Montesano's mother, by all accounts a very severe dowager, refused to consider marriage. Montesano was desperate. At that time, especially in Italy, to have a child out of wedlock would have been disastrous to anyone. Montessori was facing the ignominy of being a scarlet woman. He and Montessori fell in love and she became pregnant. He came from the south of Italy and in his family, while the sons all entered the professions, the daughters were consigned to "womanly tasks" such as lace-making and the study of music. Italian sources suggest that he was not in robust good health, but he was elegantly handsome. Her partner was another young physician, Giuseppe Ferruccio Montesano. It was an unprecedented appointment for a woman in that very conservative time. At this heady moment she was appointed the co-director for a school in Rome. She was at the height of her fame, and it seemed that she could achieve anything. She was elegant, poised and - perhaps - just a bit vain. She had been interviewed by Queen Victoria and had represented her country at major international conferences. She was known as the "beautiful scholar," and in an age when women were blocked from most professions and careers she had - against all odds - become the first woman physician in Italy. When Maria Montessori was 30 (in 1900) her father presented her with a book filled with 200 articles he had clipped from the national and international press, all of which wrote glowingly about his unusually talented daughter.
0 kommentar(er)
