Anna Salmberg
Anna Salmberg, née Brinck (1788, Copenhagen - 1868, Åbo), was a Finnish educator. She was the founder and manager of Salmbergska flickpensionen ('Salmberg Pension for Girls'), one of the most famed and fashionable educational institutions for females in Finland in her time.
Life
Anna Salmberg was born in Denmark but was raised in Danish Caribbean, where English became her first language. She married a Finnish sea captain and moved with him to Finland.
In Åbo, she founded and managed the Salmberg Pension for Girls. In the early 19th-century, there were a few private girl schools in Finland, which remained the only secondary education available for females in Finland until the foundation of the Svenska fruntimmersskolan i Åbo and Svenska fruntimmersskolan i Helsingfors in 1843-44. Of these schools, The Salmberg school in Åbo, and the school of Baroness von Rosen in Helsinki, was the perhaps most successful of their kind.
Anna Salmberg defended women's right to education. As was customary for schools of her kind, most of the education focused on accomplishments, such as drawing, embroidery and etiquette, but she her school was recommended for a high level of the subjects, and her school offered more languages than what was usual for a girl school: except for French, she also tutored in the English language, at a time when that language was considered more important to learn for men, but when it was still otherwise unknown in girl schools in Finland. Her most known students were the writer Fredrika Runeberg and the poet Augusta Lundahl, both of whom studied at her school in 1824–25.