First year a woman earned a university degree in European countries

bollmorabollen:

First year a woman earned a university degree in European countries

Gathering information and developing this map has been quite a project this last week and I'm tentatively keen to show it off! This map shows the first year a woman is noted to have graduated with a degree from a university, in a number of European countries.

Method and Considerations

Finding all the data

In Google search, I searched for "first female university graduate in X" or "first woman to graduate from university in X", but also "first female university student in X". When I couldn't find anything in English, I translated the search string using Google Translate and searched using that. There were a number of countries I couldn't find any info on, and these are grey on the map.

Modern vs. past borders:

I constrained my search for each individual country to its modern borders. This means that if lady A graduated from Vienna University in 1880 and lady B from Budapest university in 1881, then even though these belonged to the same country at the time, their listing adhere to the modern borders of those two countries.

Who was the first?

It was rare to find texts claiming that "this woman was indeed definitely the first to graduate from university in X" and more common to find "first female to earn a degree in medicine/law/pharmacy/etc in X". In these cases it is hard to know if this was the first in general or in a particular field. Because of this, if I could not find any examples that were earlier I went with the first one.

The sticklers

There are a number of sticklers in the data that need mentioning.

• Italy: It is of course difficult to reconcile a 13th century university degree with e.g. 19th century ones, but the sources I looked through were quite adamant about this being the first one so I decided not to question it further.

• Spain: On the Spanish Wikipedia there is a list of a number of very talanted women in the 16th century whom I decided not to list, due to the above-mentioned considerations. The women are listed in the document.

• UK: University degree's earned by women were not formally accepted until 1920, but the woman listed, Annie Mary Anne Henley Rogers, undertook an examination which was intended to be equivalent to men's.*

• Russia, Ukraine: The degrees of the Bestuzhevkas and Kiev-course takers were only accepted in 1910.

Documentation

For the specific years, names of all the women, sources and notes I have a Google Sheets document that is available from this link.

* see the comment below

Collection: education - Tags: education, women, universities, europe - Source: reddit.com