Bluestockings (20 page)

O England’s sisters dear!

O England’s mothers and wives!

It is not your dresses you’re wearing out

But human creatures’ lives.

Germ, germ, germ,

Lurks in that murky dirt,

You carry today with a double tread

A sword as well as a skirt.
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It is safe to assume that here was not a supporter of higher education for women. Or of women at all.

Everyone looked very prim during the first decade of the 1900s, with collars and college ties, and hair balancing like a satin cushion on each head. The 1920s were loose and winsome, and the 1930s rather drab. Bluestockings tended to favour a uniform look, after the turn of the twentieth century, which involved dark skirts and plain tops, usually with a jacket. Coats, hats, and stockings were de rigueur, right up to 1939, and trousers only latterly encouraged on field trips or treks. The odd free spirit would buck the trend – as at St Hugh’s in 1924, when a fresher appeared at dinner with her hair clipped on one side and curled on the other. She was dressed in a skirt so short and tight that the other girls gasped. The college Principal, Miss Gwyer, did not flinch; she merely turned to her companion at High Table
and commented: ‘If Miss [X] wishes to wear trousers, I do wish she would wear a pair: that one will soon split.’
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A contemporary of Miss X’s was expelled for dressing like a man; in that case wearing trousers was deemed to be assuming a disguise in order to
behave
like a man and visit men’s colleges. Miss X was luckily considered eccentric rather than subversive, and allowed to stay.

A newspaper article in 1936 recommended essentials for a ‘University trousseau’, including ‘an attractive tweed ensemble’, a black or dark navy suit, a knitted outfit for college or lectures, chic trousers, blouses, belts, and bags; ‘try to have a fur coat’, it advised, a mac, a simple woollen dress, and ‘one smart dance dress’.
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This stylish little collection, it assured its readers, would see the undergraduette right through her university career. That was all very well for those with money: Bessie Callender of Durham could only afford a ‘black artillery serge coat and skirt for 28 shillings at Debenham and Freebody’s summer sale’, with a white starched shirt.
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The absolute minimum wardrobe was a dress to change into for dinner, accessories to titivate that same dress for dances, and a couple of outfits for daytime. Gwendolen Freeman remembered wearing the same dress for the whole of her first term, which lasted nine weeks.

A leitmotif throughout literature concerning women’s domestic life at university is the ‘combi’. Combis, or combinations – a garment incorporating a chemise and knickers – seem constantly to have been in a state of disrepair, being mended with white wool, patched with the relics of long-dead predecessors, sent home to Mother to be re-sewn or washed. No item of clothing is so often mentioned in letters and diaries, so troublesome, and so necessary. Freedom from combis, when it dawned, must have been a marvellous thing.

Academic dress was a contentious issue. At Oxford and Cambridge, women were not full members of their university until they were awarded degrees in 1920 and 1948 respectively; therefore they were not entitled to wear the academic uniform of cap and gown customary elsewhere (not a mortar-board: that was reserved for the first-come, first-served of the intellectual elite). The prohibition had its positive points. No one could tell you belonged to a college, and therefore operated under disciplinary rules, if you were out and about at night in ‘civvies’; nor could anyone distinguish between scholars (entitled to wear long gowns) and ‘commoners’ (condemned to a foolish-looking scrap of black with a flap at each shoulder). But no one could fail to acknowledge the lack of entitlement to academic dress, as to an official degree, to be humiliating as well as illogical. At London, women wore them right from the beginning. A contemporary magazine illustration, captioned ‘A Scene at the University of London, May 10th, 1882’, depicts the first ‘Sweet Girl Graduates’ in England. The accompanying article is fulsome in its praise not so much of the pioneers’ scholarship, as their femininity. It imagines them as graceful acolytes at the altar of wisdom, bare-headed, wearing black silken robes, and carrying their caps like offerings in white-gloved hands. Their academic hoods are lined in jewel-like colours – dark ruby for the arts graduates and citrine for the scientists. Being womanly women (it is noted), they made the hoods themselves.
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The first women graduates in England qualified at the University of London on 10 May 1882. Their achievement is celebrated in a graceful engraving from the
Girl’s Own Paper.

At Manchester, too, bluestockings prided themselves on sewing their own dresses for Degree Day, even though their gowns were available for hire. Due to the volume of late Victorian and early Edwardian hair-dos, early undergraduates at Manchester (and everywhere except Oxbridge) found it difficult to find caps that fitted.
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Choosing between vanity and compliance with the rules was a problem. Students were expected to wear their academic dress to lectures, chapel, dinner, in the library, on certain occasions in public, and for exams. It was even more important than the clothes beneath. When Ruth Wilson of West-field College in London found herself running late for prayers after a hot bath one morning in about 1920, she
decided to put on her gown ‘over my knicks’, and rush down to chapel. The hot bath and a lack of breakfast conspired against her: she fainted, and all was horribly revealed.
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Incidentally, if the fire in your bedroom refused to blaze, you had only to hold your impenetrable gown spread out in front of it, and the flames would draw beautifully. Caps made excellent kettle-holders.

On the eve of the first degree ceremony for women in Oxford, the academic authorities held a mannequin parade to decide what headgear best suited female undergraduates. The soft black cap they chose – a sort of square beret – was considered a ‘judicious compromise between Portia and Nerissa’. It had dignity, and perpetuated the distinction between male and female. Even then, in 1920, allowing women to graduate from Oxford was deplored by commentators as a radical and dangerous enterprise. Especially Cambridge commentators: a document circulating in the Senate there described Oxford’s move chillingly as ‘a dark and difficult adventure, the outcome of which no man can foresee’.
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There was to be no female graduate of Cambridge, remember, for another twenty-eight years.

This obstinate tardiness on the part of the Oxbridge University Congregations was more demoralizing to tutors than to students. Not being officially integrated into the university precluded academic staff at women’s colleges from responsibility, rank, academic influence, and a sensible salary.
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While working behind the scenes with discretion and a great deal of diplomacy to accomplish full university membership for their student communities (not completely achieved at Oxford until 1959), most tried not to be too angry in public. Women students were still ‘on approval’, it was feared; if they and their wardens appeared too strident
in the fight for academic equality, or demanded too much, all might yet be lost. So they comforted themselves that what really mattered was their work, and its personal significance. ‘It is not for success in the next examination that we are teaching,’ claimed one careful headmistress, ‘it is not even for success in their future career… we are looking to eternity for the judgement on our work.’
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None of this politicking affected the final examinations themselves. At Oxbridge, as everywhere else, your university career climaxed in ‘finals’; there was no assessment programme, no modules: everything depended on a week or so of exams in the summer of your final term. Results were classified then, as they are now (although women’s results were not always published alongside men’s), and the pressure to succeed was hard to bear. Success, for the conscientious scholar, meant justification of all the expectations and sacrifices of the past. It was a matter of pride, even if she knew it might be irrelevant in terms of a future career. Some students pretended finals did not really count. Gemma Creighton, from an academically illustrious family, expected only a third-class result in hers: ‘I shouldn’t mind if only old friends… didn’t seem to think it rather a scandal for any of us to sink to 3rds. And really it doesn’t much matter, as whatever happens I’ve learnt a huge lot here, and have loved it, and mean to keep it and not let it become a past episode.’
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Frances Sheldon felt the same: ‘I don’t care tuppence whether I get an English certificate [the paltry female equivalent of a degree at Oxford] or any other; but I’ll get all the knowledge I can, in just the line I want…’
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Knowing you could have done better was the worst outcome: a student in the 1920s wrote that she regretted her lack of application all her life: ‘I belonged to so many societies, did far too many things, played far too many games, so that
although I was expected to get a 2nd I got a 4th: I deserved it, but have never got over it.’
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Leeds University decided to relieve the pressure by reassuring its undergraduates that they were not there to get firsts, but to be educated. But with so much at stake, panic was never far from the examination halls, and stalked querulous students greedily. ‘I don’t know if I shall ever believe in emancipated women again,’ wrote one student in 1938. ‘Out of 13 starters, 5 fell by the wayside during our [finals].’ One walked out of the exam, went home, and slept for four days. The second had gastric flu and could not physically stay the course; another collapsed with fatigue. ‘Doris went gadding about with men and began revising a bit too late – used to sit up all night with caffeine etc.’ and faded away. The fifth drop-out felt too tired to walk to the examination hall, fainted during the exam, and then went out on the river, where she was seen with a man at 11.00 p.m.
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Well-regulated exams do not usually throw up surprises. Given the right preparation – eight hours’ revision a day for at least the couple of terms leading up to finals – and a calm disposition, all usually goes well. Taking short cuts is risky, and rarely works. That is why tutors welcomed the success of their female students with such delight. Every good result was one more little vindication of the ‘experiment’ in women’s higher education that had been running since 1869. When one girl got a first in Classics at Somerville in 1935, after a colourful undergraduate career, her tutor could hardly contain herself:

Now that’s the way I like things done. Miss a term with tonsillitis, go to a few Royal balls, and occasionally to bed with a clergyman, throw in an
embarras gastrique
on the eve of Schools – and after that it really is worthwhile to say you got a 1st in Greats.

You’re quite the most sporting horse I ever jockeyed – as far as I can see you did it all in the last lap – and I’m hugely delighted…

My best jubilations.
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That is an extraordinary response. Reactions were usually more measured (‘Dear Miss Worthington, I wish it had been a third instead of a fourth but still it has been well worth doing’).
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Elsie Phare’s reward, after becoming the first woman to win a starred first in her English Tripos (Part I) and the Chancellor’s Medal for English Verse, was to recite her poem in the Senate House. Being a woman, she was not, of course, allowed to wear a gown: this was Cambridge in the 1920s. The most brilliant English student of her generation, she was still treated like a fish out of water.

For those (unlike Elsie) allowed to graduate officially, Degree Day was an iconic occasion. Its formality presented problems to those with little experience. Sarah Beswick – the unsophisticated girl from Derbyshire who had settled in so well at Manchester – remembered hers clearly. She invited her mother, a close female friend, and Miss Axon, the teacher responsible for getting her to university in the first place. The outing had been carefully budgeted by her mother: Sarah’s father was on short time (during the Depression), and money was tight. There was just enough for the tram fares, and a cup of tea after the ceremony at Houldsworth Hall. It was only when the party arrived at the Hall that they were told white gloves were essential – and Sarah possessed none. Someone dashed off to the nearest draper’s shop and managed to buy a pair in time – but that meant no money left for tea. For one last time, Miss Axon came to the rescue and treated them all. The day was saved.
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