October 14, 1931

Dr. Marie Baum, lecturer in the Institute of Political and Social Science at the University of Heidelberg and, according to The Miscellany News, “one of the best-known women in modern Germany,” visited the college as a guest of the euthenics department. Her week-long stay included two lectures on October 16 and October 19 on “The Family and the Social Structure” and a lecture in German on universities past and present.

One of the first German women to attain a university degree, Baum received her doctorate in chemistry in Zurich in 1899. Turning to social welfare work within a few years, she was director of the Society for Infant Care in Düsseldorf between 1907 and 1916 and subsequently served as divisional head of welfare services in the Ministry of Labor in Karlsruhe before joining the Heidelberg faculty. The rise of the National Socialists (Nazis) in 1933 ended her academic career, but she subsequently served briefly as one of very few women in the Reichstag representing the liberal left-wing Deutsche Demokratische Partei (DDP).