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Rating: 
Summary: Many obstacles
Review: The modern research university model, especially in the US, traces its ancestry in large part to the major German universities prior to World War 2, when German research was pre-eminent in many fields. Accordingly, it is of no small interest as to how women were admitted as students and faculty in that period, and the obstacles they faced.Mazon shows this clearly in her analysis of why women were initially barred from German universities in the late 19th century. There were many reasons. The rough-housing, hard drinking that was considered an obligatory (male) student experience. The feeling that women were intellectually incapable of rigourous thought. Etc. None of these attitudes were exclusively German. Indeed, in most countries, women faced such obstacles. For example, even today, in many Australian universities, engineering students are the rowdiest and bawdiest. This correlates with a very minimal female enrollment in that field. Mazon concentrates on the Kaiserreich era, up to the Great War. Mostly because the hardest travails faced by women were in that period. She gives short biographies of several trailblazers, to bring life to her narrative. Useful to see our past in such scrutiny.
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