Significant Sisters

by Margaret Forster

  Nor was it only the students who found the régime a little repressive. Emily kept a very close watch on the lecturers too, not because she feared any fraternizing but because she suspected they might deviate from the syllabus laid down for the men. And she was right. Two lecturers did indeed see the chance to throw out stuffy subjects and introduce new ones. Emily pounced immediately. One resigned, saying, “Just at the moment when education is taking a new shape I cannot take any pleasure in attending to the details of a college where the old and to me obsolete routine goes on . . .” Emily accepted his resignation not in the least concerned about what was alleged to be obsolete. When the men’s colleges rejected the obsolete so would she but until then she saw any rejection as a trap. Women had to prove themselves capable of doing what the men did. This was especially true in examinations. Men took a preliminary examination in their first year, entitled the “Little Go”, and she was determined the girls should do so too, as a necessary preparation for the Tripos. The fact that this Little Go was not part of the Tripos and more a test of what the men had been grounded in at school (unlike the girls) did not deter her. Different always would mean inferior and therefore could not be thought of. It made the girls unhappy and resentful but it could not be helped. “The student was a mere cog in the wheel of her [E.D.’s] great scheme,” wrote Louisa Lumsden. “There was a fine element in this, a total indifference to popularity but . . . it was plain we counted for little or nothing except as we furthered her plans.”41

  This was not quite fair. Emily’s joy in her students was unfeigned and touching. She loved their “bright faces” and was made happier than she had ever been by their “entire cordiality”. Their excitement was her excitement and she was touchingly flattered that they seemed to want to talk to her so much. She recorded their “innocent spontaneous hilarity” and valued it. When she saw how thrilled they were to have a room each, prettily decorated, she was glad she had stuck out for privacy and relished it with them. But, unlike the students, Emily Davies carried the burden of moulding the future. Hitchin was temporary, the position and the building of a real college as yet unaccomplished. The first test was not just to get girls through the Little Go but to get them allowed to sit it in the first place. The Council of the Senate graciously indicated that they would have no objection to the girls sitting the examination papers after the men had received them, nor to private arrangements being made with willing examiners to mark them. But nobody was quite sure if the plan would work since it hinged on such favours. The relief felt when the papers actually arrived for. the girls to do was tremendous. Emily Davies then supervised the examination herself, sitting in the corner and knitting ferociously like some Madame Defarge. Then there was the agony of waiting for the results. “Everything has gone quite smoothly,” wrote Emily, “and the kindness shown on all sides has been exhilarating.”42 Even more exhilarating was the news that all five candidates had passed in classics and the two entered in addition for maths had also passed.

  When the rejoicing was over, Emily got down to planning the building of the new college. It was, surely, an opportune moment. In any case, the lease on Benslow House at Hitchin had expired and it was no longer big enough to take the new students expected. The original target to reach before building could be started had been £30,000 but this was now dropped to a mere £7,000. It seemed an insignificant sum to raise when it was considered that the previous year Harrow school had raised £78,000 with no problem for a new building but, however hard she struggled, Emily found it seemed impossible to accumulate. “I go through a certain amount of hair shirt every day,”43 she commented dismally, but still the money only trickled in. The only solution was to borrow since further delay would be fatal. A proper legal association was formed, the money borrowed on the strength of it, and building at last began on a site at Girton, three miles from Cambridge itself. Every detail obsessed the founder. She journeyed backwards and forwards, supervising the planting of trees and the choice of tiles, walking across the muddy fields with Mr Waterhouse, the Architect of her choice, and explaining to him exactly what must be done, while appearing to ask his advice. When it came to furnishing the inside she was indefatigable and relished all the bargains she managed to find (especially some cheap borders for the wallpaper which exactly matched the curtains and were only ½d a yard). Once, she came across some undergraduates who had come out to help lay bricks and she watched delightedly while they solemnly wrote their names on them first. It pleased her not just that the men were helping to build the women’s college but that they had a sense of history, of the significance of what was happening.

  In September 1873 Girton was opened, amid chaos, with building work still in progress both inside and out. Emily Davies had become Mistress of the college (while it was still at Hitchin) in 1872 because nobody else suitable could be found but she enjoyed it as little as she expected. She did not like positions of prominence, nor did she like any confusion of role. She was also beginning to feel exhausted. “I suppose I don’t show illness much,” she wrote, “for it seems impossible to make people understand how worn out I am. I have often felt I could bear it no longer . . .”44 But she always did bear the strain because she saw her own contribution as vital. All the time new threats to the college loomed ahead and she felt she had to be eternally vigilant. The whole system of receiving examination papers and depending on sympathetic examiners to mark them was a continual worry and during her short time as Mistress it almost broke down. Emily was informed that it was to be discontinued and fought tenaciously to keep this crucially important concession. She only just managed it. Then the application to sit the Tripos examination was defeated so the same wearisome process had to be gone through with that examination too. She herself took the students into Cambridge where a room at the University Arms had been reserved for them to take the examination. Louisa Lumsden described the agony as the minutes ticked by and still no papers arrived. “. . . Miss Davies knitted away steadily by the fire – I can hear the click of the needles still! Minute after minute slipped away and still, until a whole hour had gone by, no paper came. Miss Davies said nothing . . .”45 But the papers arrived, the girls steadied their shaking hands, and the ordeal was gone through. All three candidates passed. Emily wrote, “We have just heard that Miss Cook’s translation of Aristotle was the best in the Tripos examination . . .”46 She did not object to her students climbing onto the roof and ringing bells with such violence that the fire engine came racing out from Cambridge. It was a great day. The last hurdle had been taken and nobody could stand in any doubt that women could match men intellectually if given the chance.

  Yet Emily Davies never relaxed. Any sign that standards need not now be so rigid and she pounced upon the offender. This led to a rebellion among her students which depressed her greatly. They said they did not want to continue taking the Little Go – the Tripos was quite enough of a strain. Emily was angry and upset. “I am afraid,” she wrote, “that it is true that I feel very vindictive generally. It is the fierceness of fear. If I felt more confident I might perhaps be more amiable.”47 She could not understand how girls as intelligent as her students could fail to appreciate that the battle was far from won. Girls had come to college, been given the same lectures and teaching as men, passed the same Little Go, passed the same Tripos – all that was true, but it was also true that none of this had been officially acknowledged. Girls still had to be content with their own college certificates. They had no degrees, they were not even in the smallest way members of the university. If once they began to deviate from the course the men followed their enemies might seize the opportunity to say they were not equal to the men’s course. The Little Go was tedious but it must be taken, the girls must conform. Emily won in the end but the resentment she incurred distressed her. “When I see such a spirit it makes me terribly out of heart with our work,” she commented. It hurt her that anyone should think she had anything but the good of the college at heart. She was extremely relieved,
in 1875, to become merely secretary again instead of Mistress, although there was no “merely” about it. The students called her “The Little Instigator” and their admiration for her was tinged with apprehension.

  After she had ostensibly handed the reins of Girton over to Miss A. F. Bernard, Emily went back to London. On April 22nd, 1875 she wrote, “I am 45 today – a good age for retiring into private life.”48 Quite what this “private life” was going to be she did not know. It was the familiar story of a woman who had found self-fulfilment through working indefatigably for a cause arriving at a stage where she had succeeded so well that she was no longer needed in the same way. Girton College was established and the machinery had been set in motion which would eventually secure true participation in the University. Emily by no means dropped out of the action – she was rightly accused of “wire pulling at a distance” – but she was no longer at the centre. There was time for other things. At first, she found it satisfying just to be back in London but after the very first party she attended she wrote, “Do you know I was so tired . . . that it took me two days to get over it. Does that not show what a wretched weakling I am, and how unworthy of attending routs?”49 It also showed something else. Playing, for her, was never going to be enough. Nor was being an aunt to her brother’s six sons and one daughter. She took them out often and had great fun (even learning to skate and being told she was “getting on like anything”) but her restlessness continued. She felt irritable and looking after her mother did not help. “If I felt more equal to work,” she wrote, “I should wish not to take up public agitations but something that I could be paid for so that I could contribute more towards the household expenses . . .”50 But in 1876 she fell ill, was confined to bed for a month and far from being equal to work had to resign as secretary of the Girton College Committee.

  From then on, as Honorary Secretary only, her influence at Girton ceased to be paramount – and there were those who were glad. There had for some time been mutterings that, although the founder always stressed that what she wanted was a “real” college, she herself did not understand what that meant. She did not understand the position of research in a “real” college. Everything, in her opinion, ought to be geared to expansion, to extending what already existed to more students instead of improving things for those already there. It was Emily Davies who chose to build twenty new rooms with a legacy left to the college and not a library. In any conflict of interest numbers always won. She would not allow any research fellowships which might benefit two or three girls to be established if the money could be diverted so that ten more could be accommodated. Nor did she understand that keeping the Mistress off the Executive Committee of the College was robbing her of power she needed to have. Wonderful though she was, there were those who said all Miss Davies wanted was a superior kind of Training College, and they were glad when she resigned. The rest of the committee had watched anxiously as spending on building work seemed to grow more and more reckless and they were eager to curb it. With Miss Davies gone, they managed to do so and at last to get properly laid out lawns and a well equipped library.

  Yet they still needed Emily Davies’ determination in the following years. Though she was now on the sidelines she alone had the necessary drive to arouse support when again it was needed. In 1880, when a woman gained the position of 8th Wrangler in the Maths Tripos, and in 1887 when Agnata Ramsay stood alone in the first division of the first class of the Classics Tripos (above all the male candidates for that year) Emily formed a committee to press for the formal admission of women to degrees. Admission to examinations was formally granted in 1881, but admission to the university body continued to be refused. The University authorities went on making themselves look ridiculous as more and more women scored impressive successes but were kept out of the University. By 1921, the year Emily Davies died, women were allowed to wear caps and gowns and to call themselves BA but it was not until 1948 that they were fully admitted to the governing body of the University (whereas at Oxford they were fully admitted in 1919 and at London and the provincial universities considerably before that).

  The withdrawal of Emily Davies from a position of power at Girton had not been the pathetic business it might have been. She was always well-balanced and sensible and accepted gracefully that her main contribution was over. The “wire pulling” gradually stopped although her annual visits continued. But after the death of her mother, in 1886, and when a long period of poor health was over, Emily began to look around for another way in which she could advance the cause of women. She had always been keenly for the suffrage, canvassing in her earlier days for John Stuart Mill and presenting the first petition to him with Elizabeth Garrett in 1865, but she had not wanted her educational work to be possibly prejudiced by agitating also for the much more controversial suffrage so she had dropped out of that movement. Now she returned.

  In 1886 her name again appeared among the subscribers to the London National Society for Women’s Suffrage and three years later she was back where she belonged – on the General Committee. At the age of sixty, she joined the Executive Committee and from, then onwards began to appear in public at meetings and on deputations. It excited her, when the militant movement began, to recognize that there were young women who felt as passionately about an issue as she had felt about hers and though she disapproved of their methods she sympathized with their feelings. She was not afraid, as many of the older suffragists were, to take part in demonstrations. In 1908, when she was seventy-eight, she was among the 15,000 women who gathered in the Albert Hall after walking down the Embankment. She said she had never enjoyed herself so much. In 1918, when enfranchisement for women finally came, she walked triumphantly to the polls to record her vote (Tory). Within her lifetime yet another great work for women had been accomplished.

  The last years of Emily’s life were spent in Hampstead living with her brother and his daughter. In 1919 the jubilee of the foundation of Girton College was celebrated and an address signed by all the past and present students was sent to her which gave her great pleasure. Hers was a serene old age, in which she seems to have accepted the gradual loss of faculties very well. One faculty she never lost was her mind. To her death, on July 13, 1921, in her ninety-second year, she was “so rational and serene and kindly accommodating,” wrote her niece, “and her good sayings and humour continued.”51

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  Emily Davies was not an immediately attractive person, nor was she ever popular. Said to resemble Queen Victoria in later life she also shared that lady’s obstinacy. Her family, of course, knew how much she laughed and smiled and how affectionate and kind she was but other people did not. They saw the set face, the pursed lips, heard the rather staccato speech and met the straight, piercing gaze with nervousness. She made people feel ill-at-ease and jumpy. They also felt reproved by her and this put them automatically on the defensive. Few outside the family circle got to know her very well, although she had some lifelong devoted friends. Barbara Bodichon, who of all people knew Emily best, was obliged to agree she had a formidable manner. “I think we all felt the want in Miss Davies of genial wisdom and influence . . . she, who has an immense love of justice for women, would die to give young women what she never had herself in early life, die to get it for them, though she might hate every individual.”52 Unfortunately, too many felt the presence of this capacity to hate. Emily Davies never shouted, never turned purple with anger or created scenes, but there was a grimness in her expression when she was displeased which was far more disturbing. Feminine wiles were quite unknown to her. She never used tears, never threatened to faint, never threw herself on anyone’s mercy, never fluttered her eyelashes or seduced anyone with a caressing look. Her methods were those of the civil servant, and a civil servant not entirely lacking in bureaucratic arrogance. This attitude, this belief in the power of logic, made her seem harsh and unfeeling. Josephine Butler, whose sympathies were wholly with Emily Davies at the time she was trying to get Girton started,
wrote, “I can feel for her and if it were not for the fear of a snub I would write and comfort her . . .” She added, “I believe that it is difficult for men to think gently of women like Miss Davies.”53

  It was a feminist problem. Women like Emily Davies were always suspected of being unfeminine. It was hurtful not just when the sneer came from men but particularly when, more often, it came from women. A good deal of Emily’s hate was turned towards those women who themselves shrank with horror from the idea that they might have a brain and could be taught to use it. She hated women who were afraid to be thought clever, who were embarrassed by the idea of intellectual activity, who appeared to imagine that the female sex would lose something if it gave up its reputation for being feather-brained. She hated most of all those who insisted the female brain was different from and smaller than the male. “I should like,” she wrote to Mr Roby when he was secretary to the Taunton Commission, “to have Huxley examined about the brain because that physiological argument is constantly used and people believe it.”54 They also believed, as she well knew, that not only the female brain but the entire female body might be overtaxed by intellectual activity. In 1874, when Dr Maudsley (a well-known mental health specialist) printed an article in the Fortnightly Review saying girls needed a special education adapted to their particular needs or they would be made ill, Emily Davies leapt to the defence of her own point of view. She was, she wrote to Madame Bodichon, “glad that this question has been raised and discussed.”55 Parents believed that, as Dr Maudsley said with such authority, studying made girls ill. There was a great deal of delicate talk about “girls’ organisation” which meant menstruation. This was supposed to make it impossible for girls to study hard for weeks at a time. With great restraint, Emily chose not to reply herself. She got Elizabeth Garrett Anderson to answer, which she did more than adequately, taking the opportunity to review the whole treatment of health in girls’ schools. There was no doubt, she said, that the cleverest girls appeared to be also the healthiest. Throughout all the best schools in England the health of the girls was of paramount importance and everywhere exercises and games, with visibly excellent results, were the order of the day. Miss Buss was thought eccentric when, in 1872, she marched her girls from the new Camden School to St Pancras Public Baths for swimming lessons but within the next decade it was considered normal and desirable.