Marie Popelin

Marie Popelin (1846 to 1913) was a Belgian jurist and early feminist political campaigner. Born in Schaerbeek near Brussels, she taught with her sister Louise at the school of the feminist educator Isabelle Gatti de Gamond from 1864 to 1875, then ran a girls' school in Mons before heading a middle school in Laeken. At thirty-seven she enrolled at the Free University of Brussels and in 1888 became the first Belgian woman to take a doctorate in law. Her application to join the bar was refused, although no law or regulation expressly barred women, and her appeals to the court of appeal in December 1888 and to the Court of Cassation in November 1889 failed, a case known as the Popelin affair that was widely reported and moved Belgian feminism from education towards political and legal reform. She founded the Belgian League for the Rights of Women in 1892 and helped establish the Belgian section of the International Council of Women. She died in 1913 without being admitted to the bar, and Belgian women could practise as lawyers only from 1922.