Significant Sisters

by Margaret Forster

  She set about forming a committee, which was constituted in October 1862 with the avowed object of obtaining the admission of women to University examinations, starting with the Locals. One by one the centres where the Local Examination were held were tried, and the two older Universities canvassed for support. Emily’s true work had now begun in earnest. She wrote that it was “hateful work” but that “incessant and un-remitting talking and pushing is the only way of gaining our ends.”20 Within a remarkably short time this pushing had achieved results. Oxford turned the idea down but the Cambridge examiners said they had no objection to copies of the boys’ papers being provided at the next examination as an experiment. The secretary in charge of the London centre, H. R. Tomkinson, said he was willing to allow the girls to be examined in his centre so that was no problem. The only snag was that permission was granted by Cambridge in the October of 1863 and the next examination was in December. It would have been feeble to turn down the sought-after opportunity on the grounds of not being ready so Emily began frantically scouring London for candidates. She wrote to every headmistress she could think of but then was disturbed by some of the replies she received. Some were illegible, some ungrammatical, some both: what hope of the pupils if this was how the teachers performed?

  Finally, however, a respectable tally was secured. Eighty-three candidates submitted themselves for the first public examination to which girls had ever been admitted. Twenty-five were from the North London Collegiate (where Miss Buss reigned) another twenty from Queens’ and a further twenty from schools like Octavia Hill’s. The rest were from untried establishments, some out of London (Cheltenham Ladies’ College would have been invaluable but Miss Beale at that time was against competition.) Great care was taken to see that the whole exercise was conducted in a dignified way and that supervision was above reproach. The papers duly arrived, the girls did them, the examiners (paid out of a subscription fund) marked them. The results were encouraging, except for Arithmetic. In that subject eight out of the forty-five juniors failed and only six of the thirty-eight seniors got more than 25%. But in English the girls did very well and in every other subject held their own. The examiners’ Report was debated the following April at a special meeting of the Social Science Association, an influential society which had concerned itself closely with girls’ education.

  To Emily’s fury the main thing that came out of this meeting was a feeling that Arithmetic should be “lightened” in any examinations for girls in the future. She would have none of that, seeing the assumption behind such a suggestion as dangerous for the whole future of girls’ education. She was always to be adamant that Arithmetic and every other subject should stay exactly as they were for the boys and that what should be changed was the teaching of them in girls’ schools. To those who suggested that this way lay “brain fever” for overpressed female intellects she once responded, “Why should simple equations brighten their intellects and quadratic equations drive them into a lunatic asylum?”21 Surely people could see that the whole failure in Arithmetic was due to the absence of proper instruction? When it appeared they could not, Emily felt obliged to convince them. She wrote a paper entitled On Secondary Instruction as Relating to Girls in which she described exactly what girls were taught and how they were taught it and by whom. It was read aloud for her at another Social Science meeting. Emily slightly cringed as she heard her own words coming back at her. “This is too strong,” she murmured to her companion but the meeting was impressed by her arguments. If she was right, girls’ education was, with a few honourable exceptions, in a pitiful state.

  It was at this point that Emily Davies heard that the Taunton Commission which had just been appointed to enquire into the condition of middle-class schools might not also look at girls’ unless specifically asked to do so. She wrote off immediately to Lord Lyttelton who was the chief commissioner. “We are very desirous, therefore, that the instructions should be framed as expressly to include girls and we should be greatly obliged if you would have the goodness to bring the matter before Lord Granville.”22 She also wrote to the other commissioners and then prepared a memorial to the entire Schools Commission Board urging that “the education of girls and the means of improving it are within the scope of your enquiry.” If she had not been so perceptive and zealous in doing this it is more than probable that the already over-loaded commissioners would have failed to have girls’ schools inspected and the whole rotten edifice of what was laughably termed “girls’ education” would never have been brought crashing down. But Emily proved a good watchdog and sounded the alarm in time. Not only did the commissioners include girls’ schools but they themselves showed almost as much enthusiasm as Emily herself. Mr Roby, who was made secretary, kept Emily minutely informed. He was a member of the Social Science Association and had been Emily’s ally in the Cambridge Local examinations. As a young don at St John’s, Cambridge, he had published a paper, Remarks on College Reform, and had gone on to become interested in all kinds of educational reform.

  This was heartening for Emily and the other feminist reformers who quickly discovered that in the Taunton Commissioners they had been extremely fortunate because everyone concerned seemed to “go in for” (as Emily put it) the girls. Emily was invited to propose witnesses “best able to speak and able to speak best” about girls’ schools. The questionnaire to be sent out was discussed with her and when she was given the date for her own appearance before the Commission she was told “If you will draw up some list of heads under which your evidence could best fall it will contribute to the good order of the examination.”23 When, added to this favour, one of the assistant commissioners, Joshua Fitch, brought out a pamphlet urging the improvement of girls’ education in which he plainly stated “Intellect is of no sex” it was hardly surprising that the Quarterly Review detected a feminist bias in the final report of the Taunton Commission.

  This report (finally presented in 1868) was a vindication of everything Emily Davies had said and was something of a personal triumph for her. So, too, had been the decision to admit girls officially to the Cambridge Local Examinations taken in March 1865. “Never having counted on success even when things looked most promising,” Emily wrote, “. . . now it is come I cannot half believe it . . .”24 But the victory was solid and real. Girls had now been brought into touch with a national standard and all else, she felt, would flow from it. But it would not flow very fast. The growth of good girls’ schools, now that the bad ones had been revealed for what they were, was bound to be slow – simply because the money to start them was not there. Section 12 of the Endowed Schools Act (which followed the Taunton Commission) left the position of girls open. It said they should share in the endowment of new schools “so far as conveniently may be.” It was a hopelessly ambiguous phrase, leaving the way open for people to claim that while the boys needed new laboratories or playing fields it was not “convenient” to let girls have a share of whatever money was available. Money for girls’ schools had to be clawed from the boys’ giant share and with public sympathy still non-existent the clawing was timid. It was a measure of how much support there was for the feminists among the commissioners administering the Act that ninety schools for girls were in fact endowed in the next thirty years.

  It was a debt Emily Davies was very ready to acknowledge. She, of all people, knew the help she had received in getting girls admitted to examinations and in getting their schools reformed. But it was a disappointment to her to find that this support was much more cautious when it came to the next step in her programme: the founding of an actual University College for women. If it seemed to her logical and inevitable this was not how her scheme was regarded by those who up to then had given her such magnificent support. She came up against a strong alternative they found more attractive. This was that women should found a university of their own and not try to join any existing institution. They should have a university education as well as men but it should be different. The argument behind this
was that the universities needed reforming anyway so why should women try to gain entry to a syllabus and to an examination system which were in many ways anachronisms?

  Emily Davies rejected this attitude scornfully. It was one she had recognized very early as dangerous. Women would never force their way into men’s colleges but this did not mean they could not be part of their universities.25 All through the battle for the Cambridge Locals there had been this threat of offering a “special” examination specifically designed for girls and she had had to stamp on it ruthlessly. London University, with its offer of a “special” examination at matriculation level was trying the same thing. “Special” colleges and “special” degrees would be fatal. Again and again Emily reiterated her belief that different would always mean inferior. It was absolutely vital to provide the same education at university level for women as for men. A friend who reproved her for her fierceness said “. . . you are so eager to be reckoned equal that you will not hear of different.”26 No, Emily replied, she would not. But support for the next stage had to come from a much less influential source – the schoolmistresses who knew, as she did, that, without a university education like men, women would always lack prestige and a sense of direction. In 1866 Emily Davies formed a Schoolmistresses Association at her house in an attempt to break down the isolation felt by teachers in girls’ schools and so that she could form a nucleus of women as determined as she was to raise the sights of girls’ education even higher. Many of the schoolmistresses who met there were achieving great things in their respective schools but all of them were overcome, like Frances Buss, “with a sort of sick despair” when they saw how much was still to be done. What in particular depressed them was the necessity of employing men in their Upper Schools. “I absolutely burn with indignation,” wrote Frances Buss “. . . at the bare notion of men teachers in Upper girls’ schools . . . it is degrading to women’s education.”27 At the third meeting of the new association Emily Davies proposed that a new College for Women should be established to provide women with that higher education they so obviously lacked, and to put an end to “degradation”.

  From the beginning of this new and hardest campaign Emily Davies was sustained by a vision of the college in her head. Outwardly calm, quiet, serious, even cold and prosaic, she burned with an imaginative, highly-coloured, utterly extravagant vision of what her college would look like. “It is to be as beautiful as the Assize Courts at Manchester and with gardens and grounds and everything . . .”28 She had begun to compose a college hymn within days (“For thee, O dear dear college/Mine eyes their vigils keep . . .”) and could exactly visualize the rooms and the furnishings and the whole arrangement of the place. This touching dream of the future she was determined to bring about kept Emily going through those endless, mundane weeks of organization and hard work which followed. A programme was drafted, leaflets printed and a memorial organized to launch her audacious scheme. Entitled “Respecting the Need of a Place of Higher Education for Girls” the memorial was signed by 521 teachers and 175 others and was presented in 1867 to the Schools Committee. It had no discernible effect. Yet another committee was called for and Emily Davies, not daunted by the already long list of committees upon which she had served, set to once more and composed one. It met for the first time on December 5th, 1867, at 9 Conduit Street. At once, the opposition made itself felt.

  Barbara Bodichon, the first to donate £1,000 to the founding of the college, was nervous about the antagonism she sensed in influential circles throughout London. There was, she thought, “a frightful coolness” and she hardly dared point this out to Emily. People thought the reform of girls’ education had gone quite far enough. It was only right they should have better schools but to suggest sending them away from home to a college attached to a men’s university was absurd. But Emily herself was sanguine. She had expected this reaction. What worried her far more, as she got down to collecting money and making concrete plans, was opposition of a different sort. A rival movement to her own had just begun in the North of England. This was to establish separate lectures just for women. “It is better,” wrote Emily at the start of 1868, “frankly to acknowledge that at the present the lectures stand in the way of the college.”29 The full force of her anger was turned against those friends who ventured timidly to suggest that perhaps Emily ought to forget about the college idea and accept the lectures as an effective compromise. Compromise in Emily’s opinion, however, was never effective. It was always outrageous. It was also disgracefully easy, that soft and spineless option she so despised. “You see,” she explained, “you must take into account that when you give the choice of the difficult best or the easy second best the latter is more likely to be taken.”30 She would not allow her committee in any way to signify approval of the lecture scheme and when in addition another scheme, to have a “special” examination for women at Cambridge, was mooted she drove her committee to oppose this formally. When Cambridge University approved it, Emily was furious. She said the university had “put its stamp on the principle that women’s education is to be lower and narrower than that of men.” Her distress was genuine. “It makes me very unhappy,” she wrote, “to see the Ladies Lectures . . . spreading. It is an evil principle becoming organised and gaining the strength that comes from organisation.”31 The suggestion from her own committee that she might be wrong, that the lectures and special examination might pave the way for women’s full entry into university life, was unacceptable to her.

  Meanwhile, Emily was doing the only thing she could do to meet the challenge – moving ahead with all the speed she could muster with the founding of a college. In August 1868 a constitution was drafted and discussions begun on the curriculum. At every step Emily found herself in opposition to her own committee and yet in virtually every instance her own unpopular view won the day. Her passion was not of the dramatic or showy variety. She made no magnificent speeches, no emotional appeals. What she did was go on and on and on, meeting every objection with a counter-objection and never for one instant appearing to flag. Nobody could match her intensity, nobody even approach the evangelical fervour of her outlook. Her greatest asset proved to be her stamina. There were battles royal over the location of the proposed college, over the curriculum, over the teaching. Emily won them all. It was she who wanted the existing classics course kept, she who wanted the college outside Cambridge, she who insisted the male lecturers could travel to the college. With a dreadful feeling that they were being foolishly shortsighted the members of the committee gave in. None of them was able to feel as sure that they were right as Emily Davies was. The “business of talking”, she wrote, was arduous, but it had to be done and so did the visiting of influential people. “So much working of the jaws is a considerable effort,”32 she commented, but so far as her listeners were concerned the exhaustion was not all her own. Barbara Bodichon wrote that she was “staggered” by Emily’s daily toil and that she did not know what kept her going. The answer was inspiration.

  Long before sufficient money had come in to finance the college, a house had been rented at Hitchin, in Hertfordshire, in which the venture could be started. Emily would rather have set up shop near Oxford, because she found the “kind, gushing way Oxford men have” preferable to “the cool Cambridge manner,”33 but Cambridge as a university was more receptive. She had personally looked at houses in Baldock, Stevenage and even Mill Hill before settling on Hitchin as a location. The committee criticized her choice but as usual Emily was adamant. She wanted to get started because “in practical working, one finds that the way to kindle faith is to show it by running risks . . .”34 It was important to have something tangible as soon as possible so that a college for women did not go on sounding like some ridiculous Tennysonian idea. With the house rented, a circular was printed and sent to all likely parents. By January 1869 only three names had been put forward but Emily was undaunted. She immediately fixed the fees at £105 a year and announced there would be an entrance exam in July. Eyebrows
were raised: why selection with only three to select from? But the theory was sound behind what seemed a slightly ludicrous idea. From the beginning, a standard would be fixed and evidence that there was a fixed standard would in itself attract serious applicants. When July came eighteen entered and fifteen passed.

  In October the first five students – Misses Gibson, Lloyd, Lumsden, Woodhead and Townshend – took up residence with Mrs Manning as Mistress. (Emily herself declined the honour saying she was neither old nor distinguished enough.) Miss Gibson, one of those first students, described arriving. Before she had time to knock or ring “the door was opened and on the threshold there stood the keen little lady to whose courage and energy the whole scheme of a college for women was due and who was now quivering with excitement thinly veiled under a businesslike manner in this moment when her cherished hopes were actually beginning to materialise.”35 But another student observed that “her dainty little figure and smiling face were most misleading. They concealed untiring energy, a will of iron, and a very clear and definite set of opinions.”36 What all five girls were quick to appreciate was that in the founder’s opinion the College did not exist for them but they for the College. They were only part of a Grand Design and would never be allowed to forget it.

  The position of the college when it opened was perilous. Far from signalling a triumphant arrival at a chosen destination it was only a first step in the right direction. The new college could too easily become just another variety of girls’ school. No one was more aware of that than Emily Davies. She was terribly afraid of this fate and fear made her appear “narrow and intransigent”. Every detail came under her possessive eye in her desire to make sure that the girls were treated like the men. Even the food had a hearty, masculine sound (“we have good plain food,” wrote Emily with satisfaction, “milk, bread, beef and mutton and it disappears very fast”).37 The girls had good appetites because they were encouraged to go for long walks and to swim in the nearby open-air swimming-pool. Their chief pastime was “to rush out after dinner to the walk on the edge of the cliff and see the Edinburgh express slip its carriage.”38 Otherwise, recreation was limited. They were taught fives by one of their lecturers but Emily vetoed football. Often, they were reduced to more childish amusements like trying to walk on the heavy iron roller as it was pushed across the lawn. Seeing Emily Davies coming towards them the girls waited for the inevitable reproof but to their astonishment the founder merely said, “I believe I could do that. Will you hold my hand?”39 But such moments were rare. A tradition as serious as the founder believed the men’s to be had to be laid down. The college must impress. At Hitchin, the dining-room tables were from the start arranged on the collegiate plan so that one student was moved to comment, “we might have been 50 undergraduates instead of 5 harmless young women.”40