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University of Bern Celebrates its Pioneer

On Anna Tumarkin's 150th birthday, the University of Bern honored its first full professor - and thus the first female professor in history.

Anna Tumarkin (1875-1951), a philosopher of Russian-Jewish origin, completed her doctorate and habilitation in Bern and was appointed associate professor in 1909. Thus she became the first woman to be granted full rights as a professor in her academic career - she was allowed to examine doctoral and post-doctoral students and sit on the Senate. Tumarkin would have been 150 years old on February 16, 2025.

Tumarkin left her native Russia at the age of 17 and came to Bern in 1892. Naturalized there almost 30 years later, she campaigned for women's suffrage and voting rights in Switzerland. As a Jew, she lost her entire family in Russian progroms and Nazi concentration camps, as she found out after the end of the Second World War.

EXHIBITION ON ANNA TUMARKIN AND THE FIRST FEMALE PIONEERS

The history of women at the University of Bern cannot be told without the first pioneers from Eastern Europe. In 1873, 20 years before Anna Tumarkin arrived in Bern, young women from the Czarist Empire ventured into university. They were inquisitive and courageous, but they also caused a stir. An exhibition designed for the anniversary traces the sometimes rocky path of the first female students.

In addition to Anna Tumarkin's extraordinary biography, the exhibition focuses on the beginning of women's studies in Bern, the groundbreaking role of pioneering women from Eastern Europe and the hurdles that women had to overcome in academia.^[1] This chapter of Bern's university history reveals several historical dynamics: on the one hand, education as the history of emancipation and, on the other, migration and internationalization as the innovation potential of a cosmopolitan university.

Women's education in the Tsarist Empire

The reasons for the high number of pioneering women from Eastern Europe at Swiss universities lie in the changing women's education policy of the Tsarist Empire. From 1856 onwards, private girls' grammar schools were opened. Until the end of the Tsarist Empire, they enjoyed growing popularity, particularly in cities and liberal circles.  The desire for equal access to education also extended to universities. Women had been allowed to attend lectures since 1859, but this was again banned in 1863. For women hungry for education, the only option was to go to study abroad, especially to Switzerland.

The pioneers at the University of Bern came from Eastern Europe

The opening up of studies to women in Switzerland cannot be understood without the pioneering women from Eastern Europe. For over 40 years, from 1874 to 1914, young women from the Tsarist Empire who had traveled far and wide dominated the student body in Bern. At times, they made up almost 90 percent of the female student body. They had taken on a great deal to study; they were eager to learn and full of drive, for which they were both envied and admired. They were pioneers, door openers and trailblazers for Swiss female academics. It was not until the outbreak of the First World War that the proportion of Swiss female students increased significantly. In 1928, Hedwig Anneler (1888-1969) summed up the situation in her essay on women's studies in Bern: “Without these foreigners, we might have found our way into the university even later and even less often.”

The “Russian colony” in Bern around 1900

In 1905, more than 700 people from the Tsarist Empire were living in Bern, many of them young, female and Jewish. The situation in the Tsarist Empire, but also the open attitude of the University of Bern, played a decisive role in this. The Tsarist Empire had introduced a numerus clausus for Jewish students in the 1880s, which severely restricted access to education. Jewish women and intellectuals in particular therefore sought refuge in Switzerland, which was attractive due to its political stability and liberal universities.

A condensed translation of the article written by Text: Isabelle Aeschlimann / February 19, 2025

https://www.uniaktuell.unibe.ch/2025/anna_tumarkin_anlass/index_ger.html