ABSTRACT
In a pioneering study of “Seven who made a revolution,” Thomas Bonner made the reasonable claim that the seven women who began studies in the 1860s for a medical degree at the University of Zurich “made possible the greatest victory won by medical women in the nineteenth century.” In spite of many problems, the pedagogical experiment succeeded so well that other Swiss universities (Bern, Geneva, and Lausanne) also accepted female medical students; by 1907 about a thousand women were studying medicine in Swiss universities, “a number greater than the rest of Europe combined.”2 The presence of women in European universities, mainly in Switzerland and France, and to a lesser degree in Belgium and Germany, was one half of a new educational phenomenon, what Natalia Tikhonov described as the “appearance [1870-1910] of two new categories of students … foreigners and women.”3 Tikhonov put forward the idea of a “Zurich model,” an “open” university popular with foreigners, one that favored feminization. Most of the foreigners were from Eastern Europe, with Jewish students from the Russian Empire the dominant category. Of course, as Tikhonov points out, in Western Europe as a whole, foreigners and particularly foreign women remained marginal compared to the student mass.4
