Clara Winnicki (10 November 1880 – 6. May 1941) became Switzerland's first qualified female pharmacist in 1905, and went on to open and operate a succession of pharmacies. Commercial success eluded her, however. By 2018 the profession had become highly feminised: more than two thirds of Switzerland's qualified pharmacists were female; but there are indications that during the early decades of the twentieth century her gender placed Clara Winnicki at a professional disadvantage. In 1925 she married a Swiss-based German pharmacist who was not permitted to practice his profession in Switzerland. As a result of marrying a foreign man Clara Winnicki lost her citizen's rights as a Swiss citizen. In 1933 the couple were expelled across the frontier into Germany, having been identified by the authorities as "foreigners without means of support".
Life.
Provenance and early years.
Clara Emma Winnicki was born in Bern. Leopold Winnicki, her father, was an engineer who had arrived from Poland as an immigrant, and then acquired Swiss citizenship through the legal process of naturalization. Her mother, born Carolina Emma Elisabeth Sulser, was a secondary school teacher from Bern. Clara Winnicki had four siblings. She became one of the first girls to attend a Gymnasium (school with an academic focus) in Bern. It was only in 1894 that public secondary schools in Bern had started to accept female students. By the time she passed her Matura (school final exams) in 1899 Clara Winnicki was one of just two girls left in her class at the Bern Literary Gymnasium ("Berner Literatur-Gymnasium'"). The other one was Ida Hoff, who also achieved subsequent feminist notability, becoming a pioneering physician.
Student years.
On 18 April 1900 Clara Winnicki enrolled at the University of Bern, becoming the university's first ever female student in Pharmacy. She mastered the study material without difficulty. The problems came with trying to obtain the internship necessary to complete the course, as she later explained in a talk:
After a long and difficult search, Winnicki eventually found a pharmacist prepared to offer her the necessary internship. She had been intending to find an internship in French-speaking western Switzerland which then, as now, was widely viewed as more socially and politically progressive than the conservative heartlands of German-speaking central Switzerland. In the end, however, she was obliged to accept an internship contract with a pharmacist closer to home, in a "small Bernese provincial town", on terms that she would describe later as "unfavourable". Student contemporaries, presumably intending to be helpful, offered advice. She was urged that the smart thing to do would be to take care of housekeeping and cooking rather than trying to force her way into one of the "liberal professions". Another confided that he found it exceptionally unaesthetic for a lady to have to scramble up a ladder in order to get medications down from the shelves.
In 1905 Clara Winnicki became the first woman to pass the Swiss National Exams for Pharmacists. Her certificate is dated 13 November 1905. If she had been involved in a race, she would have beaten her nearest rival by a year. Hedwig Delpy from Zürich became the second woman to pass the national exams in Pharmacy only in 1906. Passing the exam gave her official authorisation to manage a pharmacy, and for eight months, between April and November 1906, Winnicki managed the "Apotheke Masson" (pharmacy) in Langenthal.
It turned out that in order to acquire and manage her own pharmacy business it would be helpful for Winnicki to pursue her student career further. She returned to the University of Bern and worked on a doctorate under the supervision of Prof. Alexander Tschirch. She received her doctorate on 28 February 1907 in return for a "contribution on the developmental history of the flowers of some officially [approved medicinal] plants". The dissertation included a dedication to her parents.
Biel/Bienne pharmacist.
In April 1907 Clara Winnicki purchased the "Apotheke Bonjour", a pharmacy business on the little town of Biel, a midsized town some 100 km across the hills to the north-west of Bern. The name of the business reflects the bilingual character of Biel, which is set on the language frontier between German speaking and French speaking Switzerland. For Winnicki it was not enough to stand behind the counter and make herself agreeable to the customers. She also used the room at the back of the shop as a little laboratory in which she prepared her own range of pills and potions. "Migrainite" tablets were a headache treatment: "Pilulesroses" was designed to address Anaemia. Later she also developed a sore throat treatment in a pharmacists' bottle, advertised as an "Anticatarrhol".
Activism.
Over time, Winnicki's pioneering achievements in breaking through into a traditionally all-male profession attracted a growing volume of media coverage: she herself emerged after approximately 1914 as a prominent advocate for women's rights in the profession, using both her pen and the platforms provided by public meetings. On 14 December 1917 she addressed a meeting at the on the theme "Die Frau im Apothekerberuf" ("The Woman in the Pharmacy Profession"). The same title was used at around this time for articles she wrote, notably for the "Schweizerische Apotheker-Zeitung". She told of difficulties she had encountered in her professional career, but also shared her assessment that in her pharmacy there was no persisting "women question", and absolute pay equality had been achieved. She spoke of her pride that professional colleague now took her seriously, and a Swiss Pharmacists' Convention had passed a resolution to encourage young women to study pharmacy. But she also warned audiences that this excellent situation must be defended. Vigilance was necessary: "We now have no 'women question' in our profession. Take care that the relationships stay that way. Any time you accept a new job, forcefully reject any terms that do not place you on an equal footing with male colleagues. Doing anything else will do great harm not just to you, but, to all your female comrades, to whom you are also responsible in these matters". She was also keen to remind her listeners that female pharmacists should always take on both the same duties and the same responsibilities as their male counterparts. That did not mean they should necessarily always make their contributions in precisely the same way. The taking in of heavy deliveries could certainly be left to the boys, while circumstances might easily arise where women would more easily listen with patience and sympathy to customers describing their painful symptoms.
She also robustly rejected any notion that women were more suitable for pharmacists' duties because of their demure modesty and docility. There was nothing docile in the way she declared, "We are not modest, and nor should we be. ... We know precisely our own worth". And she highlighted the systematic failure to recognise women's potential, citing the example of the continuing way in which women were still finding it much harder to secure internships in pharmacy businesses than men.. She campaigned vehemently for equality of training opportunities. There were, to be sure, hardened feminist battlers, but they would not have progressed to their roles of "sweet graceful sylphides" in the pharmacy profession if they had always just stuck to their knitting. In a contribution to the specialist weekly journal "Schweizerische Wochenschrift für Chemie und Pharmazie", Winnicki elegantly concluded with a flourish in Latin: "Vivant, floreant, crescant, commilitones feminigeneris!".
Bern pharmacist.
In 1914 Winnicki closed her pharmacy in Biel/Bienne and moved to Bern, to try her luck with a larger business in a larger city. In commercial terms she was not conspicuously successful, however, and the business had to be liquidated, after eight years, in 1922. There were critics who did not hold back, their observations tinged with more than a hint of implicit sexism: "... Miss Winitzki simply did not have the capacity to manage her business, above all lacking the energy necessary to manage businesses like these". It was said that she had demonstrated neither appropriate administrative competence nor entrepreneurial flair, and spent too much time floating around "in the intellectual spheres of the old classics". It was true that Clara Winnicki was an enthusiastic reader of the classical texts, and she defended her enthusiasm for the ancient wisdom with her characteristic vigour: "... the study of the ancient languages is a thing of great beauty which brings much to the general education of the pharmacist ... the pharmacist [can thereby be preserved from] monochrome mental ossification and evaluate all the real human questions with an open mind."
After the collapse of her Bern pharmacy in 1922, having run down any savings that she might previously have acquired, Clara Winnicki gave up on owning her own business and started to look for work as an employee. In response to a newspaper job advertisement she applied for a position with a pharmacist called Dr. phil. August Herbrand who needed an administrator for his pharmacy at Adelboden, a farming village with aspirations to become a successful , in the mountains south of Bern. Winnicki was offered the post and accepted it.
August Herbrand.
August Herbrand had been born in Koblenz in 1869, which made him approximately eleven years older than Winnicki. His father had owned a pharmacy and August passed the appropriate exams "with distinction" in order to follow in his father's career path. Shortly before the end of the nineteenth century he had undertaken a period of study at Basel and then moved to Lausanne where he obtained his doctorate. He returned to Switzerland in 1912, accepting a senior management position at a factory producing "pharmaceutical preparations", owned by a Dr. Wanderanstellen. Two years later war broke out and in August 1914 Herbrand returned to Germany and volunteered for military service. As an artillery lieutenant serving in northern France he was wounded on several occasions and also contracted Gout. He sought to dull the pain with morphine, thereby acquiring a drug depency which seems to have stayed with him for the rest of his life.
By the time Herbrand arrived in Adelboden directly after the end of the war, he was already on his third marriage. He arrived in order to work for the local pharmacist, Theodor Hopf, who was known to be terminally ill. After Hopf died, in 1919, Herbrand was keen to take charge at the shop counter of the Adelboden pharmacy. However, although he was fully qualified for the work, he had received his qualification in Germany. He had no Swiss qualification for work as a pharmacist. The cantonal health authorities in Bern threatened to close down the business, which would have been a career blow for Herbrand and would also have left Adelboden without a pharmacist at a time when the village was trying to recover its reputation as a health resort. Despite the carnage of war, there had been few German, French or Italian convalescent patients with the inclination and opportunity to visit Swiss health resorts between 1914 and 1918: those that had come had tended to be more than averagely wealthy, and inclined to prefer the well-established and better publicised locations such as Davos. Herbrand, still aged only 50 in 1919, should have been able to find his way round the problem by passing the necessary Swiss exams in Pharmacy. His preferred option turned out to involve recruiting a management-level administrator for Adelboden who was already in possession of the necessary qualifications, however. The arrival on the scene of Clara Winnicki, aged 43 in 1922. was an answer to prayer. She not only already held the necessary Swiss qualifications, but had proven experience of running a pharmacy over more than a decade. The threat that the authorities might close down his Adelboden pharmacy was lifted. It was also a welcome development from the perspective of the local council which had already shared their assessment that "the presence of a reliable pharmacy [was] an essential requirement" for the revival of health tourism locally.
Marriage?
The teaming up together of Clara Winnicki and August Herbrand evidently looked like something of a lifesaver for both of them. Winnicki had found a man who came with a pharmacy business that she could consider her own. Herbrand hoped that through Clara's efficient management the pharmacy could flourish and become a veritable gold mine. For both of them, the obvious next step was marriage.
An impediment to their marriage was Herbrand's third wife, born Mathilde Schlicht. In the divorce case that followed,