ABSTRACT
During its early history, the university was a forbidden world for women; those who attempted to enter experienced a wide variety of discriminatory practices. Graphic examples are Nawojka of Poland (Chapter 13) who had to disguise herself as a man when attending Cracow University in the four teenth century and Anna Maria van Schurman from The Netherlands (Chapter 10) who was made to conceal herself behind a curtain in order to follow university lectures at the University of Leiden in the seventeenth century. Evidence from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries suggests that, although not in the mainstream of scientific and intellectual activity, women (particularly from the aristocracy and the artisan classes) were interested in the sciences - in princely courts, informal salons, the artisan workshop and king's academies. However, as scientific endeavours began to be concentrated in established academies and universities and science itself became a legitimate profession, women were increasingly excluded from scientific activity (Schiebinger, 1989).
