cided that they would work to get better schools for women. Marianne Hainisch spoke openly and in public, pleading that the Government should furnish schools for girls and that they should have the same privileges as boys in education. They demanded complete rights for women. Marie von Najmajer, blessed with ample means, remained single and devoted all her life and much of her means to this cause of womanhood. Marianne Hainisch, also fortunate in the possession of ample means; used it to aid her in the work so dear to her heart. The day when these two women met in 1870 may be said therefore to be the day when the New Woman Movement was founded in Austria.
Miss Martha L. Root, Bahá’í lecturer and writer, recently interviewed Marianne Hainisch in her quiet country home near Vienna. From her own lips she received this story of her work, and that of Marie von Najmajer, for the New Woman Movement in that country. These two women from 1870 on worked with the greatest enthusiasm for the better education of women, for the rights of women to enter the professions.
Marianne Hainisch said in the course of this interview: “Men could have their shops and their estates, they could do any work they wished, but women did not have the privilege of going to the universities. Marie von Najmajer and I strove to attain for girls opportunities to study just as boys did. We worked to secure for girls also gymnasium exercises, physical culture, and all other opportunities that were open to the boys of Austria. I was always a liberalist, a liberalist in religious thought as well as in the work of women. I worked, not that the rich alone should have education, but that all other women of the working classes might enjoy life.”
“Miss Root” she said, “all this that you can speak about so freely, in my day and in the day of Qurratu’l-‘Ayn was not so easy to speak about; but we have succeeded, and now women do have privileges and opportunities as do men.”
“Mme. Hainisch lives very simply,” writes Miss Root, “in a most charming small house with lovely gardens. She is very active, and though I arrived one-half hour ahead of time, she was ready to receive me. A man from one of the syndicates from America called while I was there and asked for an interview regarding politics. Mme. Hainisch answered him, ‘I am not a bit interested in politics. I have nothing to say to you. I am only interested in world peace, constructive work for women and for the welfare of humanity.’ ”
From her seventieth birthday until now, when she is eighty-eight, her birthday anniversary has been celebrated so lovingly by her friends in Austria that she now, as she tells Miss Root, goes out of the city on that day so that her friends cannot spend their precious time doing things for her. Her son, who is President of Austria, said to her on the occasion of her last anniversary, “Do you not want more—can I not give you something?” And she replied, “I only want what is necessary to live.”
Mme. Hainisch, like Qurratu’l-‘Ayn, is not a masculine type of woman. As a girl she was very beautiful; as a woman tender, sympathetic, loving, fulfilling all the duties of womanhood in her home, neglecting none of those in her larger work for women.
From the collection of appreciations published in connection with her seventieth birthday, the following quotation may be of interest: “A womanly ideal for all time is Marianne Hainisch, a real woman in her charm, her tenderness, her joy of life, beautiful also in the loving quality of her heart, daughter, wife, mother, perfect as the Creator willed her to be; yet a champion also of all others, for the rights of a new day, weariless fighter against bigotry and barbarism. For livelihood, for bread the New Woman Movement called, but the competition with the trained intelligence of man could only be undertaken when the
