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Eighteenth-century Bologna provided a rare liberal environment in which brilliant women could flourish
Many of the modern sciences have their beginnings in the 18th century, also known as The Age of Reason, a time of logic, rationality and experimentation. But throughout most of Europe, this renaissance of the mind seemed to have been reserved exclusively for men. Refined European women with an inclination to study had few options available to them. Most upper-class women learned what they knew about the world by attending salons-lectures, concerts and discussions conducted in the parlors of Europe's great houses. A university education was off limits to women almost everywhere in Europe-- with one notable exception: Italy
According to historian J. Burckhardt, the education of Italian girls from higher social classes was exactly the same as that of boys. Italian fathers thought that knowledge of the ancient cultures of Rome and Greece was the highest value to transmit to all posterity-including the girls. As H. J. Mozans explained in his book Woman in Science, the special attitude toward the education of girls in Italy stems from the old Roman spirit of freedom of which the Italians were the natural inheritors.
In the Universities of Salerno, Bologna, Padua and elsewhere in Italy, women competed on an equal footing with men, particularly in the fields of literature, natural sciences and medicine.
Among liberal Italian universities, one in particular stands apart. The University of Bologna was founded in 1088 as a law school and is the oldest in Europe. Early on, it earned a reputation for being a "student's university," because the students selected both the faculty and the rector. Not coincidentally, the University of Bologna is also distinguished by the unusual number of women scientists it graduated and hired during the 18th century. Intellectually gifted women from the upper classes and sometimes even from the less economically advantaged classes had access to a level of education not seen in most Western nations until the 20th century. Some of these women, as the following short biographies demonstrate, even flourished as scholars and scientists.
Laura Bassi (1711-1778)
Among the women professors of the University of Bologna, Laura Bassi was the pioneer. She became the first woman to earn a doctor of philosophy degree,...