The first habilitations of women at the University of Vienna
1905-1957
Elise Richter was the first woman to receive her habilitation at the University of Vienna in 1905. With the habilitation as the highest academic qualification as an university lecturer, she completed a complex process. It was only two years later, in 1907, that she finally received the license to teach Romance philology, despite concerns and resistance from male experts.
Over the next 50 years, many female academics followed in Elise Richterʼs footsteps. All of the first six women who cpmpleted their habilitation were humanities scholars, all of whom habilitated at the Philosophical Faculty (“Philosophische Fakultät”). In the following decades, an average of one woman per year was habilitated, with female physicians and natural scientists being added from the 1930s and female lawyers from the end of the 1940s. The first women had to struggle with similar prejudices in virtually all departments and often had to wait for long discussions before being approved as a private lecturer, at the Faculty of Catholic Theology even until 1997.
