Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Zentrum für Transdisziplinäre Geschlechterstudien

HU-Women’s History

Women and the History of Science at Friedrich Wilhelm Universität, today Humboldt Universität zu Berlin


It is easy to see just how intertwined knowledge, academia, and gender are by looking at the historiography of our own HU. In writing the history of the university, for years the tradition of women scholars and students was left completely unmentioned. In the mid-1990s the ZiF (today the ZtG) began to fill in those blanks.

From 1997-2001, as a part of a project sponsored by the Volkswagen Stiftung, ZiF affiliates searched all of the databases and archives at HU for information about women at the university. That information was collected and organized into the ADA database, which can be accessed through the ZtG’s Gender Library as well as the central university archives.

Based on the information gathered for the archive, ZiF members prepared the exhibition, “From the Exception to the Everyday: Women at the University on Unter den Linden” and the collection of primary documents, “Women at Humboldt University 1945-1989.” More information about the history of women at HU can be found in the book we published based on our research results in 2003, also titled, “From the Exception to the Everyday.”

We took the opportunities provided by the 100th anniversary of the first admission of women to Prussian universities in 2008, and the 200th anniversary of the founding of Humboldt University in 2010 to further examine the historical and modern gender-specific mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion in academic institutions. In 2009 we supported the publication of the volume The Gender of Knowledge: on the History of Women-Scholars in the 19th and 20th Centuries, edited by Ulrike Auga, Claudia Bruns, Levke Harders and Gabriele Jähnert (in German). 

In 2010, we published a contribution to the 200th anniversary of the founding of Humboldt University—a commentated volume of documents on women at Humboldt University, Störgröße “F”: Frauenstudium und Wissenschaftlerinnenkarrieren an der Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Berlin - 1892 bis 1945 (English: Disturbance “W”: Women-Students and Scholars at Friedrich-Wilhelm-University, Berlin - 1892-1945).