ABSTRACT
Within the German Empire, state technical colleges (Technische Hochschule) allowed women to enter shortly after the universities had opened their doors to them. The Prussian state was one of the last to do so, in 1909. Prussian legislation concerning women’s right to study, unlike that in Austria, applied to technical colleges.2 Legislation covering the universities included a special section that allowed professors to exclude women from their lectures. However, a similar law governing the technical colleges failed to grant professors there the same right.3 Yet, despite the loophole in the law, only a few women chose to study at the technical colleges. Once the law was passed, debates in Germany (and in Prussia in particular) shifted their focus from women’s education and its dangers to women’s employment.4 Historians Barbara Duden and Margot Fuchs have argued in their studies of technical colleges in Berlin and Munich that most women students preferred the natural sciences to engineering.5
