I had no idea that collecting old philosophy journals could be such a pleasure. But ever since I started spending more time in the archives, looking at letters and other pieces of paper from the past, having that tangible connection to the people who wrote them and on them became a little more special. This is why last year I started to buy any publications of Janina Hosiasson that I could get my hands on. One of her papers, on the frequency interpretation of probability (in which she kind of describes the lottery paradox, in 1932!), was published in Przegląd filozoficzny in an issue dedicated to the work of the young Warsaw philosophers who were active in the association of the philosophy students.

Here is the first page of the list of contents of that issue.

Without the superpower that is speaking Polish, you won’t necessarily know what exactly you’re looking at, but my point here will be easy to spot. Of the twenty one full articles published that year, eight were written by women (there’s a second page to this table of contents not depicted here). That’s almost forty percent, and that in a journal with a rather strong analytic leaning.

Once you compare that with Erkenntnis at the time, it gets even more interesting, for not only did they not publish any full articles written by women until the 1935 issue, but all the women who did get their articles published before 1939… were Polish. In particular, Hosiasson and Lutman-Kokoszyńska were probably the most active, especially in terms of publications, female philosophers of the “wider” Vienna Circle.

I don’t know much yet about the exact reasons for this unusual position of women in Polish philosophy in the 1920s and 1930s. There are some sociological explanations which are not specific to formal philosophy at all, but rather to the position of women at the universities at large, especially the Warsaw University. And there are some more personal explanations, pointing to the attitude of the founder of the Lvov-Warsaw School towards his female students. I will write about the latter once I collect actual historical evidence for that.

Of the sociological aspects, two facts seem to me the most important. The first is that women were fully admitted to universities at the time. In Warsaw, that happened as early as 1915, with the reopening of the university under the German occupation. The second fact is that, while women did have full access to higher education, they could not take advantage of it equally in all places and programs. In theory, they could study whatever they wanted. In practice, there were problems with some choices. It is known that in some degree programs, like medicine, the proportion of women admitted to the program did not reflect the number of them that applied. Moreover, once women had their degrees, many careers were simply not open to them, so they tended to choose programs that made them employable in the future, for example as teachers. The higher-profile jobs that required, say, a law degree, were almost never offered to women, so in practice those law degrees would prove to be more of an expensive hobby than a career choice.

All of that led to there being many more women in the Faculty of Philosophy, which in 1927 turned into the Faculty of Humanities, as compared to other parts of the university. At the Faculty of Humanities, the proportion of female students reached 71% at some point before the World War II. The numbers must have been similar for philosophy itself. And then – surprise, surprise! – it turned out that once you have female students around, they stay on, continue with research, and end up writing high quality papers in high numbers. Although it was an entirely different story in what capacity they would “stay on,” as the numbers at the higher-level university positions did not reflect at all the proportion of female students.

These are the background stories that a simple journal table of contents from 1932 can unfold into. And what were these women writing about? Like I said, Hosiasson published here her critical remarks about the frequency theory of probability. Dina Sztejnbarg wrote about indeterminism in modern physics and biology. Estera Markinówna specialized in psychology, and her paper here is on the notion of imagination. Romana Wiśniacka, Hosiasson’s colleague from the psychology lab, wrote about experimental research on fallacies in reports of eyewitnesses – she is nowadays academically remembered most for her work on the notion of testimony. Irena Filozofówna (by the way, her surname literally means “daughter of a philosopher”) wrote about theater, which she continued to work on for the rest of her life. Maria Ossowska specialized in ethics and sociology, but she started out in philosophy of language and her paper here is about that.

There they are, all of them on a page. Saying everything about philosophy and nothing about themselves.