Bluestockings (30 page)

The melodramatic and heartsick Miss Bishop of St
Hilda’s had an unsettled career. She failed to get into the civil service, and so became a teacher, but later left to work in market research. She ended up a property manager in London. The novels she wrote were unpublished, and despite her yearnings at college and afterwards, she never found her life’s partner.

Rebel Sarah Mason of Girton did marry, but it was an unhappy liaison. When her husband committed suicide, she was left with four children and a small allowance. She could not afford to offer a university career to any of her daughters. Rachel Footman, who nearly blew herself up in the chemistry labs, also married. She achieved her first ever paid employment at the age of fifty, when (thanks to her degree) she was appointed headmistress of a substantial girls’ school in Worthing. Cynthia Stenhouse, so enthusiastic about work that she managed to get herself locked in the Pitt Rivers Museum, enjoyed several careers. None of them would have been thinkable, she says, without a degree. First she was a doctor’s secretary, then an editor’s assistant, a school librarian and secretary, and finally – a teacher. She also married and had an admiring family.

Trixie Pearson continued to inspire. After leaving St Hilda’s, she took a teaching diploma, and earned enough (as promised) to raise her loyal family out of poverty and restore its self-respect. She married just before the war, and moved to Edinburgh, where she continued to work, coaching potential university applicants in her spare time to stretch their wings, as she had done, and fly.

Gwendolen Freeman got her job with the man who disapproved of bluestockings, and became a successful journalist, novelist, and poet. The most touching passages in her memoir,
Alma Mater
(1990), are about leaving university and coming to realize (only possible at a distance) what it really
meant to her, and how it changed her life. Those are questions I asked alumnae myself, and their answers were similarly moving. A maths and physics graduate of Liverpool described her university career as a beacon, which lit up her life. To Irene Peacock it was ‘a wonderful treat’, and to Miss Bott, an experience of incalculable significance:

I came from a suburban non-academic background, was lucky enough to get to a very good school, and so to Oxford. Oxford and Greats [Classics] changed and classified my mental attitude basically for the rest of my life, and I look back on those four years as a major turning-point and a source of pleasure and stability ever since.
²⁷

Barbara Britton appreciated the fun. Her abiding memory was of cycling past a group of soldiers at the beginning of the Second World War when her skirt blew up to reveal her knickers, and the men swooning to the ground and cheering. She considered university to be ‘like a game, not serious’.
²⁸
Ruth Ridehalgh read history from 1938 to 1941, but never counted herself a true scholar. It did not matter:

I look back on my university career with more than fondness. I was not highly academic and made no contribution to Oxford as some women did. I started as a shy, naive Lancashire girl. Oxford gave me a vision, opportunities, a life I had never dreamed of, and my gratitude is enormous.
²⁹

That is something so many bluestockings share: recognition of privilege, and a deep sense of thankfulness, not just for academic qualifications, but for minds opened, friends made, and memories shared.

*

This book should close as it began, with the story of an ordinary young woman whose university experiences reached beyond her own life. I had never heard of Edna Green before receiving a letter from her daughter during the course of my research, but soon came to realize I may have much, personally, for which to thank her. Edna was the first in her family to be educated at university; she went to the London School of Economics in 1928, where she read geography, and then to King’s College to train as a teacher.

Edna could not afford to live in college: the Depression had hit her (numerous) family hard, and although her parents supported her academic ambition, they could not afford to pay accommodation fees. So Edna stayed at home in Ashford, Middlesex, and caught the train each day to central London. After taking her teaching diploma at King’s, she was offered an interview at Sleaford High School in distant Lincolnshire. This posed two problems: how to get there, and what to wear. Her father somehow found the money to risk her fare and a new suit ‘to create a favourable impression’, and – luckily for them both – she got the job. She stayed in Sleaford for four years, before moving back to London shortly before the war.
³⁰

Just starting out on her secondary-school career at Sleaford High, when Edna taught there, was a pupil called Helen Robinson. Following Edna, Helen was encouraged to try for the London School of Economics, and succeeded in getting a place. Helen, in turn, encouraged her own children – two daughters – to aim high.

Helen was my mother.

Something else in Edna’s story struck me as beautifully appropriate. She was apparently a very keen sportswoman at LSE, a member of both the cricket and the hockey teams. Her daughters remember her fine woollen hockey stockings
with great fondness: for many years they were hung at the end of the girls’ beds on Christmas Eve. When they woke in the morning the stockings were magically full of surprises, brimming with promise.

Their colour, of course, was blue.

The pioneers: 1. Frances Buss of North London Collegiate School.

2. Constance Louisa Maynard of Girton and Westfield Colleges.

3. Emily Davies, founder of Girton College, Cambridge.

4. Anne Jemima Clough, the first Principal of Newnham College, Cambridge.

5. Dorothea Beale, founder of the Cheltenham Ladies’ College, in her study,
c.
1885.

6. Eleanor (Nora) Sidgwick, maths tutor and later Principal of Newnham.

7. Miss Buss, surrounded by staff and sixth-form students at North London Collegiate School, 1877.