Marguerite Engler Schwarzman
Marguerite Louise Engler Schwarzman was an American educator, librarian, and writer. She founded a children's science museum, and was an activist on education, housing, and aging issues.
Early life
Marguerite Louise Engler was born in New York City, the daughter of Swiss immigrants Charles Ulrich Engler and Marie Wyss Engler. Her father was a real estate developer. Her mother was a teacher, and her maternal grandfather was a professor at the University of Bern. She graduated from Barnard College in 1914, and earned a master's degree at Teachers College, Columbia University.Career
Schwarzman taught science at the Scarborough Day School in New York, and worked at the American Museum of Natural History before she married in 1918. In 1927 Schwarzman founded the Children's Laboratories, an experimental children's museum in a cottage in New Rochelle, New York. Among the exhibits were a live snake, a guinea pig, fossils, a microscope, and educational films. She wrote children's books including Steel, a picture book about the process of steel-making. She was also co-author of a paleontology textbook.In the 1930s, Schwarzman served on the executive committee of the National Board of Review, was a member of the Westchester County Recreation Commission, and was president of the Barnard alumnae chapter in Westchester.
After her husband died in 1944, Schwarzman moved to California, where she worked as a librarian at San Diego State College, and as education director at a Unitarian church. She was founding director of the Liberal Religious Education Association. She was vice-president of the San Diego Citizens' Housing Council, and in that capacity testified at a congressional hearing on affordable housing and the Taft-Ellender-Wagner bill in 1948. In 1964 and 1965, she worked in Germany with the Unitarian Service Committee.
In 1976, as chair of the California Commission on Aging, Schwarzman was appointed by Governor Pat Brown to the 14th District Medical Quality Review Committee, overseeing San Diego and Imperial counties. In 1978, she testified again at a Congressional hearing, on California's Proposition 13.