Edith Stein

Edith Stein (1891-1942) was a German philosopher of Jewish birth who studied phenomenology under Edmund Husserl at Gottingen and followed him to Freiburg as his assistant, taking her doctorate in 1916 with a dissertation on empathy. After her conversion to Catholicism she taught for roughly a decade at a Dominican girls school in Speyer and in 1932 became a lecturer at the Institute for Pedagogy at Munster, until Nazi legislation forced her to resign. Her essays on the education and professions of women argued that women should be educated both as human beings and specifically as women, and that university teachers should connect their subjects with the concerns of female students. She entered the Carmelite order in 1934 and was killed at Auschwitz in 1942; she was canonized in 1998.