Authors: Jane Robinson
Academic record books were not only a means of monitoring individuals’ progress; they were also used by the college Principal to help pad out the awful end-of-term interview she was obliged to hold with each student. You would be summoned to her room, where (according to her degree of eccentricity, gracefulness, or irritation) she might perch awkwardly and purse-lipped on a stiff-backed chair, slump rather grumpily in a chintzy settee, or loll in gleaming satin on a chaise-longue, like Eleanor Sidgwick used to at Newnham in the 1890s, looking terrifyingly elegant and artistic. You would be asked how you thought your work was progressing, then probably be told, in paraphrase or directly from the tutors’ reports, how very wrong you were. The book at St Hilda’s, full of scrupulously balanced observations, was obviously designed to be read from word for word. Substituting ‘you’ for ‘she’ makes it eerily personal: ‘You have not given me an impression of much power, but with more knowledge you ought to do very fairly’; ‘Occasionally you do a bit of work which surprises me, and I think surprises
you. You underrate yourself habitually’; ‘You have a clear head and a vigorous style, but are rather afraid to let yourself “go”’; ‘Your work is strangely unequal, being at times quite promising. But you are rather too diffident and seem oppressed with the difficulty of arranging your ideas.’
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The most trenchant of all reports appear in the Royal Holloway College students’ record books for the period 1907–22. These were patently not for undergraduate consumption, and today might be actionable. In fact precious few remarks concern themselves with academic ability at all. They attempt instead to encapsulate personalities in single phrases. ‘Abrupt manner. Noisy’; ‘Loud voice. Efficient’; ‘Rather breathless in manner’; ‘Quite nice, rather casual’; ‘Curious accent. High voice’; ‘Forward’; ‘Pretty manners’; ‘Rather antagonistic and obstinate’; ‘Peculiar’; ‘Rather difficult. A lady. Weak ankles’; ‘Excitable and unbalanced’; ‘Nice-looking’; ‘Tiring to listen to’; ‘Rather a cushion in character’; ‘Tight’
.
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Thus Royal Holloway unfortunately (and unfairly) emerges in the early twentieth century as a slightly worrying institution, peopled by young women with a bizarre assortment of character flaws.
This was by no means an uncommon perception of women’s colleges. With an echo of the misogynistic days when women first invaded academia, once they started achieving in finals at the same level as men, there were plenty of snipers at their backs. ‘Women!’ urged an article in the Birmingham University magazine,
why try to be so learned? Because in gaining knowledge you lose all else, and become to all intents lifeless encyclopaedias. We have enough Professors to cram this little all into us. Do we want the gentler sex to join them? I appeal to students, and I hear their gentle voices crying ‘No! No! No!’
31
The author of a piece entitled ‘The Intellectual Inferiority of Women’
,
published in the
Durham University Journal
, concurred:
Woman acts within her natural rights when she demands the opportunity at least of increased scholastic freedom; the mistake she makes is in imagining – as so many seem to do – that she can surpass or even equal the intellectual achievements of man. All history, all experience, goes to prove how great is the delusion.
32
Critics were silenced for a while by the First World War, when women students were welcomed everywhere. Lacking male undergraduates, universities needed the numbers, and the money they brought with them. But after 1918, and for the next year or two, there was a backlash. The academic establishment felt it owed soldier survivors an education, at the expense of the current cohort – infestation – of bluestockings. ‘They were glad enough to have us when they had no one else,’ noted a student tartly in 1919; now she and her peers were literally being denied entrance to lecture halls because there was no room for them. Sixteen thousand men were admitted to Oxford that year; the number of women was limited to well under 750.
33
This pattern was repeated, to a greater or lesser extent, around the country.
Sometimes opposition came from closer to home. One young woman called Jane overcame considerable difficulties to join a prestigious women’s college in the 1930s. She was an outstanding student, and embarked on her course with great confidence. During her second year she married, and was told by her husband that this disqualified her from being a student (it didn’t). She believed him, and left. Her hard-won place at university had meant so much to this young woman; she was devastated.
34
Despite outbreaks of jealousy and ill-will, it remains obvious that most bluestockings’ experiences of academia were positive, and that they met with more support than opposition once within the university precincts. They might be teased about their preternatural cleverness, but it was usually with more fondness than disdain. Jessie Emmerson, one of the first students to join St Hugh’s in Oxford, summed up this affectionate attitude perfectly, in her reminiscences of university life in the 1880s. She read natural sciences, but being a woman, was not allowed to study biology. The knowledge she might have picked up about the human body and its various systems might well have corrupted her morals, as well as her mind. So she concentrated on physics and chemistry:
I was amused to find that my chaperon always deserted me at the door of the laboratory in which I was to work for the rest of the morning and – as it were – ‘threw me to the lions’. As I was the first woman to work in the… laboratories I felt that the responsibility for the future admission of women rested on my shoulders. Everything was done by my lecturers to make things easy for me.
Because Jessie was small, and some of the lab apparatus roosted well above her head, her tutor provided her with a set of library steps ‘so that I could get up and down with ease and dignity’. She went back to visit the labs after leaving university, and in that tutor’s office found the steps with something chalked on them: ‘Sacred to the memory of Miss Emmerson. Never to be used again.’ That made her feel decidedly proud and happy.
35
When Constance Maynard arrived at Girton in 1872, having whimsically chosen a degree course in preference to a new pony, her intention was to read ‘Mental and Moral Sciences’,
or philosophy. The prospect was pleasant: she looked forward to communion with keen minds and ancient arguments; to wisdom and enlightenment. Not only would she discover long-sought answers at university, but frame more searching questions. This filled her with an almost religious fervour for scholarship. What Constance had not grasped before arriving at Cambridge was that just as engaging as the subject of one’s studies, was studying itself. That moment of realization – an epiphany – came on a visit to a sympathetic tutor, who, with the aid of rather thrilling props, conjured up in Constance a quality of curiosity and awe that lasted a lifetime. They pored over a human skull together, wondering at its perfect design; he showed her ‘a real cheek, ear, tongue and throat all together’ dreadfully preserved in alcohol, and then soothed her with an entrancing experiment involving ‘bubbles of gas (phosphoretted hydrogen, I believe) coming up through water and bursting into flame, leaving behind lovely even rings of white smoke, which whirled round at a great rate as they floated gently upwards and remained unbroken’.
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Constance was enthralled.
Women, during the earliest decades of university education, were not usually encouraged to make discoveries. They were there to learn received wisdom, in a suitable manner, to an acceptable standard. When they left, it was to regurgitate their learning for the nourishment of their own, or other people’s, children. Constance’s intellectual curiosity, and the privileges she enjoyed from indulgent parents and progressive tutors, led her beyond mere expediency. She shared with later women students the sense that a university education was more than the sum of its parts. Gwendolen Freeman, at the same college fifty years later, had her own way of putting it. ‘Looking back now over the plains of life,’ she wrote some sixty years after leaving university, ‘I see the
three Cambridge years as a walled garden separated from the rest – a garden full of voices, freedom and some intimations of immortality.’
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Gwendolen’s garden, like Princess Ida’s, may well have been enclosed and isolated, but the scent of it lingered all her life.
9. Spear Fishing and Other Pursuits
Joan took an Egyptian fresher out in a punt. After a puzzled silence, the girl asked Joan what fish she was trying to spear with the pole.
1
Maintaining a brisk momentum during leisure time was supposed to invigorate one’s studies. Idleness bred slothfulness, which not only corrupted the body and soul, but threatened exam success. Hence there was never a lack of things to do for bluestockings off academic duty. Participation in sports, membership of various college-based clubs, and a healthy (if carefully monitored) social life were all encouraged by university authorities, as long as young ladies conformed chastely to the maxim – coined at Leeds in the 1930s – of ‘gloves, hats, and no funny business’.
Sports might not include the singularly ungratifying exercise Joan’s Egyptian friend thought she was witnessing, but there were plenty of others. Before the First World War, hockey, lacrosse, and netball were ubiquitous, but also available were water-polo, diving, cricket, rifle-shooting, and fencing. After the war there were opportunities for (among other things) motor-cycling, competitive rowing, and international athletics.
2
A staple diet of meetings and societies was offered daily, seasoned with exotica like the Sharp Practice Club, the Associated Prigs, or the secretive LSDS (Leaving Sunday Dinner Society).
3
You could visit cafés, concerts, the local ‘bug-house’ or cinema, and the theatre, as long as you accepted the
restrictions, which in 1920s Oxford meant matinées only (unless you were prepared to buy a chaperone’s ticket as well as your own) and seats in the gallery rather than the more ostentatious stalls.
Dances were held in colleges and halls of residence, at first exclusively for women, then, as time went on, for men too. Private bedroom parties, hosted by students in their dressing gowns after dinner, were dedicated to cocoa, giggling, and setting the world to rights. Alcohol was rarely consumed, and few hoped to ‘achieve’ heterosexual intercourse (as one undergraduette rather grimly put it): ‘hanky-panky’ and ‘sleeping around’ betrayed bad taste, and damaged prospects.
One of the most socially energetic women’s colleges was Westfield, in London. All its activities for 1894 were logged in
Hermes
, the college magazine. Some appear more attractive than others. They include a conference of the Women’s Total Abstainers Union (South Hampstead Branch) in the Bijou Hall, covering the legislative and medical aspects of alcoholism; another on ‘Sanitary Science’ for women, all about domestic (rather than personal) hygiene; and a sensational talk by a Chinese pastor, Mr Yen, on ‘Heathen Ladies’ and how many pieces they are sliced into when they murder their husbands. From time to time there are debates, and occasional parties, like a grand St Patrick’s Day do ‘for all those who had any Irish blood in them’. Marmalade bees, or working parties, are organized in conjunction with college singing practices; there are frequent meetings of the ‘Innocents’ Debating Society’, and photographers arrive each term to take jolly group pictures of the staff and students. In summer there is a garden party for some 500 guests, and an outing to Greenwich for the college servants, whose places are taken for the day by the most senior of Westfield’s students. It is convenient, notes a junior member of college, to be able
to consult the temporary housemaid, while she dusts your room, about the intricacies of Latin grammar.
4
The Westfield Tennis Tournament did not involve any mixed doubles. Such matches were prohibited within women’s colleges until shortly before the First World War. Instead, strong players had to choose weaker partners, ironically known as ‘ladies’. As soon as mixed doubles were allowed, they quickly became popular – except at Leeds, where male undergraduates refused to play in case they were forced to become engaged to their partners afterwards.
5
Tennis was a relatively simple game to organize; team sports, encouraged for the corporate loyalty and good sportsmanship they fostered, were frequently compromised by lack of numbers. Marjorie Collet-Brown was among the first cohort of eleven women at Imperial College in 1924 – ‘enough for a hockey team’, which they formed immediately; but a student at Durham in 1914 found netball exhausting, principally because there were only three a side. It was suggested as early as 1898 in Leeds that bluestockings there should form a football team. The ladies’ department of the students’ union greeted the idea with rapture. ‘Just contemplate it, O my Sisters! Shall it be Rugby or Association? Will you “scrummage” or “dribble”?’
6
Nothing happened. Most universities could field a women’s cricket team, however, and lacrosse was always popular.
At first, women’s university sport was a matter of health:
mens sana in corpore sano
. Exercise, especially outdoors, was supposed to temper the fetid tendencies of academic life for ladies. Too much sedentary scholarship was dangerous. It slumped internal organs and sagged the spirits. Fresh air and vigorous movement (within limits) got the circulation going again and braced the brain. Cerebral work and physical play, when properly regulated, were perfect counterbalances. Progressive girls’ schools, like Miss Buss’s and Miss Beale’s, boasted elaborate gyms, in which young ladies in weighty woollen gymslips swung solemnly from ropes and rungs, and outdoor ‘drill’ was a sacrosanct part of the day’s routine.