Women’s and gender studies

For a long time – until the turn from the 19th to the 20th century – women were the exception in the hallowed halls of academia. This exceptional status challenged them to prove they belonged in the university. Elise Richter, one of the first female students, doctors and the first woman to habilitate at the University of Vienna, wrote in her autobiography: “As a woman I certainly gave as much as I received. I received the path, but I walked it, if I say so myself, in an exemplary manner”. Criticism of male dominated science was left to the next generations and a later time, in which the social and political conditions had changed. Therefore, the quantitative increase in the number of women in the tertiary educational sector in the 1960s and 1970s went hand in hand with a qualitative increase in academia.