Bluestockings (12 page)

The author of the 1882 article urging girls to concentrate on ‘little things’ implied it was not just the physical organization of the female body that prevented intellectual achievement, but her temperament. Much might be heard nowadays about the advantages of producing ‘girl graduates’, the writer allowed, but had anyone thought through whether it was psychologically safe for women to exert themselves mentally? Brain power depends on bodily strength, and as women’s bodies are demonstrably weaker than men’s, so must their minds be. Is it wise to tease women with the promise of intellectual equality? Would it not be kinder to lower expectation, and (revisiting an age-old theme) make home her sphere of accomplishment, rather than university? In any test of nature versus nurture in womankind, nature would always win.

The author of that article, acknowledged only as ‘M.P.S.’, was not some gravy-stained male academic, but a woman, and though it may be convenient to label the anti-bluestockings as chauvinists or even misogynists, that would be too simplistic. It is true, for instance, that careers for women graduates remained frustratingly limited well after professional qualifications in the form of degrees became available. University broadened the mind (granted women had one), but what for? Did it not dangle possibilities in front of them which, as soon as they left, were whipped away by society? Did it not open tantalizing doors and allow women to peep through, even though everyone knew they would be slammed shut in their faces? Surely, then, university bred discontent?

There was particular concern among the more bigoted branches of the medical profession that if this movement to make scholars of schoolgirls were allowed to develop, the Englishwoman might end up in the same dire straits as the
American, who was – with staggering overgeneralization – acknowledged ‘physically unfit for her duties’.
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Doctors noted what Edward Clarke of Boston had to say in a well-publicized lecture, ‘Sex in Education’, delivered at Harvard in the 1870s. His research into the sexual health of women graduates had produced shocking results. So hard had their brains been worked that their wombs had atrophied, to conserve energy. Occasionally a muffled maternal voice might call a child into existence, but college-educated mothers were unlikely to be able to breastfeed. Brain work was not the only risk: American women students sat down, all slumped, for hours on end, ate too much, and rarely exercised. They indulged themselves in what Clarke called ‘the zone of perpetual pie and doughnut’ and neglected to cultivate the judicious activity, rest, and mental serenity so necessary to bountiful mothers. This resulted in a ghastly merry-go-round of leucorrhoea, amenorrhoea, dysmenorrhoea, chronic and acute ovaritis, prolapsus uteri, hysteria, and neuralgia, from which, if she emerged at all, the learned lady emerged infertile and – probably – insane. No good to anyone.

Mens sana in corpore sano:
Regular callisthenics were a feature of the university routine for all Victorian and Edwardian women students.

Suddenly, we are back in the realms of the fruitful womb and barren brain.

Emily Davies’s friend Elizabeth Garrett Anderson read Dr Clarke’s lecture, and was furious. On his own terms, as a professional medical practitioner, Garrett Anderson published a riposte.
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Women need not be incapacitated by their periods, either in the short or in the long term, she stated. Manual workers manage perfectly well, and domestic servants are not allowed to rest for a week each month. Exercise is an integral part of the curriculum at most girls’ schools and colleges, which refreshes both mind and body. In fact, she argued,
not
going to university is far more perilous than going. To keep a bright young mind at school for long enough to grasp at new ideas and then to cast her into an exile of dull domesticity is dangerous. Boredom and restlessness breed unhappiness, and unhappy people are vulnerable. Their health tends to falter, their moral fibre frays. They become self-absorbed, depressed, hysterical, perhaps anorexic – or so ‘languid and feeble’ in feeding themselves, as Garrett Anderson puts it, that their menstrual cycle shuts down.

If they had upon leaving school some solid intellectual work which demanded real thought and excited genuine interest, and if this interest had been helped by the stimulus of an examination, in which distinction would have been a legitimate source of pride, the number of such cases would probably be indefinitely smaller than it is now.
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Medical opposition to women undergraduates eventually petered out, as credible evidence failed to materialize, but a certain amount of academic prejudice persisted,
stemming from low intellectual expectation. That was rooted in all sorts of things: universities’ suspicion of women’s motives in coming, fear of change, lack of precedent, cronyism, professional jealousy, a genuine apprehension that degrees would be devalued or the academic integrity and reputation of English universities be compromised, and good old-fashioned institutional chauvinism. A male undergraduate at Durham was succinct in his estimation of any bluestocking’s potential: ‘her proudest achievements, her loftiest thoughts, when compared with the quantity and quality of her brother’s work, are, and always must be, “blinder motions bounded in a shallower brain”.’
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Dean Burgon of Chichester Cathedral was even more brutal, informing the women of Oxford in a sermon in 1884: ‘Inferior to us God made you: and our inferiors to the end of time you will remain. But you are none the worse off for
that
.’
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His audience, brave souls, dissolved in incredulous laughter.

Such academic prejudice manifested itself – especially at Oxbridge – in universities’ refusal to judge men’s and women’s achievements on equal terms. At its most extreme this meant ignoring women completely, like the (probably terrified) professor mentioned at the beginning of the chapter who walked out on a lecture room of ladies. Different male lecturers had different strategies. The architect and artist John Ruskin mischievously doubted women, or ‘bonnets’, could cope with his classes:

I cannot let the bonnets in, on any conditions this term. The three public lectures will be chiefly on angles, degrees of colour-prisms (without any prunes) and other such things of no use to the female mind, and they would occupy the seats in mere disappointed puzzlement.
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C. S. Lewis grew ill-tempered and muttered petulantly when there were women present; J. R. R. Tolkien was quiet and subdued in the lecture room, his Anglo-Saxon sounding faintly threatening, like ‘gentle swearing’. One tutor at Somerville College serially proposed to all his female students except one (who was mortified); another, supposed to be teaching six women maths, was slapdash and lazy. He gave them dispiritingly difficult problems to solve, without the background knowledge to tackle them; he never gave them individual attention; and if he had corrected a mistake on one girl’s paper, would never correct the same on another’s. They were left, bewildered and panicky, to compare notes, which took time, and none had the confidence or expertise to understand why she had gone wrong. His written comments were entirely indecipherable. His poor students, not surprisingly, were ‘in a terrible commotion about their prospects’.
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All they learned from this tutor was to hate maths.

Inevitably, discrimination posed practical problems. Durham University was desperately short of ladies’ cloakrooms, forcing women students to arrange depots of chamber pots in strategic locations around the chilly city. Even though the huge and overwhelmingly splendid Royal Holloway College for women offered science degrees, they had neglected to build any laboratories; until the 1920s, women studying science at Oxford were bundled into a basement of Balliol College to do their practicals, with noxious results. Rachel Footman was a chemistry student in 1923–6:

Balliol… was rather dangerous as we studied poison gases there under Professor Thompson and we only had tiny windows below pavement level. I remember one day being seized round my middle by the Professor himself who threw my head and shoulders out of this tiny window – apparently I was making C.O. [carbon monoxide] and my gas cylinder was very inadequately sealed. He said ‘another moment of that my girl and you would be dead.’
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Arts students at Oxford, in the early days, met for lectures in a poky little room above a baker’s shop, with yeasty aromas filtering through the dust. At least they had no need of chaperones there.

Even though several of the civic universities were founded for men and women on an equal footing (except for the latter being initially barred from courses such as medicine, theology, or law), their male undergraduates seem to have been among the most chauvinistic in the country. At Birmingham, someone facetiously suggested opening a faculty of Feminology, so that students could have a crack at learning the arcane customs and thought-processes of the genus
Bluestocking
, also known as ‘modern girl’. Another wag composed a ‘Song for Maidens’ (1915):

Napoleon knew a thing or two, said he, ‘Les femmes tricottent,’

Which by interpretation is ‘Let women till their plot.’

But they hold meetings nowadays and talk an awful lot,

And while they blag with politics the race just goes to pot…

When you disdain your strait domain, your scroll of life you blot.

If envy men you must, pray do – but emulation’s rot.

We’ve seen your pictures, read your books, we COULD say quite a lot,

But chivalry forbids, – why, that’s another thing you’ve not!
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One might assume the author of the following little ditty to be some high Victorian misogynist, with Aristotelian sympathies:

You modern girl, you chit of legs and wings,

You walking palette of deceitful things,

You mannequin who, with such subtle aid,

Make every walk you take a dress parade.

Prevaricator, holding flaming youth

For all you say and do, a good excuse.

Between a hat and shoes you fill the gap,

They call you Miss, they’re right in this:

Mishap.
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In fact, it appeared in the Birmingham University magazine,
The Mermaid
, of 1934.

At Cambridge there were riots in 1897 when the Senate addressed a vote on whether or not women students should be allowed official membership of the university, including the right to a degree. Oxford and Cambridge were by now the only universities in the country not to confer them. Tension was high on the morning of the ballot. Special London to Cambridge trains were laid on by the opposition, to encourage as many choleric graduates as possible to return and cast their votes. University Square filled with overexcited male undergraduates wielding screaming banners and placards – ‘No Women’, ‘Down with Women’– and someone rigged up a caricature bluestocking, immodestly dressed in her underwear, on a bicycle suspended high above the crowds. According to Winifred Pattinson, up at Newnham at the time, things got very nasty very quickly. Effigies of Miss Clough and Miss Jex-Blake, the Girton secretary for the Committee for Nominal Degrees for Women, were set alight in the Square and burned, to whoops of atavistic glee from the men. Students at the two rowdiest colleges in
Cambridge, Caius and Jesus, were gated for threatening to fire-hose anyone voting for the women. Newnham girls were not allowed out of college after 11.00 a.m. Several escaped, however, and watched the proceedings unharmed, although oranges, lemons, eggs, bags of flour, and exploding fireworks were being pelted at anyone suspected of bluestocking sympathies.

When the results were declared – 662 for allowing women ‘in’, 1713 against – all hell broke loose. To great cheering and jeering, the cycling mannequin was torn down by crowds of crazed undergraduates and marched to the locked gates of Newnham, where it was ripped to pieces and poked through the railings. They tried to plant their placards all over the college (when one student had the bright idea of propping one up in a tree, the loyal Newnham gardener’s boy kicked away his ladder and left him stranded). More fireworks were lobbed at the girls’ windows, with threats and obscenities, until at 10.00 p.m. men from Selwyn College lit a huge bonfire outside, subsided a little, sang ‘God Save the Queen’, and then went to bed. ‘It was most kind of them,’ noted Winifred, ‘to provide us with so much amusement.’
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