First Accepted, Then Rejected: Women in the Sciences in the First Half of the 20th Century

Abstract

“From the exception to the marginalized": Thus reads Annette Vogt’s summary for the first fifty years in which German universities opened their doors to women. During the Weimar Republic the existence of women in the sciences went almost without saying, until National Socialism led to grave setbacks. Along with this came the displacement of women working in the university from the area of the natural sciences to that of the humanities. The consequences of this development were felt long after 1945. Vogt comes to these conclusions through a comparative analysis of the career development of hundreds of female scientists at Berlin universities and at the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Society in the first half of the 20th century”.