Women at university!

Germany opens its universities to women

The decision is taken to admit women to study at German universities

Although 18th-century women were often required to contribute to the household income, they were not admitted to any of the learned professions and it was seen as unnecessary to allow them to attend university. Although female scholars were not unheard of – for example Luise Adelgunde Victorie Gottsched, the wife of the Enlightenment philosopher and professor of philosophy Johann Christoph Gottsched, collaborated closely with her husband – women were not seen in the lecture hall, and Gottsched’s wife could only listen to her husband’s lectures from behind a door that had been left ajar. Although women were admitted to universities in the USA (1833) and France (1863), a petition submitted to the Reichstag in 1891 to advance this cause caused “considerable amusement”. At the turn of the century, a famous German neurologist even claimed that the “imbecility of women” was natural.

Despite such attitudes, the wind had already begun to change. Women could increasingly take up informal studies, and university professors teaching in Baden and Prussia were permitted to admit selected women to their lectures as “guest students”. On 20 April 1899, the Federal Council of imperial Germany called on the federal states to admit women to the state examinations for medicine and pharmacy. Baden, which had just graduated its first cohort of female grammar school leavers, was the quickest to react, and the first women students enrolled at the universities of Heidelberg and Freiburg in the summer semester of 1900. All German universities admitted women students by 1909.