Born: 26 June 1868, Germany
Died: 5 July 1937
Country most active: Germany
Also known as: NA
Dr. Doris Gutsmiedl-Schümann on early German-speaking archaeologists transcript
The following is excerpted from a 2025 interview with Dr. Doris Gutsmiedl-Schümann, co-investigator for AktArcha, a project researching early female archaeologists from German speaking areas. A German biography can be found on the AktArcha site.
So, the first woman who studied, really studied archaeology, means going to a university in Germany was Elvira Fölzer. She was the first female archaeologist in Germany who was awarded a PhD, which was also the only way to finish a study program in archaeology at that time. Elvira Fölzer was born in 1868 in Wandsbek, which is now a part of Hamburg, and she also came out of a wealthy family. We do not know much about her early life. It seems that her family got the wealth through the German-Brazilian trade during the later 19th century, and she had at least three sisters. She received the typical education for girls from wealthy families at that time. We already know from Johanna Mestoff, for example. So, she was trained to run her own household. She was trained in languages and literature and to have basically nice educations, but her education was not very scientific. And it was surely not an education that allowed her to go to university. We do not know much about her early life, what she did as a young woman, but we know that her father died in 1893, and that the family’s houses were sold in 1895, and the money that came out of this was split between the siblings. So, we think that this money Elvira Fölzer received made her financially independent, so she was able to attend private classes to prepare for the Abitur, so the final school exam boys got at this time was the general qualification for a university entrance in Germany. The Abitur could at this time only be acquired at a gymnasium. That is a secondary school that was usually only open for boys. However, girls could privately prepare for the final exams and take them as external students. And in 1899, Elvira Fölzer passed her Abitur successfully at the gymnasium in Dresden-Neustadt, and at this time she was 31 years old.
She started to study archaeology, art history, and classical philology at the University of Leipzig in the same year, and she continued her studies in 1901 in Freiburg, and from 1902 in Bonn. And she also graduated at the University of Bonn in 1906 with a thesis about the hydria, that’s a special Greek pottery type, and she was at this time not only the first woman to receive a PhD in archaeology in Germany, but she was also the first woman to receive a PhD at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Bonn. And this was so special that it was announced in at least two German newspapers back at this time. After her graduation, she first made a study trip to Italy, but she was unfortunately not awarded the prestigious travel grant of the German Archaeological Institute, for which she applied twice. And later on in her professional life, she was working at the Museum of Trier, where she specialized in Roman pottery, especially in pottery of the Roman provinces, but she did not get a permanent position at this museum. So, roughly 10 years after her PhD, she dropped out of archaeology and it’s very hard to trace her life after that. It seems that she made a living as a private teacher of art and antiquities, but we know not much what she did after she left archaeology until her death in 1937.