Matriculation exam which became the requirement of university studies, was formed in 1949 as a part of the Austrian education reform and was promulgated in Hungary in 1851. But women had to wait 50 more years to have the possibility to gain the same graduation as men.

Veres Pálné Beniczky Hermin organized the first Hungarian association for women education. The school run by this association was the first to be formed into a women’s secondary school which was to be entiteled to organize maturation exam for women. From those 32 girls who went to the fifth class of the school in 1896, 24 sat for the matriculation exam in 1900. Althoug women had the right to sit for this exam from the 1880 education act, there was no secondary school in the country for them, and had no permission for them to go to the university. Universities opened for women in Hungary in 1895.

The aim of this research is to documentate the very first maturation exam, which was organized for women in the June of 1900. This can be based on the sources found in the Budapest Archaives, school reports of the first secondary school for women, educational and political papers of the time and the memoires of the daughter of Veres Pálné. Although the story itself is interesting as being one of the really important events of the education history of Hungary, the basic aim of this research is to discover the impact of this event in the Hungarian society of the time. This very moment is not only important because of being ’the first’ but it is also important in the question of how it affected the judgement and acceptance of how women could and should be educated.

In our presentation we would like to touch the following questions: after what antecedents and by whom was this event organized, what results could women students chalk up in the different subjects, could they drew up with the traditional results of men, how their teachers and contemporaries judged their results, and what was the reaction of the educational and political press of the time, how they positioned ’educated women’ at the very beginning of the 20th century in Hungary.