The Search for the First Female Sociologist in Lithuanian History of Sociology

Agota Vaitkienė
Institute of Sociology at the Lithuanian Centre for Social Sciences

During XIV Lithuanian Sociological Society conference named “Universities, Sociology and Civil Society in the Face of Crises” in 2022 there was a plenary discussion on “Which year we can consider the beginning of sociology in Lithuania” with focus on different historical factors and periods. Nowadays, as more and more attention being paid to gender studies and feministic theories, there is a need to search for the first female sociologist in Lithuania. Based on an institutional analysis (Ostrom, E.; Crawford, Sue, E. S. 1995), there was made an assessment of women’s situation in terms of education in early Tsarist Russia, interwar Lithuania and the Soviet era, including the prospects for acquiring a sociological education and conducting social research. Only the institutionalized learning of sociology is evaluated. Since historical data on sociology in Lithuania as a discipline is limited, the legal practice of higher education is used.
Based on the collected data, a matrix of historical periods is formed, in which the periods with the highest probability of identifying the first female sociologist in Lithuania and the reasons for this are highlighted.