Bluestockings (13 page)

What would have happened had the women won? What appalled the Establishment, of course, was Girton’s implicit demand for sexual equality. But it is worth remembering that Miss Clough at Newnham had never sought equality with the status quo. She wanted an improved system of university education everyone could share, according to individual strengths and ambitions. London and the civic universities concurred. The vast majority of women involved in developing higher education, staff and students alike, did not strive to be like men, nor even to be treated in the same way as men, except in terms of opportunity and just reward.

Some did not even want that. Kathleen Courtney at Lady
Margaret Hall in Oxford wrote to her mother on 23 May 1897 that she was glad Cambridge had just voted against giving women degrees, for if the motion had been passed, ‘there would have been a renewal of the discussions here, and we are very well satisfied with our present position’.
¹⁹
Another LMH student, Eglantyne Jebb, agreed. She thought those clamouring for degrees were being hasty:

I cannot help thinking that the higher education of women is of too recent a growth, for us to be quite sure as yet what we do and what we don’t want. If we bound ourselves down to it, it would probably prevent for ever the possible development of a separate and perhaps better system of our own. We are in such a hurry…
²⁰

The Establishment had an answer to that idea, too. ‘If women require a university,’ ran a newspaper article, ‘by all means let them have it. Let one be founded at some suitable spot, say Land’s End or the Scilly Isles, and let it turn out female Bachelors by the hundred. But on Oxford and Cambridge women have no just claim whatever.’
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The critics of unrestricted university access for women were relentless in pursuit of prohibition. Few girls, in the period before the Second World War, were able to study at university without their family’s consent. So, as well as attacking on medical and academic fronts, the opposition attempted to claim the moral high ground by alarming undecided parents with threats of domestic catastrophe and social collapse. Their battle cries invoked duty, reputation, and obedience. If the medics and academics were right, they argued, and university really was a potentially ruinous environment for women, who in their right mind would send a daughter there? Think what might happen! At Oxford she might
degenerate into that abhorrent ‘type’ so maliciously recalled by the author Christopher Hobhouse, who was there in the 1930s. His undergraduettes are sheep-witted creatures, content to flock to every lecture and scribble down every word, to read every book they are set, obey every rule, and dutifully to parrot every little gobbet of received wisdom they are fed. They have no sense of style, decking themselves in ‘hairy woollens and shapeless tweeds’.

Instead of claret and port they drink cocoa and Kia-Ora [orange squash]. Instead of lordly breakfasts and lunches which a man can command in his own rooms, they are fed on warm cutlets and gravy off cold plates at a long table decked with daffodils.

In this setting the mind of the Oxford woman grows narrower day by day.
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Elsewhere the ‘Oxford woman’ was characterized in stinging little epigrams: on being told about someone’s new boyfriend, the typical Somervillian would immediately ask, ‘What does he read?’; the student from LMH, ‘Who’s his father?’; from St Hugh’s, ‘What’s his sport?’; and from St Hilda’s, ‘Where is he?’ In another version, LMH was supposed to be for ladies, St Hugh’s for girls, St Hilda’s for wenches, and Somerville for women. St Anne’s did not feature, not being a cohesive college until the 1950s, and therefore deemed (in certain circles) unworthy of notice.

If your daughter went instead to a civic university, people might think her common. Rules there were more lax than at Oxbridge, but only because their students were snobbishly perceived to be somehow less valuable and weaker-willed. A large proportion of them, according to a 1909 report, belonged to a different class, and suffered from the
‘marked contrast’ between what was expected of them at university, and at home.
²³

Send her to Birmingham, where they taught technical subjects, and she would be corrupted in days:

Miss Georgiana Washington’s life went in whirls,

She caught all the vices of ’Varsity girls,

She smoked in capacity,

Drank with audacity,

Her one saving grace was her utter veracity.

Georgiana’s virtue scarce lasted a week,

Since then horrid rumours have started to leak,

Fate seemed to design her

To find life diviner,

When dancing with dentals or even a miner.
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At Manchester she would quickly curdle into a graceless ‘new woman’. An article in the Owen’s College magazine in 1895 describes this unlovely species: she smokes, rides a bicycle (while
not
wearing a skirt), demands a vote, a public voice, and total independence. She agitates for political recognition, and bruits her so-called learning like a hyaena. ‘To be short… she is no longer content to exert the sweet influence of her sex, but stakes her hopes upon power. She is therefore odious.’
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At
any
university, she would be exposed to infectious social diseases, and put in mortal danger of contracting feminism, nymphomania, asceticism, atheism, or eternal spinsterhood. It was patently irresponsible, declared the critics, to condemn one’s daughter to an expensive, unproductive interlude at university, which would probably rob her of charm and eligibility, and spoil her for family life.

To counter that negativity (somewhat feebly), articles
were published in the pictorial press suggesting the possibility of regarding scholarship as just one more asset in an accomplished young lady’s repertoire. It need not compromise her essential womanliness. A Newnham student wrote an article to prove it:

Never have I heard it more consistently and reverently asserted that a woman’s true sphere is the home. Most of the ladies [at Cambridge] rather pride themselves in their domestic accomplishments. Among my own contemporaries were some whose nimble fingers could wield the needle as well as the pen, and produce with equal ease a copy of Latin verses or a fashionable bonnet. Others could send up a dinner not to be despised by the most fastidious of College Fellows.
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Parents and students alike obviously required a measure of strong-mindedness – itself an unattractive quality – to brave certain quarters of public opinion. Perhaps the cleverest students were those who could disguise their intelligence and appear normal, like the Girtonian encountered at a dinner party in the 1880s: ‘My dear, she was such a
nice
girl, with rosy cheeks and nice manners and nicely dressed and you wouldn’t have thought she knew
anything
.’
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The steady increase of women undergraduates from the 1880s onwards proves that more and more parents, fortunately, were confident enough in their support of higher education, and sure enough of their girls’ integrity, to withstand the gainsayers and satirists. They were at worst not particularly bothered, and at best honoured by the idea of an undergraduate daughter, even if her chosen course were non-vocational. What were the alternatives for an intelligent, unmarried young woman? Florence Nightingale and
Elizabeth Garrett Anderson warned of the corrosive effects of sitting at home doing nothing. The
Girl’s Own Paper
suggested some late nineteenth-century pastimes to fill what it deliciously called that ‘
mauvais quart d’heure
’ in a girl’s life between school and marriage (in an article ‘by the author of
How to be Happy Though Married
’). ‘There is such a thing as adult education,’ asserts the writer, but it need not involve university. ‘[W]e may learn from everybody and everything until the day of our death, so that nothing is more ridiculous than to speak of a girl’s education being “finished” when she leaves school.’
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She should try an essay club, a reading or study club, an ‘Early Rising Society’ (activities unspecified), a ‘Question Society’, a lecture or discussion group. The poor are always with us, so there is plenty of charity work to be done, and ‘there is no household work such that a girl should deem it beneath her position to know how to do’ – if only to set the servants a good example. If she keeps herself thus occupied, ‘she will be able to wait in dignified tranquillity until the right man comes to claim her’.
²⁹
Oh, good.

Vocational courses became available at teacher-training colleges, schools of nursing, art colleges, or academies of music during the second half of the nineteenth century. But only at university could a girl really explore learning for its own sake, or as one student put it, distinguish what she knew from what she did not, ‘which is the beginning of wisdom’. Sympathetic parents recognized this. Even unsympathetic ones might be persuaded, given a little diplomacy and determination on the part of the ambitious schoolgirl. She had only to draw attention away from the negative arguments (which sound either quaint or chillingly familiar to modern women students), and concentrate instead on the many positives.

It was usually the father, if still alive, who made the final
decision about whether or not his daughter went to university. If he had no particularly strong opinions on the matter, he might be swayed (as Constance Maynard’s was) with skill, and made to think he was humouring a mildly wayward daughter. As we saw in
Chapter 2
, Constance was offered a pony in the 1870s to distract her from applying to Cambridge. Lucy Addey, sixty years later, was tempted with £1,000 by her father to give up the idea of Oxford.
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Both girls preferred the adventure of university, showed their steadfastness by refusing to be bribed, and eventually made their bemused parents proud.

Hannah Cohen longed to go to university in the 1930s to escape the shadow cast by her sister’s terminal illness at home in Sunderland. The possibility had never occurred to her Jewish parents (whose sons were sent for their higher education to the local Talmudical College). Hannah got a place at nearby Armstrong College in Newcastle, allied to Durham University, and persuaded her parents by promising to live at home and take extra classes in Hebrew. So she caught the train from Sunderland to Newcastle at 7.15 every morning; from Newcastle to Durham (a journey of about half an hour) for Hebrew later on, then back to Newcastle, dashing up the tower-block stairs to be in time for the last classes of the day. All this meant she did not get home to Sunderland until the dangerous hour of 11.15 p.m., and as the stress was beginning to give her nosebleeds, she was allowed to give up the Hebrew. Her parents chose not to attend her graduation ceremony in 1938, but that hardly worried Hannah. She loved every minute of a frenetic, fulfilling university life, and vowed to pass the opportunity on to her own children – as long as they stayed close to home, as she had.
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Essex girl Kathleen Lonsdale had nine elder brothers and sisters; her parents had separated while she was a child, and her mother (like Trixie Pearson’s in
Chapter 1
), recognizing
a spark, fought to keep Kathleen at school, even though her siblings all left at the age of twelve. When Kathleen was offered a place at University College, London, in 1922, it was acknowledged as Mrs Lonsdale’s triumph as well as Kathleen’s.
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Daphne Harvey, who matriculated in 1937, relied on her father’s support, in the teeth of active opposition from everyone else. ‘My mother did not believe in education for girls… and I disliked living at home where, apart from my father, the family was anti-Bluestocking.’
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When her contemporary Edith Wood won a place at Oxford, her father refused to pay, until her headmistress sent for him and gave him a brisk talking-to. He gave no trouble after that.
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To girls like Trixie Pearson, Hannah Cohen, Kathleen, and Daphne, university meant escape. Not all escapees found a better life, however. Doris Maddy’s lonely path to university was strewn with obstacles. She had always (improbably, given her background) dreamed of going to Cambridge. Her single mother, by whom she was brought up, ‘didn’t agree’ with school, let alone university, and refused to pay Doris’s fees when she became a teenager. So Doris left home and became a pupil-teacher. With the support of her school she won a place at a teacher-training college, and then a teaching post in Grimsby, where she saved all her money while studying Greek for ‘Little-Go’ in the evenings. After two years, in 1919, she finally had enough money to afford the entrance examinations for Girton, which she stormed through, with the award of one of the highest open scholarships available.

She carried on working in the vacations as a supply teacher, or selling souvenir gift books of Grimsby to tourists (a meagre occupation): it was hard keeping her head above water financially, but her pride in fulfilling her ambition should have made the struggle worthwhile.