Death found María de Maeztu y Whitney in Mar del Plata, Argentina, on January 7, 1948. She had been born in Vitoria 67 years earlier, into a family of teachers whose Basque roots were mixed with English and Cuban ones.
Like her brother Ramiro, with whom she collaborated closely, Maria studied and taught throughout her life and inquired about how to improve both processes. In a traditional approach, but with a very bold and conscious feminist approach, she considered that teaching was a particularly suitable task for women and that in it they would find not only a vital mission but also a way to be more independent and free.
After graduating she trained in Europe and the United States. Contact with other models of education, particularly the British, and his learning together with Unamuno and Ortega y Gasset would mark his own pedagogical ideas: boys and girls together, without punishment or homework, with freedom for their inquiries and questions, without books. of text… strange and almost revolutionary premises then.
In 1915 and until 1936 she directed the International Residence for Young Ladies: she was not only looking for female talents, but also for the students, national and foreign, to have access to the highest knowledge and the best education. During those twenty years, the Residencia de Señoritas received the most outstanding women of the time: from Marie Curie to María Montessori, from Gabriela Mistral to Clara Campoamor. Other initiatives that she carried out, such as the creation of the Lyceum Club Femenino, confirmed that more cultural and intellectual spaces open to women were needed.
Those luminous projects ended with the start of the Civil War: after the execution of her brother Ramiro de ella, she resigned and went into exile in Buenos Aires, where she taught classes at the University until she died. Petite, tireless, this brilliant teacher and pedagogue lived decades ahead of her time.
