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Authors: Jane Robinson

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Two years later, the college moved again, this time to Newnham Hall, the nucleus of Sir Basil Champney’s purpose-built accommodation in the gracious, domestic style reminiscent of a Queen Anne country house.
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Indeed, for all the new women’s colleges the suggestion of country-house ambience was quite deliberate. It was supposed to lend an air of well-ordered conviviality and social propriety to comfort the students and confound those who thought you might as well let cretins or criminals invade academia, as women.

In the early days, not all of those who came up to college stayed the full three years. Options included living in while attending one or two series of lectures, and then leaving; working for a ‘pass’ or ‘ordinary’ degree (that is, a lower-calibre course), or buckling down to full honours – including, at Girton, ‘Little-Go’. It has been a feature of women students’ lives across the span of this book, however, that at any time the call might come from home to abandon the life of an intellectual sybarite and return to reality. As Anna Lloyd from Girton knew (whose sisters’ disapproval grew too strident to ignore), for women domestic duty was too often pitted against scholarship, and reputation against self-fulfilment. Welsh girl Dilys Lloyd Davies was another reluctant drop-out: she had gone up to study natural sciences at
Newnham after a brief stint as pupil-teacher at her old school – Miss Buss’s North London Collegiate – in 1877.

Dilys wrote letters home every Sunday, like everyone else, and hers shimmer with enthusiasm. She drew a careful plan of her room for her family. It had three chairs, a chest of drawers, a washstand, a curtained-off corner for hanging dresses, and a dressing table under the window next to her bed ‘with a snowy quilt’; she used her tin trunk for a bedside cabinet. Most of the college furniture was donated by well-wishers, or found by the Sidgwicks in antique shops around Cambridge. The wallpaper and curtains were riotously floral (mostly passionflowers), and clashed with the cheerful green and red carpet. At night, Dilys was kept awake by nightingales.

The other students were fascinating. One was a thin girl whom Dilys was shocked to realize wore no petticoats.

She is given just a little to manly or rather masculine movements of the lower limbs: sitting on tables now and then and spreading her feet out a little but I dare say she is nice… One or two are rather given that way.

She found the ‘ladylike ones’ a great comfort. They did not gossip or use slang, and though they could be rather earnest and drab, at least they were safely conventional. The young men she saw at lectures looked equally fascinating; especially one who asked if he could walk along beside her. ‘That is against the rules, I find, but I didn’t know.’ He asked her and a chaperone to come on the river with him, but Miss Clough said it was out of the question, ‘so that’, Dilys wrote regretfully, ‘is the end of that’.
3

Chaperones were an unavoidable feature of university life for women right through to the 1920s, and even, in some archaic cases, beyond.
4
They were married ladies or widows
engaged as guardians. Guardians against moral, perhaps physical, violation when students were out and about among undergraduates and university staff; and against moral, perhaps physical, turpitude if students were tempted to interact in any way with said risky gentlemen. In other words, they were paid to safeguard young women from themselves as much as others. Their presence was also a comfort to parents at home, worrying about their unprotected daughters at large in a man’s world. Chaperones were issued with cheap tickets to lectures where, having corralled their charges into a corner of the hall, they sat and noisily knitted. If a woman student wished to go to a concert (only with her college Principal’s permission, of course), to tea with family friends, to conduct an experiment in a laboratory, for a little stroll along the river,
anywhere
indeed, without a chaperone she could not do it.

Naturally enough, these duennas were resented as being staid, strict, interfering, and inconvenient. No doubt many were all of these things, but it could be a thankless task, and those who volunteered were doing the cause of higher education for women a considerable service. Eventually, women undergraduates were trusted enough to manage life by themselves, but it took a good half-century for that to happen.

No chaperones were required for life in college. There the staff and senior students took their place. As a ‘fresher’, or first-year, Dilys Lloyd Davies was forbidden to go to a college dance at Girton (an all-female affair), but she wrote home breathlessly describing those lovely creatures who were allowed, accompanied by Miss Clough:

Miss Bettany wore a very pale blue cashmere trimmed with silk, a fan, gold bracelet, snowdrops and heath[er] in her head and dress… Miss Gill, who is about 5 feet nothing wore a white lama [fine woollen fabric] with snowdrops in a chain round the square body and on the elbow sleeves and fan – and in her hair. She looked a regular little doll. I wished I were a man to dance with her… Miss Prideaux, a long and narrer [sic] lady wore a dark green velvet dress; Miss Harrison white silk and gold beads on neck, wrists and head. She is very graceful. Miss Richmond wore pink silk with white crocuses. Miss Clough wore grey slate silk, so pretty.
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No wonder Professor Sidgwick was worried that his college would not be taken seriously: the girls, he said, looked far too lovely to be clever.

Dilys stayed only a year at Newnham. During her first summer term, she was summoned by Miss Buss, who needed a new member of staff at the North London Collegiate and thought Dilys would do. The young Welsh girl was reluctantly forced to accept the post. It is ironic that someone who did so much to promote the university careers of such crowds of young women should be responsible for denying an individual student the same. But Miss Buss was not renowned for her empathy.

In 1881, the University of Cambridge formally opened its examinations to women, a move welcomed by Girton and Newnham with slightly exasperated gratitude. (The next step would be the granting of a degree to those candidates who passed them.) This may have been a local triumph, but by now Cambridge had relinquished its place at the vanguard of higher education for women, never to regain it. The university itself had never been proactive: it just suffered pioneers like Miss Davies and Miss Clough to fuss about in its shade for a while. London University had a tradition of dissent, however, and in 1878 radically announced that, following the passing of the Enabling Act two years
previously, all scholarships, prizes, and degrees (except medicine) would henceforth be open to men and women equally. Soon a dedicated hall of residence was established for those women undergraduates attending University College; others went to Bedford College, now an official part of the university establishment; Constance Maynard set up Westfield College in Hampstead in 1882; Royal Holloway was opened on the outskirts of London in 1886, and was later presided over by Miss Tuke, who wore silver slippers and, naturally enough, azure blue silk stockings. Then there was King’s College for Women in Kensington, with the following also opening their doors in due course to women as well as men: Imperial College (formerly the Royal College of Science), the London School of Economics and Queen Mary College in the East End.

The first two women’s colleges in Oxford, Somerville and Lady Margaret Hall (LMH), were opened in 1879. As in the Other Place (Cambridge), they were originally homely hostels for ladies keen to attend university lectures, and then developed into what Dorothea Beale of the Cheltenham Ladies’ College described as ‘academic institutions in family form’. Somerville was rigorously non-denominational, while LMH embraced Anglican principles. St Hugh’s followed in 1886, and St Hilda’s, founded by Miss Beale, in 1893.
6
The local branch of the Association for the Education of Women administered a lodging-house system for local ladies, known as the Society of Home Students (later St Anne’s), to allow those who could not afford full-blown college accommodation, or did not need it, the chance to attend lectures and (after 1884) take finals. Not that college accommodation was very grand. Jessie Emmerson was one of the first girls at St Hugh’s, then housed in a semi-detached residence in Norham Road, and was bemused on her arrival
in 1886 by its spartan lack of charm. There was hardly any furniture, and nowhere quiet to work, since next door’s child seemed constantly to be practising the piano. Social interaction was awkward: there was only a handful of students, none of whom knew each other:

We all felt rather shy… especially during the first meals in the little dining room which looked into a small back garden containing nothing in particular except grass. But next door there were some rabbits in a hutch, and they at once arrested our attention and naturally became a subject of conversation when other topics failed.

One day someone’s undergraduate brother came to visit, ‘and looking out of the window exclaimed – “What a dull hole! I expect you have nothing to talk about except those rabbits”.’
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Things were much more exciting in the provinces. At the time of its momentous announcement in 1878, London University was solely an examining body; this meant that any teaching institution with staff and students of sufficient intellectual calibre could apply to award its external degrees. All around the country, colleges of higher education realized that they could class themselves as vicarious universities, and attract undergraduates of both sexes, by subscribing to London’s matriculation and final exams. Thus Nottingham became a university college in 1881, Bristol in 1883, Reading in 1892, Sheffield in 1897, and Exeter in 1901. At several of them there were more women than men among the non-resident students.

Back in 1868, a commissioner reporting on the state of secondary education for girls in England had made a bitter observation:

Although the world has now existed for several thousand years, the notion that women have minds as cultivable and as well worth cultivating as men’s minds is still regarded by the ordinary British parent as an offensive, not to say revolutionary paradox.
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Now, apparently quite suddenly, that revolution was well under way. It was happening in the north of the country, too. The vigorous Ladies’ Educational Associations which had employed lecturers like James Stuart as part of the University Extension Scheme in Liverpool, Manchester, and Leeds in the 1870s helped galvanize the colleges already in place there to form their own collective degree-granting body in 1881. It was called Victoria University, refreshingly unencumbered by an arcane male provenance, and it declared itself proud to admit women as undergraduates on equal terms with men from the very beginning. Each of its constituent colleges admitted day-students, but also ran single-sex halls of residence which became the focus of under graduate life, much like the colleges of London, Cambridge, and Oxford.

Durham University, founded in 1832, did not decide to award women degrees until 1895; once made, however, the decision was broadly welcomed, and there was obvious satisfaction at beating Oxbridge:

Durham has come to the rescue where Cambridge and Oxford have failed. The little University nestling under the shadow of that great Cathedral of St Cuthbert which looks so majestically down upon the Wear, is chivalrously coming forward to allow the young ladies of the day to write the magic letters ‘BA’ after her [sic] name… And when the ladies go to Durham, won’t there be a large increase in the number of male Undergraduates? Fortunate Tutors! Lucky Dons! Happy Durham!
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By about 1900, 16 per cent of university students in England were women.
10
The University of Birmingham was granted its charter in 1900, Southampton University College (offering external London degrees) was founded in 1902, and Hull and Leicester (on the same lines as Southampton) in 1927. All these admitted women as well as men and awarded degrees to both. No more emerged before the Second World War.
11

As university places increased, so did the number of young women eligible to take advantage of them. Encouragement came from several quarters. The success of the Cheltenham Ladies’ College spawned other seriously academic boarding schools for girls, including Roedean, Wycombe Abbey, and Downe House. More schools were opened in the pattern of the North London Collegiate, including Camden School for Girls, founded by Miss Buss as a cheaper, more accessible alternative for bright local girls. The Girls’ Public Day School Trust came into existence in 1872, responsible for so many of the independent high schools still flourishing today. The Woodard Trust established rigorous schools with a strong Christian ethos, and state education profited hugely from the Taunton Commission’s findings – steered by Misses Buss, Beale, and Emily Davies – in 1868.
12

The examination system for girls grew far more robust after the introduction of the Cambridge (and later the Oxford) Higher Locals in 1869. They were soon acknowledged to be so effective a measure of students’ achievement and potential that boys’ schools used them, too. A typical paper, proudly preserved by Edith Cass of Leeds (who read botany in 1909), looks horribly challenging to modern eyes. It expects candidates to cope with a panoply of questions, from the nature of sin, or Machiavellianism, to the American system of taxation; to be able to draw a map of Queensland, Australia, labelling
its railways and rivers; and to compose essays on military training, spelling reform, or Florence Nightingale.
13

Something else encouraging the university system towards maturity in England was the progress of that system elsewhere in the world. In America, Oberlin College in Ohio had been welcoming men and women (albeit with a very limited curriculum) since 1833. The universities of Iowa, Wisconsin, and Michigan were also co-educational; the ladies’ colleges of Vassar and Smith opened in 1865, and Wellesley ten years later. How these institutions compared to their English counterparts was open to argument, but they existed: opportunity was there. For women wishing to read medicine, only the universities of New York and Zurich offered respectable degrees in the subject; in England, before most medical faculties admitted women at the end of the nineteenth century, there was only the London School of Medicine for Women, opened in 1874. (The Irish and Scottish universities all accepted women by 1892, incidentally, and the Welsh by the following year.) A German visitor to the University of Birmingham in 1904 declared his country’s undergraduates far more advanced, in every way, than England’s. The crippling social conventions so strictly observed in England simply didn’t exist there; the ‘proprieties of the drawing-room’ were irrelevant. There were no ‘women’, ‘ladies’, or ‘gentlemen scholars’, just students and ‘perfect equality’.
14

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