Bluestockings (27 page)

In a petition to the university establishment in 1924, ‘the chief defects of the present regulations’ were listed by Oxford’s women students. The authorities demeaningly treated responsible young women like impressionable schoolgirls; they adhered to the outdated morality of the 1870s ‘when several of the Principals of the women’s
colleges were of the age of their present students’; there were too many spurious restrictions; the current atmosphere of oppression created a culture of defiance and contempt, and encouraged an unhealthy, furtive attitude to sex and relationships; finally, this disciplinarian regime was condemning the university’s young women to all the evils of co-education, and none of its advantages.
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In the early days, a zero-tolerance policy was rigorously maintained towards anything that could conceivably be construed as lax behaviour. At Durham, it was noted in 1908 that

a Senior Woman had been sent down for speaking to her brother on Palace Green, another student had been gated for the rest of term because she rang the doorbell just after, and not before, the last stroke of six had sounded from the Cathedral clock, despite the pleading of one of the clergy, with whose family she had been taking tea, that the drawing-room clock was slow.
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Scandal ripped through a university science department in 1895 when a reeling professor reported he had just ‘heard a young man and a young woman engaged in conversation in a room darkened for the purpose of studying optics’.
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Manchester students appear to have been particularly spirited: in 1910, two young ladies were excluded for having occupied with two gentlemen undergraduates a room in the students’ union ‘not used by the Music Society during a Social’; when asked to leave they refused, and stayed there ‘with the light out for a considerable time’, behaving in a blatantly ‘unseemly manner’. A few years later, another Mancunian girl was expelled for unspecified ‘misbehaviour’ in a charabanc on the way home from a sports match against Liverpool university.
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Incidentally, the punishment meted
out to the males involved in these outrages was almost without exception more lenient than that inflicted on the females. Boys will be boys.

A draconian approach is hardly surprising, given the anxiety of those responsible for establishing university education for women about how their protégées would behave, perform, and be accepted. What is shocking is that undergraduettes were still being treated like recalcitrant children into the 1920s and 1930s. The Shawcross Affair at St Hilda’s in 1935 is a case in point.

There had been a slightly shaky relationship between St Hilda’s students and their superiors for a while. A bust of Miss Beale, the college’s esteemed foundress, used to preside over the dining room; at the beginning of the 1920s, some skittish students decided it was too ugly to be borne, and commissioned boys from Magdalen College School, across the road, to sneak in and abduct it. The joke backfired when no one noticed it was gone, so the boys brought Miss Beale back. The morning after she was reinstated, the students discovered someone else had given her a gaudy overhaul in red, white, and blue paint. Miss Beale was immediately ordered to be scrubbed clean. Soon afterwards, as the final act of an anonymous and sinister comedy, the bust was smuggled down to the River Cherwell, poked beneath the surface with hockey sticks, and drowned.

Such mutinous behaviour boded ill, and for the next few years various japes, such as booby-trapping dons’ doors, or hiding people’s gowns before chapel, erupted and subsided like dramatic preludes to Dorothy L. Sayers’
Gaudy Night
. The apotheosis of this grumbling rebellion was the Shaw-cross Affair. One evening in May 1935, the Principal of St Hilda’s was (according to which report you read) locked either in her room, out of her room, or in the lavatory.
Furious at the indignity, she demanded to know who was responsible. She also cancelled the May Dance, to which the whole college had been looking forward all year. When an article about the episode appeared with suspicious promptitude in
Isis
, the university student magazine, the Principal was even more incensed. She blamed the editor, a sophisticated St Hilda’s student called Edith Shawcross, for the leak. Miss Shawcross, along with her friend Lady Katherine Cairns, offered to take the blame for both the prank and the leak (without acknowledging responsibility) so that the dance could go ahead. Both were asked to leave the college. But then one of the national newspapers got hold of the story – ‘Earl’s Daughter Sent Down’ – and within a day or two St Hilda’s, its choleric staff, and glamorous, naughty students were being talked about not only in British papers, but in America, India, Australia: all over the world.
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The dance, by the way, remained cancelled.

Despite the general heavy-handedness, the spirits of most English undergraduettes remained robust. There were still plenty of ‘noises off’ behind the scenes. In different locations around the country, girls screamed down college staircases on tea trays, slept illicitly on the roof, consumed secret bottles of sherry, or canoed down streams in the dark. Life as a bluestocking was rarely bland.

All reminiscences of living in a women’s college or hall of residence, whatever the date, are punctuated by minor mishaps and inconveniences. Snow blew down the chimney and settled on the bedroom floor; dyspeptic plumbing kept you awake all night; fires smoked, coating the walls with a bloom of soot and calling forth chilblains and cold sores. Sometimes burglars or unspecified ‘madmen’ broke in, or exciting accidents occurred. Sarah Mason and some Girton
friends were nearly killed in 1880 when their carriage drove on to the kerb in Cambridge, the horse keeled over, and the girls were pitched into the path of oncoming traffic. Women fell off their bicycles with tedious regularity, and sustained impressive injuries from hockey sticks or skate blades: such little disasters are remembered fondly.

Food generally looms large in letters and diaries. Although they were rarely too awful (in peacetime, anyway), it has always been fashionable to complain about college meals. In the face of such harsh criticism, those who planned and cooked students’ fare must have despaired. A ‘Bursar’s Song’ from the Somerville archives suggests it is not the quality of the food that spoils its enjoyment, but the illogical conviction on everyone’s part that somebody else’s college cuisine must be so much tastier:

I’ve tried and I’ve tried but you’re not satisfied,

I can’t sympathise with your attitude.

You disdain kedgeree, you want cake for your tea,

You want grapefruit for breakfast each morning.

Caviare for your hall, but it won’t do at all,

For the whole kitchen staff would give warning.

I don’t like to boast but there’s plenty of toast

And it’s only your greed that reduces it.

In my College the food is remarkably good,

And ’tis envy alone that traduces it.
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The worst food, and most difficult conditions, were experienced during the First World War. None but the most selfish complained, when they realized what their male contemporaries had to deal with on the front lines. But however stoical you were, there was no denying the food really could be dreadful – and less and less plentiful as the war dragged
on. Unfeasibly yellow bread and margarine were increasingly substituted for ‘real’ food, and a single sardine each was welcomed as enthusiastically as a banquet. Qualified people to cook meals were in short supply, as more women disappeared into munitions factories. ‘I once found the cook’s blouse button in my rice pudding,’ lamented a wartime student, ‘and then the safety pin that had replaced it.’
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Another described how

It became so difficult that wages had to be increased to get enough staff to keep things running. When food became very scarce, and very horrid, the students’ ration books would be used to make things more pleasant for the kitchen staff. We were very near a starvation diet. There seemed to be an abundance of artichokes [and rabbit, carrots, and macaroni] which I detest, and I also have memories of very hard pink pears, stewed for hours but still hard as pebbles.
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Fuel was scarce during the war; a good idea was to pool resources (two lumps of coal each per day), work together with friends by a single fire, and in winter, to wear your coat and fingerless gloves indoors. When academic work was done, there were always socks to be knitted for the soldiers and plenty of other war work. Lists on JCR notice-boards across the country asked for volunteers for the university Ambulance Corps, Nursing Corps, canteens, hospital laundries, digging land, breeding rabbits, wheeling wounded soldiers around the streets, reading to them, and – in the vacations – flax-pulling in the fields.

While most women students were pleased to stay at university and do their bit, some found the enormity of the war too much to bear – especially students in the ivory towers of Oxford and Cambridge. They could not justify ‘standing
and waiting’ in academia, so far removed, or aloof, from the action. Vera Brittain remembered arriving for the summer term of her first year – in 1915 – the day after Rupert Brooke was killed. Her college at Oxford had been commandeered as a military hospital, and the students evacuated to another college; the city was empty of undergraduates, full instead of cadets and wounded soldiers, and news was filtering through of the second battle of Ypres. Vera’s brother and lover were both away fighting. Her university career, in these circumstances, seemed obscenely irrelevant, and she left.
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Those who stayed knew they were ‘living in a changing world’, according to a Cambridge student in 1917: ‘The youngest-looking of the Newnham students reading my subject was a war widow.’
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She and her friends bitterly resented paying for the mistakes of the previous generation, and vowed to do all they could, as educated and enlightened citizens, to make things better for the next.

This meant practically as well as ideologically. Everywhere there was an annual ‘rag week’, a festival of fund-raising when ‘gown’ donned bizarre costumes and performed various stunts for the amusement of ‘town’, and collected money. Women’s colleges also offered opportunities for voluntary charity work during term and in the vacations. This might be fairly small-scale, such as inviting children from the slums to tea in the dining hall, or going carol singing; it might also involve serious commitment of time and energy. Inner-city ‘women’s settlements’ were sponsored by individual colleges, or national, university-based associations, to which students were seconded to work (on social welfare projects) in the holidays.
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During the Spanish Civil War, and the lead-up to the Second World War, undergraduates aided refugee camps around the country, and raised money to support Jewish students and their families. There is evidence throughout
academia of a muscular social conscience among women, and the will to act on it. They acknowledged the flipside of privilege to be responsibility.

One of the keenest delights of university life for the bluestocking was friendship. After a degree (or its equivalent), friends were the most precious legacy of this heady period in her life. Friends formed her college ‘family’, and her happiness depended on how satisfyingly relationships developed. As Elisabeth Bishop discovered – she who found herself ‘on the edge of an abyss’ at St Hilda’s – ‘mucking up’ socially could be profoundly upsetting. Those who had been to boarding school, had large families or a wide social circle at home, coped better with the vagaries of popularity and commitment than loners. There was no advice available on how to cope when things went wrong. In an atmosphere lacking the fresh air of self-reliance, close friendships, or ‘pashes’, could soon curdle and turn sour.

Popular nineteenth-century literature throbs with examples of loyal, loving girls who demonstrate their sentimental affection for one another by stroking, kissing, and embracing. They might be even more intimate, without losing their innocent charm. When two boarding-school mistresses were charged with ‘improper and criminal conduct’ in 1819, for climbing in with their pupils at night, lying on top of them and ‘shaking the bed’, they were acquitted because the judge blithely declared that ‘according to the known habits of women in this country, there is no indecency in one woman going to bed with another.’
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Constance Maynard was actually advised by the college doctor in 1883 to bring one of her students at Westfield to bed with her, to calm the girl’s nerves:

[Maynard] then had to lie down with her on the bed, which gave the girl the opportunity to grasp her tightly and to declare that they were now married. In ‘solemn tones’ she insisted ‘we are two no longer. I am part of you and you are part of me…’ The next day the girl was quickly taken away and returned to her family for care.
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The emotional stakes were high, for those who were not equipped to make a distinction between ‘healthy’ (that is, platonic) friendship, and a homoerotic ‘pash’.

Constance is an interesting example. She was always a highly religious woman, very loving too, and she considered it her duty to act on that love for the mutual spiritual development of herself and her closest companions. In the cultural (and linguistic) idiom of the day, she expressed her love for special colleagues and students in terms of a wife’s for her husband, often giving them male nicknames. She writes about the end of an affair with a tutor at Westfield most movingly: