Higher Education

Abstract

Switzerland was one of the first countries in the world where women could pursue regular studies at universities open to both sexes. This right to education was not, however, fought for by Swiss women. Moreover, the professors opening the doors for female students were mostly German while the first female professors were of ‘foreign provenance’. Once again, the impact of migration on these processes becomes clearly visible. Nevertheless, the impact of these ‘foreign’ students on Swiss society is often made invisible, as this chapter shows.

Switzerland as a Pioneer—And What Lies Behind It

Against the backdrop of the aforementioned examples concerning the schooling of girls, it might come as a surprise that Switzerland was one of the first countries in the world where women could pursue regular studies at universities open to both sexes. The possibility of men and women studying together produced important changes in gender relations, an aspect mentioned by the former students Käthe Schirmacher and Svetozar Markovic.¹ This right to education was not, however, fought for by Swiss women. It is a well-known fact that women from the Tsarist Empire (of different nationalities, among them many of Jewish origin) were the pioneers in this struggle.

In the years 1867–1914, between 5000 and 6000 women from the Tsarist Empire studied in Switzerland.² At the University of Zurich, the first Swiss university to allow women to attend, the professors opening the doors for female students were, moreover, mostly German.³ In fact, with regard to the early introduction of co-education in Swiss universities, we have to consider that ‘the role of Switzerland as a country which granted political asylum influenced the political climate in favour of women’s emancipation’.⁴ Once more, it becomes evident that it is not enough to exclusively focus on women—and, for instance, forget the male professors involved—when studying processes of changing gender relations.

The first woman to obtain a doctoral degree was Nadeschda Suslowa in 1867. It is important to realise that, initially, only very few Swiss women made use of their right to study at a university. After the departure of the female students from the Tsarist Empire (numbers peaked around 1910), it took several decades before a comparable level of female enrolment was reached.⁵ Nevertheless, the impact of these ‘foreign’ students on Swiss society is often made invisible, as the following examples will show.

The Oft-Omitted Impact of These ‘Foreign’ Students

Marie Heim-Vögtlin became the first female physician born in Switzerland. Today, she is seen as an icon of women’s emancipation, as she managed to reconcile work and family, stood up for female suffrage and co-founded the country’s first gynaecological hospital. The Swiss National Science Foundation named a scholarship after her, and for the hundredth anniversary of her death in 2016, a Swiss postage stamp was dedicated to her. However, the particular circumstances of her career choice are often omitted, as is the case, for instance, in the Historical Dictionary of Switzerland.⁶ It was, in fact, when her fiancé broke off their engagement in 1867 and, soon after, married the aforementioned Nadeschda Suslowa that Marie Vögtlin decided that she too wanted to become a physician.⁷ In the Historical Dictionary of Switzerland, however, Marie Heim-Vögtlin’s entry lacks any reference to Suslowa. In addition, in the entry on Nadeschda Suslowa it is stated that, as a pioneer, she was a role model for many Russian women who studied in Switzerland in the period leading up to the First the First World War. Her influence on Marie Heim-Vögtlin, the first female Swiss physician, is once again omitted.⁸ The importance of migration as a motor of equal rights is thus erased from history. This is not an isolated case; other similar examples concerning these two women could be mentioned.⁹

Despite the importance for Heim-Vögtlin of her Russian role model, in 1870, together with five other female students, she urged the rectorate to restrict the conditions for the admission of women, fearing an influx of politicised Russians who, in her eyes, would damage the image of all female students.¹⁰ The request was not successful, but, shortly thereafter, a new university regulation required a Baccalaureate certificate from everyone enrolling at the University of Zurich.¹¹ Due to the lack of corresponding schools for women at the time, this made access to the university more difficult for them.

Feminist Forerunners Are not Unequivocal Heroines of History

Of course, not only left-wing revolutionaries like Rosa Luxemburg and Alexandra Kollontai studied in Switzerland.¹² M. Carey Thomas, for instance, gained her doctorate at the Philosophical Faculty of the University of Zurich in 1882, the first woman to do so in the Humanities at that university. Incidentally, when, as a student, she fell ill shortly before her Ph.D. defence, she was successfully treated by Marie Heim-Vögtlin, who was, according to Thomas, ‘the most prominent woman doctor here’.¹³ Thomas became a pioneer in women’s education, the first female college faculty member in America to hold the title of dean, the second president of the Bryn Mawr College and a leading member of the National American Woman Suffrage Association.¹⁴ She pursued relationships with other women and never married. When, in 1922, the New York Times asked many experts to name the twelve greatest American women, almost all chose to include her on their list.¹⁵

Before coming to Zurich, Thomas had been refused a Ph.D. at the University of Leipzig and Göttingen because she was a woman. However, the experience of being a victim of prejudice did not alter her own racist worldview. For instance, in letters she wrote from her travels, she denigrated the Japanese as ‘radically unintelligent’ and Egyptians as ‘untrustworthy, untruthful mongrel races, totally ignorant, superstitious and without any intellectual curiosity’.¹⁶ This example demonstrates very clearly that these feminist forerunners are not always unequivocal heroines of history, but sometimes deeply ambivalent figures. Moreover, the case of Thomas also contradicts the naïve claim that geographical mobility necessarily broadens one’s mind.

The First Female Full Professor in Switzerland—Born in the Russian Empire

The first female professor in Europe was Sofja Kowalewskaja who became—under special conditions—an extraordinaria in Sweden in 1884 and a full professor in 1889. Her pioneering role as a female mathematician made her the subject of several books.¹⁷ By contrast, little work has been done so far on the first female university professors in Switzerland, except for the interesting research carried out by Natalia Tikhonov Sigrist and Franziska Rogger.

From the moment when Swiss universities opened their doors to women until the beginning of the Second World War, 72% of the 43 female teachers (among them very few professors) were of ‘foreign provenance’, and half of them had been born in the Tsarist Empire.¹⁸ In this context, it has to be remembered that in Switzerland, it was (and still is) very common for male professors to be of ‘foreign’ provenance, although the percentage is likely to have been lower than in the case of female professors.

In Switzerland, the first full female professor was Sophie Piccard who became an ordinaria in 1943/44 at the University of Neuchâtel.¹⁹ She had been born in Saint Petersburg. Her mother came from a French Huguenot family (her mother also had a Danish father) and her father from a Swiss family living in Russia. The family was hit hard by the political unrest following the Bolshevik Revolution and the war. A sister died due to the consequences of malnutrition, a brother disappeared. In 1925, the family fled to Switzerland.

In Switzerland, Sophie Piccard’s degree was worthless and she had to earn another one from the University of Lausanne. After her Ph.D., she was unable to find a teaching position. Wishing to devote herself to teaching, she undertook pedagogical training, but, in contrast to the Soviet Union, Neuchâtel at that time did not allow women to teach mathematics at the secondary level. Therefore, she worked for an insurance company and later for a newspaper. In 1936, she was called upon to replace, as a lecturer, a sick professor from the Department of Geometry at the University of Neuchâtel. Her teaching qualities having been recognised, she became an extraordinary professor of higher geometry in 1938. Her career culminated with an appointment, in 1944, to the chair of ordinary professor of higher geometry, probability calculus, and actuarial sciences, which she held for nearly thirty years. In parallel to this engagement, she founded and directed the ‘Centre for Pure Mathematics’ in Neuchâtel starting from 1940. Her research was carried out at an impressive pace, and she quickly became an authority in her field.

After her mother’s death in 1957, she devoted much time and many resources to the publication of her mother’s literary and historical writing. Eulalie Piccard’s work touched above all on Russian literature, history, and the transformation of Russia into the Soviet Union. Thanks to Sophie Piccard’s tenacity, her mother’s personal papers, correspondence, works, literary papers, iconographic documents, and press clippings are preserved in the Swiss National Library. These, along with Sophie Piccard’s own written legacy, are still waiting for a thorough historical reappraisal.²⁰

The scientific, political, social, and cultural potential for innovation of the research done by these early female academics has barely been explored.²¹ Moreover, tracing the biographies and legacies of the first female professors would likely be highly rewarding. Studying these cases in-depth would mean analysing their career paths, migration trajectories, and the networks that led these women to work at Swiss universities as well as their impact within their fields and beyond. As this research has not yet been carried out, I will limit myself to describing two other prominent cases, the trajectories of the first female professors in German- and French-speaking Switzerland, respectively.

The First Extraordinara in Romandie—Born in the Russian Empire

Lina Stern, who was born in present-day Latvia into a German-speaking Jewish family, was named extraordinara in Biochemistry at the University of Geneva in 1918.²² After Stern’s unsuccessful attempt to acquire a full professorship in Geneva, she left for the Soviet Union in 1925 and became a professor in Moscow. In 1932, she was nominated to the famous German Academy Leopoldina and, in the same year, received significant research funds from the Rockefeller Foundation. Stern was also the first female member of the Russian Academy of Sciences.²³ She became famous, among other things, for her ground-breaking work on the blood–brain barrier. In 1943, she won the Stalin Prize. In the same year, she was asked to dismiss two co-editors of a scientific journal, as it had been decided to greatly reduce the number of Jewish physicians in leading positions. Outraged, Stern sent a letter to Stalin and succeeded in preventing a change in the composition of the editorial staff. Her career ended abruptly, however, during the Stalinist purges. It is now known that she was co-accused in the secret military trial of fourteen leading members of the former ‘Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee’. She was charged with being a rootless cosmopolitan and sentenced to death. Probably because of her prominent reputation, her punishment was commuted to a prison term. In 1949, she was incarcerated and spent 44 months in prison, followed by a period in exile that was intended to last five years. In 1953, shortly after the death of Stalin, she was released. Before and after this dramatic experience, she maintained an extensive correspondence with her former colleagues from Geneva—a correspondence that still awaits a more thorough study.²⁴

The First Extraordinara in German-Speaking Switzerland—Again Born in…

In 1909, nine years before Lina Stern, the philosopher Anna Esther Pavlovna Tumarkin, of Jewish origin and born in 1875 in what is now Belarus, had become an extraordinara at the University of Bern. Paid only as a lecturer, Tumarkin was the first woman in Europe to have the right to supervise Ph.D.s and review habilitations. However, she was denied appointment to a full professorship, on the grounds of her gender, among other things.²⁵

Anna Tumarkin explained philosophy in its historical contexts and analysed life from philosophical, theological, anthropological, and psychological perspectives.²⁶ In 1937, Tumarkin was awarded the Theodor Kocher Price for her philosophical work and in 1999/2000, a path was named after Tumarkin in Bern. It is located to the north of the main university building and is only 90 metres long. So much for the space of recognition that is granted to important women in the Swiss capital. The tribute to the first female professor in Switzerland is almost an insult.

Tumarkin had studied in Bern from 1892 to 1895. After her Ph.D., she went to Berlin for a three-year research stay with Wilhelm Dilthey and other professors. Afterwards, she stayed in the Canton of Bern until her death in 1951. During and after the Second World War, Tumarkin witnessed many of her family members being deported and killed.²⁷ In 1918, when Kishinev passed to Romania, Tumarkin became stateless. This prompted her to apply for naturalisation. In 1921, she became a Swiss citizen. Her application for naturalisation shows the precarious financial conditions under which these first female professors usually worked. When asked whether she had any savings, Anna Tumarkin wrote in August 1921: ‘I have no savings, since I have only recently received a salary from which I can finance my living expenses’.²⁸ The documents also show that in 1921, she earned 450 francs per year and that she had to pay 300 francs for her new citizenship.

As a student, Tumarkin had reflected upon her not always easy experiences as a ‘foreigner’ in Switzerland in the draft of a letter to her professor: ‘Then I went abroad and here I got to know real loneliness, I often missed sympathy and that’s why I understood how to appreciate it’.²⁹ Interestingly, Tumarkin’s most important academic mentor and promotor—and probably also the person to whom this letter is addressed—was professor Ludwig Stein.

Stein was also a ‘migrant’. He had been born in what is now Hungary. He studied in Germany and became a professor in Bern. In 1909/1910, he had to resign from his chair because of an anti-Semitic campaign. The reason for the defamatory attack was Stein’s harsh criticism of race theories. His opponents represented a racist, anti-Semitic, and misogynist attitude. For example, one opponent found it unbelievable that Stein had the conviction that whoever migrated to America from the Russian Empire at the age of ten to twenty would become an unmistakable Yankee after a few years.³⁰ When Ludwig Stein died in 1930, Tumarkin wrote an obituary in the newspaper Der Bund. She paid tribute to his ‘so successful academic work’ in Bern—and did not mention his dismissal.³¹

From 1921, Anna Tumarkin lived communally with Ida Hoff. In their wills, the two friends had nominated each other as heiresses, and both were buried in the same grave after their death. Such communities were not uncommon among working female academics.³²

Hoff, too, had experienced migration. She was born in Moscow and came to Switzerland with her mother in 1886.³³ Remarkably, it was once again Ludwig Stein who helped Hoff and her mother to become Swiss citizens. Ida Hoff was one of the first women to be allowed to drive a car in Bern and also the first female school doctor there. In addition, she had been engaged in the women’s student association and, for many years after, sat on the board of the Women’s Suffrage Association of Bern. Anna Tumarkin also advocated the right to vote for women and in 1928, she participated in the First Swiss Exhibition for Women’s Work (SAFFA). In this context, she co-authored a list of publications by Swiss women, also including some women of ‘foreign’ origin living in Switzerland.³⁴ In addition, she wrote several newspaper articles in favour of women’s suffrage.³⁵

As was the case elsewhere, several of the first female students and professors in Switzerland later became key figures in the struggle for political participation, gender justice, and women’s rights—and many of them had experienced some form of migration. Early female academics were, in fact, regularly at the forefront of feminist thought, and it was often the case that the women’s student association was a veritable training ground for the female suffrage movement.³⁶ This brings us to our last topic, the long struggle for female suffrage in Switzerland and its interrelation and interdependency with migration.