Born: 1851, Poland
Died: after 1895
Country most active: Poland
Also known as: Stefania Wolicka-Arnd
The following bio was written by Emma Rosen, author of On This Day She Made History: 366 Days With Women Who Shaped the World and This Day In Human Ingenuity & Discovery: 366 Days of Scientific Milestones with Women in the Spotlight, and has been republished with permission.
In 1875, Stefania Wolicka, a Polish historian, became the first woman to be awarded a Doctorate of Philosophy at the University of Zurich. Born in Warsaw on August 31, 1851, which was within the Russian Empire from 1867, Wolicka pursued her history degree despite the efforts of the Russian government to prevent women from pursuing higher education.
In 1873, she defied a decree ordering Russian women studying abroad to abandon their studies. Despite her request for an exemption from the decree being denied and her direct petition to the Minister of Education, Dmitry Tolstoy, proving unsuccessful, Wolicka elected to continue her studies.
The Russian government saw a political threat in “radical socialist activists,” leading to the expulsion of several women students in Zurich. Wolicka’s name was on a list of 45 female Russian students who were all banned from teaching in the Russian Empire, forcing them to leave Switzerland by January 1, 1874. Despite these challenges, she received her Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1875.
Her doctoral dissertation is titled “Griechische Frauengestalten, 1.Teil” (Greek Figures of Women, Part 1). She has been called one of the “first Polish female academicians.” Wolicka later became a noted writer on women’s rights in Poland. In 1895, she published an article in the Polish law journal Athenæum titled “Twenty-five years of the parliamentary struggle for the rights of women.”