sections of the political parties.

In spite of this tepid initial reception, Popelin's many objectives were largely met before her death in 1913. The legislative reforms excluded two of Popelin's core demands: universal adult suffrage, and equal access to the liberal professions for women. Modern studies acknowledge Marie Popelin's central role in the creation of a Belgian feminist movement. In recent polls to find The Greatest Belgian, Marie Popelin was ranked 42nd.

[edit] References

• (French) Nandrin, Jean-Pierre, "POPELIN Marie (1846–1913)", in Éliane Gubin, Catherine Jacques, Valérie Piette & Jean Puissant (eds), Dictionnaire des femmes belges: XIX^e et XX^e siècles. Bruxelles: Éditions Racine, 2006. ISBN 2-87386-434-6
• (French) Suzanne Van Rokegem, Jeanne Vercheval-Vervoort & Jacqueline Aubenas, Des femmes dans l'Histoire en Belgique depuis 1830. Bruxelles: Éditions Luc Pire, 2006. ISBN 2-87415-523-3