Berlin as a Forum of the Reform, Transfer and Equality of Female Education around the Year 1900 – the Victoria Lyceum and the Congress of the International Council of Women Around the year 1900, women in the urban milieu fought for the equality of the sexes in society and state, both legally and in the field of education. Whereas in those days (as already at the end of the 18th century) progressive educational attempts were rather Rousseauist, critical towards big city life and aiming at institutions, those women as being organised in the women´s movement and its institutions founded reform centres and other institutions in Leipzig, Dresden, Hamburg or Berlin, for it was only there where middle class liberality offered opportunities for individual development, cultural variety and diversity of ways of life. Being a place of educated people (extended school and university systems), of political and financial power, Berlin became also a centre of the reform of higher education for women and girls. Amazingly, the royal family played quite a role for the development of female education and vocational training meeting the demands of a modern industrial society: Due to her knowledge of the liberal development in Britain and her close contacts to the reform milieus both here and there, Princess Victoria, the later “Empress Frederick” (1840-1901) – Queen Victoria´s eldest daughter and the wife of the Crown Prince (Emperor in 1888) – supported also financially female education, the establishment of innovative institutions and new fields of professional work for women. She made Berlin a place of the exchange of thoughts on higher education and vocational training for women. At the same time the women´s movement became stronger in Germany, and also in this context Berlin, due to its potential for innovations and reform, became the focus of interest, being the centre of political decision making. Despite women being excluded from politics and the ban on political assemblies of women (§ 8 of the law on associations from 1850), in 1904 the women´s movement held its third world congress (after Chicago and London) in Berlin and thus made the city an international forum of the debate on female education and vocational training, on civilizing gender relations and society. In the focus of the contribution there will be the Victoria Lyceum in Berlin, its significance for making academic education accessible for women in Germany as well as for the exchange with British supporters and institutions. Also in the focus will be the Congress of the International Council of Women which (before the law on associations was abandoned in 1908) confirmed the city´s urbanity.

Methods of cultural transfer and transformation, analysis of historical sources. Sources used: The establishement of the Victoria Lyceum in Berlin, the national and international women's movement and the congresses of the International Council of Women, especially in Berlin in 1904.

Both in Britain and Germany access for women to the higher education and the university, from which they had been barred for centuries, is due to the committment of celebrities and women´s organisations of the liberal middle class and the urban context. Non-simultaneity of development: at about 1870, Britain being in the lead regarding questions of an educational theory aiming at equal rights and regarding the woman being socially accepted resulted in steps towards creating analogous institutions also for the German middle class. With the great support of Princess Victoria Berlin was the place where those experiments of transfer started. It will be shown that social conditions, traditions, and limitations due to the completely different structures of the respective national educational systems let to transformations in establishing the Victoria Lyceum and further institutions in Berlin. By deliberately choosing Berlin as the place of the third congress of the ICW in 1904, the growing women´s movement in Germany, which was also supported by Victoria and was soon to become active at the international level, intended to confirm the city´s urban quality and to advance the equality of women in the educational system which in Prussia had not been achieved.