Elsa Eschelsson

Who was Elsa Eschelsson?

Elsa Olava Kristina Eschelsson was the first woman to finish a Doctor of Laws degree and the first to attain the academic position of docent at a Swedish university, but was denied the right to even serve as acting professor because of her sex. She died from an overdose of sleeping-powder in 1911.

Elsa Eschelsson was born in Norrköping. As most of the earliest generation of women to study at Swedish universities, she came from a well-to-do bourgeois background, daughter of Anders Olof Eschelsson, the owner of a soap factory who also served as Prussian consul in Norrköping. Elsa's mother Carolina Lovisa Ulrika Frestadius was her husband's cousin and daughter of a prominent Stockholm industrialist, A. W. Frestadius.

After his wife's death, A. O. Eschelsson settled in Stockholm with his four daughters. At the age of fourteen Elsa lost her father as well and moved in with an older sister, the young dowager countess Anna Piper. Her oldest sister, Ida, was married to Johan Vilhelm Hagströmer, a law professor at Uppsala university. Elsa finished her "studentexamen", the final examination from secondary school, in 1882 and came to Uppsala as a student. She began with a fil. kand. degree in history which she completed in 1885. After graduating, she went on a long journey through Europe and the Middle East, but returned to Uppsala and her studies in the fall. She had shown an early interest in studying Law and after her return she began her law studies, encouraged by her brother-in-law Hagströmer. She received her juris utriusque licentiat and juris utriusque doctor degrees in 1897 and was appointed a docent of civil law at the university.