In my paper I will focus on the research of women's opportunities in oriental studies during the 20th century. The research will focus on the various positions behind which female scholars were hidden, mainly in the first half of the 20th century. During this period, we can observe the scientific involvement of women mainly in the roles of wives and daughters of scientists or secretaries/scientific assistants of university seminars. The paper will analyse the influence, caused by the political and war turbulences, on the academic community, especially the crucial years 1945 and 1968, when the positions of women in oriental studies were significantly changed by the political changes in Czechoslovakia after WWII and as well with political changes in scientific institutions after 1968 and during the normalization period. I would like to follow the change of role of female from hidden family assistants to scholars and directors of scientific departments at Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences (founded in 1952) as well as at Charles University. as an examples I would like to present scientific roles of Irena Lexová, daughter of the first Czechoslovak Egyptologist František Lexa, Anna Blechová secretary/scientific assistant of Orientalist Alois Musil, Berta Krebsová and Vlasta Hilská, wives of a sinologist and the first director of the Oriental Institute of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, who became leaders of a department of Sinology at the Academy, resp. first professor of Japanology at Charles University.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, women in archaeology could only be realised as assistants to their fathers and husbands. After the establishment of Czechoslovakia, although the first women began to establish themselves in classical and prehistoric archaeology, women in the State Scientific Institutes of the new republic mostly occupied administrative positions as assistants and secretaries. When women succeded in this male-dominated field, it was often at the expense of their personal lives, forcing them to choose between career and family.
After the Second World War, the number of women studying archaeology rose sharply. Their employment in the field was subsequently made possible by the establishment of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, of which the State Institute of Archaeology became a part. Within two decades, women archaeologists had established themselves as scholars, some even becoming heads of academic departments and research groups. For many women in archaeology, 1968 meant persecution and restrictions on their scientific activities, as well as forced resignations from leadership positions within the Institute.

Funded by: The Commission on Women and Gender in the History of Science, Technology and Medicine

On 9 September 1893 the French physician Professor Edmond Delorme first performed pulmonary decortication surgery to treat empyema at Val-de-Grâce military hospital in Paris. Including crude forms of early anaesthesia, this moment of discovery was captured by his daughter the painter Marguerite Delorme (1876-1946) in Professor Edmond Delorme (1847-1929) Describing Lung Decortication to Trainee Doctors of the Val-de-Grâce, 1894, 1897 (herein after Val-de-Grâce, 1894). Although medical paintings were a well-established practice, works located in military hospitals were highly unusual. In 1894, Val-de-Grâce was both a military hospital and a teaching facility with an all-male medical studentship. That the painting was created by a woman artist in such a masculine space makes this depiction of historical surgery and anaesthesia practices rarer still. Adopting a gendered lens for the purpose of offering new insights into the area of medical painting, I will use Val-de-Grâce, 1894 to create a bridge between medical and art practices.
Such high-art medical subject matter was generally inaccessible to women artists during the nineteenth-century and, on creating the painting, Delorme used her inherently female visual language to break through professional boundaries placed on women. She interrupted male medical spaces by claiming a female space in the operating theatre of Val-de-Grâce. In addition, the artist treated her high-art surgical subject as a genre scene. Accordingly, close attention will be given to the contentious relationship between the medical and military genre subject and its relationship to the artist’s social status as a woman in late nineteenth-century France, principally her art training and practice as a woman artist. Pushing this gendered discussion even further, the study will explore the various ways Val-de-Grâce, 1894 speaks about women in Paris during the late nineteenth century―specifically how professional women overcame the challenging gendered experiences of their work in the areas of medicine and art.