Exhibition “Women at the University of Tartu until 1919” moves to the corridor of the Skytte Institute

The 3nd floor corridor of Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies houses a new exhibition – Women at the University of Tartu until 1919.

The exhibition was created as part of the project of the same name (KUM-TA31, Ministry of Culture), the aim of which was to collect information about women associated with the Imperial University of Tartu. Although women were not admitted as students at the University of Tartu in the 19th century, midwives, governesses, dentists, and assistant pharmacists took exams at the university, and from the turn of the century, the first women pharmacists also took exams. At the turn of the century, the first women who had obtained higher education elsewhere and needed a university diploma to work in the Russian Empire also took exams (usually in medicine). From 1905, women were allowed to audit courses for a short period and finally to become students during World War I. The dataset created in the course of the project contains over 5,700 women, but it is now clear that it is not complete.

Work on the digitized personal files continues within the framework of Catherine Gibson’s project “Entangled borderlands: mapping intra-imperial connections for a new spatial history of the late Romanov Empire” (PSG1042, Estonian Research Council). The Imperial University of Tartu and private educational institutions operating in the early 20th century brought together women from different parts of the empire. Documents in the personal files help reconstruct their journey here and, in rare cases, where they travelled from Tartu.