Henry Sidgwick- Eye of the Universe
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This is too harsh, but it is true that Symonds’s rejection of “civilization”
was not as radical as Carpenter’s activism; it was a very selective affair that
managed to think well of most of Sidgwick’s academic reformist efforts.
Indeed, the practical task, whether for Mill and Maurice or for Sidgwick
and Symonds, was how to make their visions of culture and cultural
advance flourish, fostering some new balance of friendship and individ-
uality, comradeship and greatness. And curiously, given the masculinist
overtones of talk of Dorian comradeship and individual greatness –
especially pronounced in Symonds and Noel – all of these figures held
that a crucial part of the program involved supporting higher education
for women. Indeed, Sidgwick’s most famous reformist efforts, the arena
in which he could claim to rival Green as an inspirer, concerned women’s
higher education. It was work in this connection that specially illustrates
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Sidgwick’s dilemmas during the s. If his frustration with the General
Board and the SPR had contributed to his depression in and ,
so had his work for Newnham College.
This is not to deny that he found this “positive” side of his reformism
quite rewarding. He certainly did, and his collaboration with Eleanor in
this endeavour – with Newnham College, Cambridge as their enduring
monument – well illustrates just how far he was willing to go in trans-
lating the Apostolic ideal of friendship into the Millian ideal of friend-
ship between the sexes. If in the process he clung to his tactic of re-
serving his deepest teaching for the elect who were already on his rocky
path – the kind of Apostolic personal education that flourished in the
closets of the universities – he nonetheless devoted a remarkable amount
of energy to less esoteric modes of improving his students, fostering the
Millian vision of culture that had always defined his larger educational
ideal.
Of course, the longer the Sidgwicks worked for the cause, the less they
were given to the more nervous, cautionary aspects of Millian agnosticism
(not the aspects that Mill and Taylor had emphasized, to be sure). Their
experience, or “experiments,” with the women of Newnham suggested
that women would be able to meet any test that men might throw down. In
contrast to those of their parapsychological research, their “results” in this
domain were altogether positive, except when it came to the conservative
reaction against them from a very threatened male establishment.
The story of the Sidgwicks and Newnham has been well told by Rita
McWilliams Tullberg, in her Women at Cambridge. As she shows in
detail, the Sidgwicks’ work for Newnham was almost from the start caught
up in an unfortunate rivalry with Emily Davies’s work for Girton, which
had actually begun at neighboring Hitchin:
As early as , Emily Davies and her committee were considering plans for
building a college, the location of which was again a point of controversy. Sidgwick
pointed out the advantages of joining forces; a college built in Cambridge meant a
ready supply of lecturers and the chance for women to attend the public lectures
of University professors. The Hitchin scheme had proved very expensive and
this had been a deterrent to many students. But Emily Davies could not agree
with Sidgwick; she objected strongly to the use made of the examinations for
women and had very definite views on the dangers of siting her college in the
University town. For his part, Sidgwick objected to the use of the Previous, and
the official connection which the Hitchin college had with the Established Church.
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Co-operation was impossible; Emily Davies and Henry Sidgwick went their own
ways.
Perhaps McWilliams Tullberg should have said that they went forward
into a relationship of intense and heated rivalry. Davies once described
Sidgwick’s work as “the serpent gnawing at our vitals.”
Still, it is far from clear that Sidgwick and his group were wrong to
be unimpressed with the notion of exactly identical treatment for women
and men. Sidgwick wanted women’s education to be better than that of
men – after all, men’s education was precisely what he had been trying to
improve. As Hunt and Barker have summarized the points at issue, Davies
and her supporters saw the creation of any special rules and exceptions for women
as fundamentally unhelpful to their cause. In particular, they believed that anything that made women’s education easier would devalue women’s accomplishments.
By contrast, Sidgwick’s goal was to improve women’s higher education, and he
was willing to make separate arrangments for women (such as the Higher Locals)
if these were likely to improve women’s participation in higher education. At the
same time, Sidgwick was a vocal campaigner for university reform in other areas,
and combined other efforts with his campaign for women’s status.
Sidgwick was perfectly frank about the worthlessness of the Previ-
ous Examination (the fourth-term university exams requiring Greek and
Latin) and the Pass Degree – more so than he was about the worthless-
ness of Christian theology – and he could not see the point of subjecting
women to the same bad schemes that had been inflicted on men. This
would turn out to be a lifelong cause; as he put it to the Royal Commission
on Secondary Education in :
I think that no reform in our academic system is at present so urgently needed as
a change in the previous examination which would bring it into correlation with
the modern system of education, now so widely established in secondary schools;
and I trust that the influence of the Commission will be directed to the attainment
of that end. I think that the change would tend ultimately to improve the quality
of classical as well as of modern education; since it would render it easier to raise the standard of knowledge of Latin and Greek required from boys trained in the
classical system.
I may observe that in this respect the relation of both Cambridge and Oxford
to the school education of girls is in a far more satisfactory condition, since both
universities have refrained, in the case of women, from requiring a knowledge of
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Latin and Greek as a condition of en
tering the examinations that test academic
work. (CWC)
Newnham did in fact thrive with a crowd of independent spirits, highly
motivated and scarcely open to any charge of seeking laxer standards. And
this without benefit of so much as a chapel.
In any event, there can be no doubt about Sidgwick’s devotion to the
cause. He was first drawn into the business in the s, when he was
concerned with the problems confronting governesses and school mis-
tresses, who often complained of inadequate training. From , when
he leased premises on Regent Street to provide a residence for the handful
of women students coming to Cambridge to take advantage of the lectures
being offered, to , when the first permanent building of Newnham
opened, to the triumph of , when women gained the right to take
the Tripos examinations, to the bitter and unsuccessful campaigns of the
late s and s for full university membership for women, Sidgwick
devoted as much time and money to this work as he possibly could. With
the help of the Balfour fortune, the Sidgwicks effectively built out of their
own pockets much of the Newnham that stands today, though it took until
for the university to finally grant the demands they were making in
the s and s.
The Sidgwicks oversaw this creation with considerable shrewdness and
academic skill. Nowhere was this more evident than in their recruit for
the first principal position:
Miss Clough was already when she came to Cambridge; she was the sister
of Arthur Hugh Clough, poet and principal of University hall, London, who
had set up lectures and classes for girls in Liverpool, her home city, Manchester,
Leeds and Sheffield. By she had created the North of England Council
for the Promotion of the Higher Education of Women, and this was one of the
inspirations which led Owens College, Manchester, to consider admitting women
in – and so to the admission of women to the Victoria University comprising
Manchester, Liverpool and Leeds when it was formed in . Sidgwick (himself
a Yorkshireman) and several of his colleagues had met her through these lectures,
and been impressed by her ability and dedication. She represented a very distinct
national element in the formation of Newnham.
Doubtless Sidgwick did sometimes fall into an overly cautious approach
to reform, as in his opposition to a move for full membership for
women because of his conviction that this would only be defeated and
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prove counterproductive – might in fact end by undoing the gains made, of
their sitting the Tripos and being awarded a certificate if they passed. This
was an ugly dispute, with Sidgwick inadvertently creating much tension
between Newnham and Girton. As McWilliams Tullberg explains:
The dispute caused confusion amongst the women at Newnham. Sidgwick’s in-
fluence was very strong there; his wife . . . was Vice-Principal of the College and shouldered an increasing amount of responsibility as Anne Clough grew old.
If the University was going to receive Memorials from groups supporting and
opposing women in Cambridge, Newnham could hardly stay silent. But their
dilemma was, as Helen Gladstone (at that time Eleanor Sidgwick’s secretary)
put it, ‘to compose a memorial so as not to ask for degrees, but not to appear
to reject them if they are offered.’ Sidgwick made this delicate situation even
more difficult by bringing the dispute into the open. In a letter to the Daily News on July , he explained his opposition to the London Committee’s plans.
He was not opposed in principle to the identity of conditions for the two sexes in
University examinations and he supported in principle the idea of a mixed univer-
sity. But he believed that the demand for degrees was inopportune and impolitic,
since it was too soon to judge the effect of Newnham and Girton on the life of
the University. Further, if women gained admission at the expense of having to
take the Previous examination, they would have struck an extremely bad bargain.
He suggested that the matter be dropped for four or five years, by which time
the Greek of the Little-Go might have disappeared and there could be less talk of
‘inexperience’ of the effects of women on the University environment. The issues
were now becoming clearer. Sidgwick wanted the women to have their degrees; his
real worry was that imposing the Previous on women candidates would lengthen
the life of the examination that he was so committed to change. Emily Davies’
brother, Llewelyn Davies, who replied to Sidgwick in the columns of the same
paper four days later, quickly pointed out the opposite interpretation to him. He
too was opposed to compulsory Greek, but in his opinion the prescription would
be abolished all the sooner if women were involved in it, since it would then be
very clearly unreasonable. Who might have been right is a matter for conjecture,
though Llewelyn Davies was quite mistaken if he thought reason would be the
guiding star in Cambridge disputes about Greek.
That is putting it mildly. Indeed, the stunning unreason of which
Cambridge was capable became clear less in the debate over Greek than
in that over admitting women to degrees. Sidgwick was ever the cautious
reformer, fearing backlash. Unfortunately, he was mostly right. All that
came of the pleas that Cambridge should get with the times and, like the
newer universities, recognize women was an inflammation of reactionary
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feelings in favor of traditional, “special” Cambridge. College life was, for
so many Cambridge men, essentially a period of male bonding to set the
stage for mature life; to have women in the middle of it, as opposed to
having them as a few second-class citizens off in their own colleges and
available for dating, would be an intolerable intrusion. In February of ,
the Council of the Senate met to consider the case for granting women
full membership, and the result was precisely what Sidgwick had feared:
the university would make no more concessions.
As we have seen, circa –, about everything that could possibly
go wrong for Sidgwick was going wrong. This crisis with his cherished
cause of women’s higher education was surely another weighty factor in
his depression, rivaling the crisis of the SPR. And what followed was
certainly cause for further gloom. Throughout most of the s, work
for women’s higher education at Cambridge was cause for discouragement
after discourage
ment, coming as it did from the university upon which
he had pinned so many of his reformist hopes. Virtually no progress was
made in the s; in fact, when the issue of full membership was pressed
again, in , the defeat was even nastier, with jeering undergraduates
hanging an effigy of a gowned women in bloomers outside the Senate
House and terrorizing the town with bonfires and firecrackers. After the
voting, the dons lined up in the Senate House yard to await the result. But
“Someone threw a cracker over the palings and this was the signal for the
commencement of a general bombardment. Cooped up like sheep in a pen,
the devoted dons, some thousands in number, were pelted with fireworks
of every description, while smoke rose in clouds over their heads.”
Sidgwick, who missed the battle because he had returned to Newnham
immediately after voting, really did not by this point require any fur-
ther confirmation of his opinion that the University was caught up in
a “hidebound and stupid conservatism.” Indeed, he had again feared
a bad reaction, but was reluctantly pressed into coming forth, arguing
passionately:
The University of Cambridge in gave the substance; it is now considering
whether or not it should give the symbol. You have evidence laid before you,
showing that the symbol is required to produce a due popular valuation of what
our students trained here have done and the examinations they have successfully
passed. The symbol is required, but it would be a great mistake to suppose that
the country taken as a whole is so unintelligent as to value the symbol more than
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the substance. That is not the case. The view throughout the circles in which the
truth with regard to educational matters is known, is that the Universities have
already taken the most important step. That in my view is the reason why it is
not only the interest of women, but I should say, quite as much the interest of
the University to take the further step that is to-day proposed. From the point of
view of the provinces the question of membership falls into a subordinate place.