Abstrakt
In my study, I compare the lives of first female graduates of the Czech university and the technical university in Prague, who completed their studies in early 20th century. The opportunity to study at a university and to pursue a scientific career was for centuries open only to men.
At the end of the 19th century, however, the lecture halls of some faculties at some universities in the Habsburg monarchy welcomed their first female students and the WWI brought women also to technical universities. Their student life and subsequent careers were, in great majority of cases, not easy.
The students came from different social and religious backgrounds, achieved different academic results, and found employment in different professions. I follow the fortunes of the following women who studied in Prague: Anna Honzáková (1875–1940), the first female physician who graduated in 1902, Olga Šrámková (born 1876), a philosophy student who graduated at the Czech Faculty of Arts on June 3, 1902, Marie Vávrová (born 1877 or 1878), the first Protestant woman to graduate, also at the Czech Faculty of Arts, Alice Masaryková (1879–1966), the first female doctor of history at the Czech Faculty of Arts, and Milada Petříková-Pavlíková (1895–1985), the first female architect who graduated in 1921 at the Czech Technical University in Prague.
Some of these women had successful careers in their fields and became part of the Bohemian and Czechoslovak public life. Others married, abandoned professional ambitions, and devoted their lives to their families and children.
Society was at that time only getting used to the idea of female university graduates. Opinions and views of them ranged from strongly negative and disapproving to very positive and supportive, and advocates of these positions tried to argue for their views.
The lives of female graduates we follow lend, in varying degrees, support to all contemporary society’s views.
