biografiA - Biographical lexicon of Austrian Women

The multi-modular documentation-, research- and networking- project "biografiA. database and lexicon of Austrian women" has been supported since 1998 by the Federal Ministry for Science and Research. The project has been carried out since its inception by the Documentation Center for Women`s Studies of the Vienna Institute for Arts and Sciences with the goal to produce an extensive historical and biographical review of Austrian female personalities. The project has reached out to the public through various events, a series of publications, as well as an internet website (http://www.biografiA.at). Over the years the project has steadily expanded and the documentary database of Austrian female personalities has developed through thematic project modules and various key research areas in the fields of history of science, the Jewish women`s history, the resistance-, exile- and emigration research and children`s and youth`s literature research. Since 1998 19.794 biographies have been documented in the publicly accessible database of biografiA. The last project phase commissioned by the BMWF (10/2010 to 6/2013) was dedicated to the creation of an encyclopedic manuscript which is regarded as one of the major achievements of the project since ist beginning. For this purpose 6.367 biographies were selected from the general stock and edited in several editing stages. For the lexicon, time and geographic criteria were used. The timespan extends from the Roman time, with first woman biographical traces, until 1938, the latest year of birth considered. The borders of today`s Austria were chosen as geographical boundaries. All women that have been included in the publication either were born or died in Austria, or spent an important part of their lives in Austria. The publication collection ranges from biographical data fragments to detailed and precise life descriptions which have been researched by experts and written specifically for biografiA. In addition to the now-famous women of today, lesser known or unknown women were specially considered. Only by considering the very diverse spectrum of female personalities, the biografiA project and this publication could capture and provide an overall picture of feminine activities and intervention areas, which very often refer to a dense network of social and societal relations. For example, many activists of the historic women`s movement were recorded. Further women, who had their domain in charity organizations, as well as women of interest groups such as the "Vereinigung der Künstlerinnen Österreichs" and even the female members of the "Wiener Werkstätte". The proposed representative publication aims to provide experts as well as the interested general public with a comprehensive overview of many centuries of Austrian women`s history and diverse insights into the cultural and social context of each era. Beside the lexical part, the reference volume provides a comprehensive index of persons, in which possible name changes become visible, an inevitable consequence of research on biographies of women. Likewise, the list of secondary literature can be seen as independent representative literature volume valuable for women-specific and biographical research in general.