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First let me be clear, there were lots of educated women before today’s leading lady.

But for many people in the past, both male and female, education was simply less formal than it is now. Maybe your parents hired tutors. Maybe those tutors actually knew the subject. Maybe they were also good at teaching it. Maybe you got access to a library and more or less educated yourself. Maybe you just hung around educated people and picked up stuff along the way. Maybe you attended a school run by a monastery or a nunnery or another religious institution.

All of these methods could produce good results. (Or not.) But what they didn’t do was award you a high-level degree, which you could reasonably expect other people anywhere to understand as proof of your accomplishment, showing that you had not just started, but also finished an accepted course of study taught by qualified people.

The Origins of the Modern University

The modern university has its roots in the ecclesiastical schools of the Roman Catholic church. There were schools in some nunneries, but the larger and better-known versions were for men because the purpose was to train boys to become priests. There were also equivalents in non-European and non-Christian countries. Definitions can vary but the first school generally accepted as a university by modern standards was founded in Bologna, Italy, in 1088 CE. Or 1180 CE depending on how you define “founded.” Either way by 1180, the University of Bologna awarded high-level degrees, it was somewhat independent, and it taught secular subjects right alongside the theological ones. That’s a definition we’re using for a university.

Western Europe was thrilled by this idea, and it wasn’t too long before there was a University of Paris, and a University of Oxford, and a University of Cambridge, and a University of Salamanca. Also, and most importantly for our purposes today, a University of Padua. That one was founded in 1222 by a group of scholars who were unhappy at Bologna, so they packed up and moved north.

These universities all had one thing in common and that is that they were boys-only clubs. because of course they were. This kind of higher-level education was both beyond a woman’s limited capacities and also of no use to her. It would only give her ideas above her station. Also, who was to guarantee her safety out and about on campus? It was much better for women to stay home with their needlework.

Even so, there are very occasional references to an odd woman briefly attending various of these institutions, and maybe even teaching at them. But not a lot of references, and not well-documented references, and no details. Not until we get to the middle of the 17^th century.

A Genius in Venice

Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia was born in Venice on June 5, 1646. Her father was noble, but her mother—gasp—was not. Also, her parents weren’t married. (Feel free to gasp even louder.)

As a result of such recklessness by her father, Elena and her siblings didn’t count as nobles. Not until much later, when her father paid a significant fee to get them counted as nobles. Also, he belatedly married their mother (Karborycha, 261).

What Elena did have in favor was that her father’s family was scholarly. He was both able and willing to hire tutors, buy books, and host visiting scholars. He also noticed that Elena showed talent. He arranged for her to get tutoring in grammar, theology, philosophy, dialectics, astronomy, mathematics, Latin, Greek, French, English, Spanish, singing, harpsichord, clavichord, harp, and violin. She excelled in her studies (Fusco, 30-31). So much for the limited capacities of women.

(As a side note, all that musical training was the least unusual part of the list. Venice was a musical hotspot in the Baroque period, a certain composer named Antonio Vivaldi was about to be born there. If Elena had had a different kind of philandering father, she might have found herself discreetly deposited at the Ospedale della Pieta, which was a church-funded orphanage. Boys learned a trade and had to leave by age 15, but girls were taught music to a very high standard and their performances were admired all over Europe. Much of Vivaldi’s music was composed for these girls; he was the violin master at the school. However, Elena’s father did not abandon her, so she learned her music at home.)

At the age of 19, Elena became an oblate in the Benedictine order. An oblate is not a nun. Oblates continue to live in regular society, but they do vow to live the rules of St Benedict, including chastity. So no marriage for Elena. Some sources say Elena took this step against the wishes of her parents and certainly of her suitors (Karborycha, 261; Fusco, 34). The older sources see this as proof of her piety, and maybe so. I certainly don’t want to cast aspersions on anyone’s faith. But it also occurs to me that a husband would probably just get in the way of her academic pursuits. You couldn’t count on a husband to be supportive of so strange a thing, and you certainly couldn’t count on a husband to have a library and intellectual friends like her father’s. So who knows what she really thought? At any rate there will be no romantic entanglements in Elena’s life.

Heading to the University

In 1667 she was 21 when she met Carlo Rinaldini, a professor of philosophy and mathematics at the University of Padua, about 40 miles away from Venice. Padua was renowned for its academic achievements. It had hosted many luminaries, but the one that is still famous to this day was a mathematician by the name of Galileo Galilei. He did much of his groundbreaking work while he was chair of mathematics there, though he was long since dead before Elena was born.

Anyway, Professor Rinaldini was very impressed with Elena’s grasp of geometry, and he thought she should come to the university and continue her studies there.

I can find no hint that this was a big deal. None of my sources said anyone opposed her. I think it was not so much that women were forbidden as that it simply wasn’t done. Until Elena did it.

In Padua she added Hebrew to her list of accomplishments. She joined a lot of academic societies that were male-only until they admitted her. She attended classes in many subjects. In 1677 she had a public debate with another scholar. It was held entirely in Latin and Greek (Kaborycha, 261). She also started corresponding with scholars and nobles all over Europe, which was how learning and academic networking was done in a world without academic journals and video calls.

Studying Is One Thing, Graduating Is Another

But Elena still didn’t actually have a degree. Because women didn’t earn degrees.

She had applied for a doctorate in theology, but she was denied. One of her teachers asked the chancellor why women were permitted to study theology at all if they couldn’t get a degree? The chancellor reluctantly agreed that was a valid point but a doctorate in theology was just a step too far. He couldn’t handle it. But he could compromise on a doctorate in philosophy. That was maybe okay. It was one step further removed from God, and closer to a woman’s level (Fusco, 35).  

In today’s world, if you want to be a Doctor of Philosophy, otherwise known as a PhD, you have to do original research. In Elena’s day, it wasn’t quite like that. Original research wasn’t necessarily required, but all-around high-level scholarship was. To pass, you had to publicly present on a topic (Elena’s was Aristotle) and then answer questions from the examiners, who could theoretically ask you anything they wanted, on topic or off it.

Elena did all this on June 25, 1678. She was given no leniency. The examiners grilled her in front of an audience so large it had to be moved to the cathedral to accommodate them all (Fusco, 38).

The results of the examiners were unanimous. Elena passed and was granted the title of Doctor of Philosophy. But she wasn’t just the first woman to get a doctorate. She was the first fully documented woman to get any university degree.

Post-Graduation

After her graduation Elena continued to study and write. She published essays on morality, religion, and politics. She wrote poetry and translated a religious work from Spanish into Latin. It was popular enough to go through five editions in seven years (Kaborycha, 262).

Not all of Elena’s work still survives for us to read. What survives better is her correspondence. This is not thanks to her family. After her death, they did the very standard procedure of disposing of her papers. But that is not true of all of her illustrious correspondents. Thirty-five letters written by Elena have been gathered from the various collections of people she wrote to. Some letters are in Italian, some in Latin and on a few we still have the actual physical copy she wrote herself (Zambonin). These letters prove that not much has changed in academia. For example, one letter she wrote to the director of the University there in Padua. It’s basically a letter of recommendation. Doesn’t say much except that she highly recommends that the university renew that man’s contract (Kaborycha, 263).

Unfortunately, Elena did not have a long life. She died at age 38 (probably of cancer) (Kaborycha, 263).

Elena’s Legacy

There’s no way of knowing whether Elena hoped her example would pave the way for other women. But if she did, she was disappointed.

When the next woman applied for permission to graduate, the University of Padua changed the rules and formally prohibited women. It’s like we can accept one highly unusual, freakish woman, but we certainly can’t make it a habit. Goodness me no.

So even though Elena was the frontrunner, the battle for women’s education hadn’t really even started. A whole host of other women had to break down educational barriers too. Here’s just a sampling of the many, many firsts in educational history for women:

• In 1732, Laura Bassi became the second known woman to earn a PhD. She got hers from the University of Bologna. They also gave her a salaried position as a lecturer. She taught on chemistry, physics, and other scientific topics.
• In 1786, Catherine the Great of Russia opened free public schools for girls. While she wasn’t the absolute first person to do this, she was early, and the idea of public schools, especially for girls, would have to wait another century in most places.
• In 1836, the Georgia Female College, later renamed to be Wesleyan, became the world’s first college specifically intended to grant university degrees to women.
• In 1837, Oberlin College became the first pre-existing American college to formally admit women. Initially, women were only eligible for a two-year “women’s program,” but they soon expanded to make it fully co-educational.
• In 1849, Elizabeth Blackwell became the first American woman to earn a medical degree. When she applied to attend the school, the administrators let the all-male student body vote on whether to accept her. They voted yes. As a joke. She came anyway. And she graduated.
• In 1862, Mary Jane Patterson was the first African-American woman to earn a bachelor’s degree, and she got it from Oberlin College. Her course of study was called the “gentleman’s course” because it included Greek, Latin, and higher mathematics.
• In 1869, a group known as the Edinburgh Seven became the first women to be enrolled in any British university. Unfortunately, they weren’t allowed to graduate. The courts ruled that they should never have been admitted in the first place.
• In 1889, Susan La Flesche Picotte was the first Native American woman to earn a Western medical degree. She was valedictorian of her class.
• In 1904, Helen Keller graduated from Radcliffe University. She was the first deafblind person to receive a Bachelor of Arts degree.
• In 1939, Dorothy Garrod, archaeologist, became the first woman to hold a chair at either Oxford or Cambridge University. Interestingly, it wasn’t until eight years later that Cambridge allowed women to take full degrees. They were the last university in the UK to allow that.

I could go on with other firsts in other places and fields, especially in the non-English speaking world, but the more important issue for women in general is when having education more available and acceptable to large masses of women. It’s cool when some extremely gifted, hardworking, and determined woman beats the odds and achieves something great, but the better outcome is when opportunity is available to everyone, and you don’t have to be extraordinary or beat the odds because you start with an even playing field.

Women Catch Up (at least in the US)

In the United States, women were slowly admitted to more and more colleges starting in 1836. But we didn’t reach parity with the men in bachelor’s degrees awarded until 1982. To the surprise of nearly everyone, we didn’t just stay at equality. Women started getting more degrees than men. And then even more than that. As of 2019, there was a 14 point percentage gap in women’s favor, and it’s even bigger now. American men are less likely to graduate high school, less likely to start college, and less likely to finish college (Reeves).

This remains true even beyond the undergraduate level. Elena Cornaro Piscopia would be astonished but nowadays, a person earning an advanced degree is more likely to be a woman than a man. At least in the United States. Other countries will vary, but in the US in 2020, 53.1% of all doctoral degrees granted went to women. It was the twelfth year in a row that women had outnumbered men (Perry). For the year 2022, I have the breakdown by subject, and there still are some interesting discrepancies there.

• In Education, women earned 77.3% of the doctoral degrees.
• In Medicine, women earned 75%.
• In Behavioral and Social Sciences, women earned 69%
• In Humanities, women earned 63.1%
• In Fine Arts, women earned 60.3%.
• In Law, women earned 55.8%
• In Natural Sciences, women earned 53%

Women don’t drop below half until we get to Business and Management, which is still at 49.5% (that’s not a significant deviation), and then Engineering, at 31.5% (which is a significant deviation) (American Academy of Arts and Sciences).

There were two further breakdowns that I found a little interesting. For the humanities overall, women took 63.1%, but within each subfield it was sometimes a little different. For history, women took 48.6%. But the one Elena Cornaro Piscopia wanted, that is the advanced degree in theology (now labeled in this data as religion), women took 45.8% of the advanced degrees. So maybe not quite half, but still pretty amazingly good compared to what Elena dealt with.

Today I have a special thanks to Teresa and someone with the initial H for their one-time donations on Buy Me a Coffee. I also want to thank Elizabeth, Stacy, and Mahsa for signing up as supporters on Patreon. I generally give a shoutout and thanks to those who support my show, but this one’s a little different than usual because Mahsa is originally from Iran, and she asked me to switch her personal shoutout to a shoutout for the amazing women of her country. In particular, she is concerned about 18-year-old Melika Azizi, who is now sentenced for execution because she participated in protests. Over the five years of this podcast, I have spent a lot of time researching and telling the stories of strong women, some of whom paid a very serious price for circumstances that were not of their making. But they have always been very safely in the past, and I often think how glad I am that things aren’t like that anymore because people like Elena Cornaro Piscopia have won so many for us battles already. So it’s good to be reminded that not all the battles have been won. Not everywhere, and not for all women, and not permanently anywhere. My heart goes out to the women suffering in Iran and to Melika. Because in the slightly modified words of my own country’s fight for independence, all men and women have “certain unalienable rights, and that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

Selected Sources

American Academy of Arts and Sciences. “Gender Distribution of Advanced Degrees in the Humanities.” American Academy of Arts & Sciences, 2024. https://www.amacad.org/humanities-indicators/higher-education/gender-distribution-advanced-degrees-humanities.

Fusco, Nicola. Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia, 1646-1684. Pittsburgh : United States Committee for the Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia Tercentenary, 1975. https://archive.org/details/elenalucreziacor0000fusc/page/78/mode/2up.

Hawrami, Ravan, and Alanna Williams. “Male Stagnation in Doctoral Programs – American Institute for Boys and Men.” American Institute for Boys and Men, January 10, 2025. https://aibm.org/research/male-stagnation-in-doctoral-programs/.

Kaborycha, Lisa. A Corresponding Renaissance : Letters Written by Italian Women, 1375-1650. New York ; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.

Perry, Mark. “Women Earned the Majority of Doctoral Degrees in 2020 for the 12th Straight Year and Outnumber Men in Grad School 148 to 100.” American Enterprise Institute – AEI, October 14, 2021. https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/women-earned-the-majority-of-doctoral-degrees-in-2020-for-the-12th-straight-year-and-outnumber-men-in-grad-school-148-to-100/.

Reeves, Richard V., and Ember Smith. “The Male College Crisis Is Not Just in Enrollment, but Completion.” Brookings, October 8, 2021. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-male-college-crisis-is-not-just-in-enrollment-but-completion/.

Zambonin, Francesco. “The Correspondence of Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia.” Early Modern Letters Online, 2019. https://www.academia.edu/39289499/The_Correspondence_of_Elena_Lucrezia_Cornaro_Piscopia.