Minerva 1890–1936

The Chronicle of the Minerva Grammar School captures the first half-century (1890–1936) of the existence of a secondary school whose foundation represented a breakthrough in the education system. As the first girls' grammar school in Central Europe, its goal was to prepare girls for university studies, which, at the time of the school's founding, was not yet possible, even within the Habsburg monarchy. The chronicle thus also maps the path that its founder, Eliška Krásnohorská, the school's teachers, and the pupils took to help champion the admission of girls to universities and their subsequent equal employment in qualified fields. Given the obligation to record daily routine, the chronicle also captures the discontinuity (but in many respects also the continuity) of secondary school education during the reign of Franz Joseph I, during the First World War, and after 1918 in the newly established Czechoslovakia.