Women's Work: History of Women in Academia at the University of Tartu

Dr. Janet Laidla shares her work on charting the roles and contributions of women at the University of Tartu from the early days of the Estonian Republic, and what it means today. 

Baltic Ways is a podcast brought to you by the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies, produced in partnership with the Baltic Initiative at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of AABS or FPRI.

Read more: 

• Estonia's first female doctorates were educators and physicians | News | ERR 

• Eesti esimestest naisdoktoritest said eeskätt arstid ja õpetajad | Ajalugu | ERR

• Laidla, Janet; Anepaio, Lembi (2024). Esimesed doktorikraadiga naised tänapäeva Eesti aladelt [The First Female PhDs from the Present-day Estonian Area]. Õpetatud Eesti Seltsi aastaraamat / Annales Litterarum Societatis Esthonicae, 28−67. https://oes.ut.ee/publikatsioonid/

Transcript

Indra Ekmanis: Welcome to Baltic Ways, a podcast bringing you interviews and insights from the world of Baltic studies. I'm your host, Dr. Indra Ekmanis. Today, we listen to a conversation with Dr. Janet Laidla, lecturer in Estonian history at the University of Tartu. Dr. Laidla's recent research has focused on the history of women at the university and the essential roles they have played in both academic and non academic work. Stay tuned.

Thank you so much for joining us on Baltic Ways. Perhaps you can start with a bit about your background and how you came to be involved in Baltic studies.

Janet Laidla: Thank you so much for inviting me. It's a bit of a long story. So bear with me, because I have a bit of an unconventional academic career path. It started out conventional enough. So I did my BA and MA in history at the University of Tartu in Estonia, and then right after went straight to PhD also in history, also at the University of Tartu.

But in my fourth year of PhD, in early modern chronicles, I got a bit stuck. So instead of graduating, I went out to look for a job. And eventually I was hired by the University of Tartu Museum. And there I worked in different positions and for several years I was the head of the Old Observatory. I enjoyed that a lot.

But instead of history I was promoting astronomy for 10 years, and my research was more concentrated on the history of science [rather] than the history of 17th century chronicles. I still had a small position at the Institute of History and Archaeology as lecturer, and although I always planned to defend my PhD eventually, I got around to it when the university changed the rules and said you now have to have a PhD to be a lecturer.

But as I said, my focus had already changed, so after graduating I was moving slowly at first towards the 20th century. And, because I had been working on the early modern period, I now also had to seek out new networks. And I had been aware, through a lot of my colleagues, of the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies. But, well, a few years ago, I decided now it's time because I was working in similar topics that my colleagues who were members were now working on.

IE: Maybe you can tell us a little bit about that transition from studying early modern historiography, and then you went into history of astronomy and sciences, and now your focus is on studying women in academia. Perhaps you can trace that path for us a little bit.

JL: Well, the University Museum is not only about history of science, it was also about the history of university, and I had been interested in the history of university, especially women students for a while, specifically the period of the 1920s and the '30s, the interwar period.

And for the university centenary in 2019, where we celebrated the hundred years of Estonian-language university, we were preparing an exhibition at the National Archives on academic women. And we were so surprised that there was so little research on that subject. So basically, this is how I ended up with the topic that I'm really passionate about. However, my first research paper I did in my first year of university was actually on the position of women in Greek society. So in a way I was going back to the roots.

IE: A full circle sort of a journey then. Well, can you tell us a little bit about your current work, looking at women, studying and working at the University of Tartu? You mentioned that you started looking at the interwar period. Maybe you can tell us a bit about the role of the university during those first years of the Estonian Republic and how it developed and how it came to admit women also into different fields of study.

JL: The University of Tartu has a long and illustrious history going back, well, almost 400 years. So it already played a role in the national awakening in the 19th century of Estonian and also Latvian and many other nations of the Russian Empire. And of course it was important for the young republic. Its official name was the University of Tartu of the Republic of Estonia. So the state was literally in the name. Also, there was the political decision, to change the language of instruction to Estonian that we celebrated. So Estonian at the time was not a language of scholarly use. The secondary education had mostly been in German or Russian.

And so the university was tasked, alongside other organizations, to create the vocabulary needed for research. And the university also concentrated on Estonian culture, Estonian history, literature, but also Estonian geography and nature, natural resources, instead of the whole Russian Empire, or the world.

It was not as provincial as it sounds, of course, there were still world renowned scholars like Ernst and Armin Öpik, Ludvig Puusepp, Johann Villip, Walter Andersson, and others. But when we talk about women — women had been admitted as auditors since 1905 and full students since 1915, which is much later than in the US or the UK, for example.

But in the Russian empire, and also, in fact, Germany, the struggle for female higher education had been going on over the 19th century. Many women also from Estonia went to Switzerland and there were the higher courses in Tartu, but also in St. Petersburg and Moscow, and some of them are kind of like women's colleges. But this is like a topic that I plan to have a closer look at in the future.

So the university in 1919 did not reverse the decision to admit women — it was already admitting women, it had been admitting women for, for some years already. And I think it would have been an unpopular decision if they had decided to no longer admit women, but I mean, not everybody was in favor as well. It was like not 100 percent that all the male academics were like, “Yes, let all those women come in.”

IE: Maybe you can share a little bit about how the career paths of women in these academic positions at University of Tartu evolved over time — some of the trends that you saw.

JL: So, even before you had some women working as assistants in the university clinics, or assistant assistants at the astronomical observatory, Maria Orlova, for example. But, in 1919, they started with a temporary lecturer of English. She was called Jenny Leidig, and she had been appointed already in 1905 [edit: 1906]. But then the state said, the government said, “No, no women in academia, in the staff positions, I mean, we don't even have them as students, so what were you thinking?”

So in 1919, you had Jenny Leidig. You had some assistants in the clinics, and there was this young woman, Lidia Poska-Teiss, who also applied to become an assistant in — first she was working at the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, but then sort of moved into medicine. And, over the period of the 1920s and the '30s, you could say that the number of and the percentage of female staff grew steadily.

By 1938, it was around 16 percent of the whole staff. That includes all of the clerical, the secretary positions and the libraries and so on. But we can say that perhaps around 13 percent of the staff were doing at least some research and teaching. And over time, some women rose from junior to senior assistants.

The first woman to be invited to become a professor was in 1939. She was, however, not appointed, again by the state. For different reasons, gender had probably less to do with it. So Alma Tomingas basically became the first auxiliary professor in 1940. And she was a pharmacologist.

IE: In your work, you also speak a little bit about the challenges facing women in their career progression. And those challenges — one being dealing with gender and patriarchal society, but also other social and economic and political factors. Can you tell us a little bit about those and their impact on women at the University of Tartu?

JL: Basically, it was as complicated as it is now, in a sense. A fair part of the society still saw women's place at home. Single women, and also men in Estonia, in the marriageable age were frowned upon.

IE: In terms of coming into the university?

JL: Well, sort of basically coming to university because either you were there to find a husband or you were there to sit in a cafe and, you know, waste your life.

And also the fear that if you had a higher education, you would not marry because that myth stayed around for quite a bit of time. However, there were still many working mothers — also at the university. So economically, it made sense in many cases that both of the parents worked, except right after the Great Depression, where, especially in civil service, only one of the spouses was supposed to work.

It could be the woman, but of course more often it was the man. So, and also the university — all this apparent progress aside, the steady rise of women and staff numbers — there is no question of the fact that the university and the state saw research as mainly as a male profession, because the graduate research scholarships that are listed in the staff lists were given almost exclusively to men.

Vera Poska-Grünthal, she was a specialist in social law, is a notable exception. This of course, led women to search for alternative opportunities, for example, through the International Council [edit: Federation] of University Women. Hilda Taba, who worked in the US, is a very good example. But this also needs a little bit of a deeper investigation.

A lot of women were working in temporary, low paying positions at the university. If you see that there's a job opportunity in, say, high school, or you can become a barrister, or open your own practice in medicine, work for a hospital, you figure that this will perhaps give me a higher salary. But definitely it might give you more financial security. The Baltic German women went to have careers in Germany. So there were a lot of issues at play here. So it was quite complicated. And of course there were stay at home moms and wives, it's just that I'm interested in professional women.

IE: Of course. Can you speak a little bit more about these sorts of non-academic roles that women held and how they played into the overall culture at the university?

JL: Yeah, interestingly, women had worked for the university long before they were admitted as students. From the first part of the 19th century, you had the midwives working for the university. From the second part, you had the housekeepers at clinics, you had the first secretaries. And the beginning of the 20th century, as I mentioned, the assistants at the Astronomical Observatory and the clinics. In the 1920s and '30s, there were also a lot of women working as secretaries in the offices, also at different libraries and with collections.

And some of these women working especially in the collections might have also pursued research and they also could have done some teaching. I think the archaeologist Marta Schmiedehelm is a good example of this. So in my opinion, the line between academic and non-academic is blurred. And this is why I don't want to dismiss the non-academic positions from my research as many other scholars have done.

IE: Yeah, absolutely. The work and the history of women at the university extending far beyond what we think of as formal academic roles. That's an important point to make. I wonder if you can tell us about the overall situation, and some of the key takeaways that you're finding in your research or areas perhaps that you want to continue to explore.

JL: Well, some of the things that I have found from study of the University of Tartu during the interwar period, when I sort of engage them with the previous research on the subjects done in the US, the UK and Germany — then, in some places, the women were engaged in the so called feminine fields, such as home economics, for example. But in Tartu there were no clearly defined feminine fields because they did not have the home economics department for starts. But there are definitely non-female fields. So the faculties of theology, agriculture, and law were dominantly, if not exclusively, male fields. So women were more numerous in the faculties of medicine, veterinary medicine, mathematics and natural sciences.

But it's sort of interesting because I think that the factor here is also the hierarchy, like how many levels of positions you have. For example, in humanities, you have lecturers, docents and professors. So in humanities, women only have the lower positions, at least until 1939. But in these other areas where you have the temporary assistants and junior assistants, senior assistant, docent, if you have more layers, then you actually can see women sort of starting from the bottom and going up.

Of course, men also start from the bottom and go up and sometimes they linger in the lower positions and sometimes they are similarly demoted or leave the university. So I think that I need to do some more data analysis to really understand how the sort of the restructuring or the structure or the hierarchy of the position works for women at the time and perhaps how it works for women now.

Also, the preliminary survey of the social status also suggests a more varied social background for the academic women in Estonia, in comparison to some other Western European countries. several are indeed from lower and upper middle class, but there are also a fair number of working class women and farmer's daughters.

Now, farmer's daughters, there is a range, so they could be quite wealthy in Estonia, or relatively poor. So there's other factors as well. And, in many places, marriage ended the academic career. So academic women were single, but there's a significant number of married couples working at the university, such as Elfriede and Vilhelm Ridala, Elisa Käer-Kingisepp and Georg Kingisepp, Gerhard and Natalia Rägö, Salme and Ilmar Vooremaa, and so on. Many others were also married, just not to fellow academics, including Lidia Poska-Teiss, that I mentioned earlier. And of course there are fathers and daughters. So we get to mothers and daughters only in the 1940s.

That said, there are several women students who remember being told that if they are serious about their research, they should not marry. One by Professor Gustav Suits, whose wife Aino worked at the university as a lecturer for over 15 years.

IE: Oh, a bit ironic then!

JL: Yeah, sort of, I know that this discussion took place before Aino took up the position of lecturer, so maybe he changed his mind when he, because Aino was also a mother, she was a working mother, they had children and so she had to somehow cope with everything. 

IE: It's interesting that you talk about this kind of range of economic backgrounds with the women who entered into these roles. Do you have any inclination as to why there is that type of access, that range?

Janet Laidla: So I think it has something to do with Estonia, being the young republic, that sort of, sort of declared itself classless or where class wasn't as prominent. Also for many of these women, the secondary education, and also the university education was a way of social mobility. And they were out there to get a job, because the university education was costly, and they thought that it would be an easier way to work for the university while studying at the university. So they sometimes weren't motivated so much by the sort of idea of an academic career, they didn't see it as entering academia, as perhaps we sometimes do now that you have this career path ahead of you. It was just a job as any other. But this was a preliminary study and I would need to go further in order to make any kind of more profound arguments based on this. But it was interesting to see. But it was also expected, thinking about Estonian history, and what the Estonian state declared in the beginning it was about to do. I think that was one of the things that perhaps makes the Estonian state and probably some other similar case studies stand out on the background of the Western European situation.

IE: I wonder what you think of all this work that you're doing — the study of the interwar period — how do you think it translates into today? How can it impact the way that we are thinking about women in academia now? I'm thinking a little bit about a study that I recently read about the United States, where there are fears of a “demographic crisis” regarding too many women in comparatively, in academia. The argument was that there's not necessarily a balance anymore. And I wonder what it's like in Estonia. And at the same time, keeping in the back of our mind that there are plenty of areas where we are not seeing parity or equity. So, curious about your thoughts on that.

JL: Well, it's also a complex issue. Yes, I actually heard that argument recently. When we had the women in science days, one of the discussants was saying that soon we will be talking about the lack of men in university, so they will become a minority. Not yet in Estonia.

Of course, things have changed where in 1940, we had one professor. And now we have around 30 percent of professors at the University of Tartu are women. So we're getting closer to balance. Thinking about recent research, Michelle Ryan wrote a paper in Nature in 2022 saying that one of the misconceptions we have is that we overestimate the progress.

So perhaps, perhaps it was based on statistics, perhaps it was another overestimation of the representation of women. And I'm thinking perhaps partly we underestimate the number of women working at the university in the past. So we overestimate now because we think that there has been this huge progress.

And then you might say, and that, yes, that's the numbers, but their positions and their contributions in comparison today were insignificant. But nowadays we understand research much more as teamwork, as a collaborative effort. So perhaps, the women of the past their contributions were not as insignificant. I mean, the records did not file themselves, the notes and manuscripts did not type themselves at the time. And we also know these later controversies concerning, for example, Rosalind Franklin or Jocelyn Bell Burnell. And I'm not saying that we'll find something like that here in Tartu as well, but still.

Coming back to the overestimation or the fact that women are becoming dominant, that there's a fear that women might start to dominate academia some — well, it then tells you something about academia. Because the IT sector used to be a female area in the beginning, because the computers and it all started from the universities. It started from Harvard University where the computations and also the glass plates the astrographs were making were analyzed by a group of women, called the Pickering Harem. And also Tartu had its own sets of women computers and they were called computers.

It's the whole “Hidden Figures” story at NASA and so on. So in the beginning, these sort of computer programs and computing, well, not in the beginning, but at some point this was women's work. And then it started to pay something. It started to be prominent. It started to be, you know, the salaries got higher. And then for some reason it became a dominantly male field. And now we're looking to include women in STEM, but also IT. So maybe we should do some soul searching and see if the working positions in academia are then not highly paid or prestigious enough that men are no longer interested.

So it's not about women taking over. What I see when I look at professional women is that they are often stuck into low prestige, low paying jobs. So if, you know, if they're overflowing the academia, it says something about academia in the future. But well, at least in Tartu, we're a fair bit away from that.

And it's also sort of about numbers. It's another thing that Michelle Ryan said that it's not the percentage of staff, you have to look at the positions. And I mean, are the sort of the heads of, you know, these Ivy League universities and colleges, the top positions, are they being taken over massively by women? Or is it just that you have women in administrative positions, the low paying the teaching positions. Is the overall percentage more than 50 or are you having women in the higher positions?

IE: Yeah, absolutely. And you speak really well to that idea of those hierarchies and also the unrecognized labor that really does support broader academic achievement. Filing. Typing. Being a sounding board. It is important and significant to recognize that labor as well.

Perhaps you can tell, tell us a little bit more about the future of your work.

JL: The Tartu example is very interesting and also there is a lot of material because the University of Tartu collected masses of information on its staff and students — so, much more than many other institutions around the world, so you can do different things with the material. But I would also like to do some comparative history. For example, Zane Rosīte is doing similar studies, for her Ph.D. at the University of Latvia. I am looking to compare the Tartu case with Latvia because they are so close. But I'm also looking to compare my Tartu case with the universities in Finland, New Zealand, and Australia. And now you might be wondering why these countries.

Well, the obvious factor, of course, is the early vote for women. But also the size of population, the number of universities, the empire factor is also there, and in a way, all four countries trying somehow to redefine themselves before the Second World War. Two of them becoming independent, and two of them sort of becoming definitely more autonomous within the empire. So I think it would be interesting to compare these. I don't think many people would agree Estonia and Finland as being a frontier in the 20th century, but somehow sort of these frontier, co-educational institutions in these four countries to see what else comes out from this comparison.

IE: We will certainly look forward to seeing the results of that future work from you as well. You know, this has been such a fascinating discussion. And I think it's such an interesting and significant topic. It's really necessary to understand our histories, the histories of our institutions, the role of women throughout the course of those institutions, which has so often been undervalued or understudied at the very least. And this is making a significant contribution to that work. So I appreciate the discussion very much — especially in this time where we're seeing slow and incremental, but still important progress. I often think of the Baltics as one of those key regions that advances the visibility of women in leadership positions — thinking very much about those strong women Kaja Kallas, Vaira Vīķe-Freiberga, Dalia Gribauskaite — so it's interesting to have this perspective as well.

Janet: Yes, because sort of we assume that the position of women, especially in the 20th century, has been linear, sort of progressive, but it hasn't actually. Also in academia, it hasn't. And there is a PhD thesis on the University of Washington in the US, for example, where she starts out in the 19th century and ends in, I think, 1970s. And she so shows how it has been up and down. It hasn't been this linear progress that I'm showing and, and here the fact that it's linear is really interesting.

But of course in Estonia, there's a different kind of break in the 1940s. And this apparent understanding that in the Soviet Union, the gender question had been solved. And, I don't know if I'll really go into the Soviet period as well, but, well. It isn't as easy as that, definitely. So even if we are making progress at the moment, I think, especially in the US, you're feeling that when women's rights in general are in question. And then it's definitely sort of if you have reached some level, it's not, “Yes, we can also only go forward from here.” No, you can actually go back.

I think it's something that needs to be kept in minds — every victory we have won is not certain.

IE: It is certainly not a guarantee for that progress to be guaranteed. That's such an important point. Well, again, I am so thankful for the opportunity to be in discussion with you. Thank you so much, Dr. Laidla for joining us on the podcast. We certainly look forward to your future work

JL: Thank you for having me. Thank you so much. 

IE:Thank you for tuning in to Baltic Ways, a podcast from the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies, produced in partnership with the Baltic Initiative at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. A note that the views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of AABS or FPRI.

I'm your host, Indra Ekmanis. Subscribe to our newsletters at AABS dash Baltic studies dot org and FPRI dot org slash baltic dash initiative for more from the world of Baltic studies. Thanks for listening and see you next time.  

This transcript has been slightly edited for clarity.