This Act, which became law on December 23rd, 1919, also stated in its ‘permissive’ Clause III that nothing in the statutes or charter of any university should be deemed to preclude the authorities of such university from admitting women to its membership, and at Oxford the advocates of Degrees for Women acted upon this clause so promptly that by November 27th of that year, the day before Lady Astor was first returned as Member of Parliament for the Sutton Division of Plymouth, I was able to write to my mother: ‘The statute for Degrees for Women has just been published; in it they give us absolutely everything we ask for and it will be discussed at the beginning of next term. If they pass it - and everyone seems to think they will - it will come into force on October 9th next year, which means that when I do my Finals I shall also get my Degree and you will see me going about in a mortar-board and gown . . . before I go down.’
To a Times leader-writer, however, the publication of the statute merely suggested that women at Oxford were seeking an extension of their ‘present advantages’ without corresponding obligations, and if admitted to full membership of the university, must undergo ‘stricter discipline than is at present in force’. Raging with partisan fury, I took up my pen; the Oxford Outlook, I had heard, was now occasionally read by persons of discrimination in London, and whether this was so or not, it certainly represented the only medium in which I was likely to be given the chance to express my indignation. My article, ‘The Degree and The Times’, disputed with meticulous fierceness the major premisses of the solemn leader:
‘We would ask for a more exact definition of that “stricter discipline” to which The Times writer refers. We should like to know from what rules and regulations, written or unwritten, we are supposed to be so conspicuously exempt. Is it generally presumed outside the precincts of this university that, whereas undergraduates are induced by the vigilance of authority to enter their college gates at a reasonable hour of the night, the women students are free to wander whithersoever they will from darkness to dawn? Do our critics really think so ill of us as to imagine that we always arrive late, or not at all, at the lectures we are not officially entitled to attend? Or are we pictured as Mænads dancing before the Martyr’s Memorial, or as Bacchantes revelling in the open spaces of Carfax and the High? If such notions as these really do exist abroad, we can but protest that we are law-abiding citizens, keeping the rule of those whose work we share in full and whose privileges we enjoy in part, perhaps more religiously than those for whom it was first made.’
But the university and The Times alike proceeded majestically along their dignified paths, completely unaffected for good or for ill by the explosive ebullitions of feminine wrath. In the Hilary term, when Congregation was to discuss the proposed new statute, Winifred and I slipped into the Divinity School at the tail of a group of Somerville dons; we were evidently regarded by the ushers as belonging to them, for no one challenged our occupation of the limited space available to non-disputants. Almost the only women students present, we listened, our hearts surging warm with hero-worship, to Professor Geldart and young Dr Moberly - who had come back from the War with a D.S.O. and two mentions in dispatches - putting in their plea for the women, and realised from the small opposition encountered by their speeches that the battle was almost won. The statute was actually passed on May 11th, 1920; before it came into force on October 7th, the universal tide then flowing so strongly towards feminism throughout the world had swung woman suffrage into the American Constitution.
That Michaelmas term saw both the largest number of undergraduates ever known in Oxford - there were 4,181 men and 549 women - and the greatest change that had taken place in the constitution of the university. One of the first duties of Dr Farnell, the Rector of Exeter, who began that term his adventurous Vice-Chancellorship, was the matriculation of nearly a thousand women. Winifred and I were among the number, together with several headmistresses, whose hair had grown grey in the process of training generations of girls to educate and work for their still handicapped sex.
‘One is a little puzzled,’ the Oxford Chronicle remarked complacently, ‘to know why what Oxford did with such graceful unanimity is still a matter for hesitation and controversy at Cambridge. ’ Nevertheless I felt afraid - not, as time has proved, without justification - that the university might feel too proud of itself, too sure that it had done everything which could be done to put women undergraduates on an equal footing with men; ‘if freedom at Oxford broadens down from precedent to precedent a little less slowly than at Cambridge, this is the utmost that can be said for it,’ I protested, in a Chronicle article advocating (then very daringly) the amalgamation of the Women’s Dramatic Society with O.U.D.S.
On October 14th, I joined the crowds of young women in the Sheldonian Theatre to see the first Degree-giving in which women had taken part. It was a warm, scintillating autumn day, and the crimson hoods of the M.A.s rivalled the wine-red amphilopsis which hung with decorative dignity over walls and quadrangles. Within the Sheldonian, rows of eager childish faces looked down, awed and marvelling, upon the complicated ceremony in the arena below; the excited atmosphere was tense with the consciousness of a dream fulfilled which had first been dreamt, years before these feminine Masters and Bachelors were born, by women long dead - women who did not care whether they saw the end so long as they had contributed to the means. Everyone pretended to ignore this atmosphere - the men assumed an attitude of determined conviction that nothing special was happening, the women wore an expression of demure severity, as though Degrees were commonplace to them - but there was no gainsaying the nervous tension of the hour, and after much robing and unrobing and clicking of Press cameras, the harassed Vice-Chancellor, in dignified confusion, tapped one candidate on the head with his mortar-board instead of with the Testament.
Before the usual ceremony began, the five Principals of the women’s societies - now all vanished from the Oxford limelight - became M.A.s by order of Convocation, and the theatre vibrated with youthful applause as they put on their robes and sat down behind the Vice-Chancellor - a ceremony which the Principal of Somerville had practised with other Degree-taking Somervillians for nearly an hour the previous day. What a consummation of her life-work this was for her! I reflected, with a feeling of partisan warmth towards the intellectually arrogant college whose Principal, more than any other Oxford woman, had been responsible for the symbolic celebrations of that morning. Brought up in the nineteenth-century educational tradition, she was an academic Metternich of an older régime - but it was a Metternich that the War and post-war periods had required. Her task, during those complicated years, of reconciling college and university, don and student, man and woman, war-service and academic work, conscience and discretion, had been colossal in its demands upon tact and ingenuity, and probably no woman living would have done it so well. The wide gulf fixed during her period of authority between the Senior and Junior Common Rooms at Somerville had been largely of her own creation, as a means to an end; she herself for thirteen years had reigned above them both, a lonely Olympian, secure in the legend of her purpose, her omnipotence and her inhumanity. Who knew what Spartan ideal of justice, endurance and self-sacrifice had inspired the ruthless impartiality of that splendid isolation?
When the men, in turn, had received their Degrees, renewed cheers echoed wildly to the vaulted roof as the first women stood before the Vice-Chancellor; among them were Dr Ivy Williams, Dorothy L. Sayers, and D. K. Broster, once at St Hilda’s. Even the unchanging passivity of Oxford beneath the hand of the centuries must surely, I thought, be a little stirred by the sight of the women’s gowns and caps - those soft, black pseudo-mortar-boards with their deplorable habit of slipping over one eye - which were nevertheless the visible signs of a profound revolution.
For the rest of the term, at any rate, the male undergraduates were very much stirred indeed. ‘I realised with a pang,’ wrote one typical humorist in an Oxford journal after describing the ‘strange vision’ of a woman in cap an
d gown descending from a bicycle, ‘that I was in the presence of my equal, and Schools assumed a new terror for me. The woman undergraduate stood revealed. Two senile, placid dons passed me. “Monstrum horrendum informe,” I heard one murmur. I wonder how the charming ladies will enjoy their new status . . . Shall we behold them in white ties when the last dread moment comes?’
And so on. Quite soon, we all got used to it and didn’t read it, but the men - no doubt hopefully supposing that we did - still continued to write it.
10
By November the excitement of these triumphs was dying down, and I read - with a feeling that by going back to Oxford I had strayed away from the life that really mattered into a world of small things - about the burial in Westminster Abbey on the third Armistice Day of the Unknown Warrior who might so well have been Geoffrey, and the opening of the first League of Nations Assembly by M. Hymans on November 15th, while Convocation was discursively making up its mind to establish, a fortnight later, the new School of ‘Modern Greats’. But when, in December, Olive Schreiner died in Capetown, early memories of Woman and Labour and The Story of an African Farm put the women’s movement back into perspective in my mind, and my feminist enthusiasm had completely revived by the time that Queen Mary came up to Oxford to receive the Honorary Degree of D.C.L., and to visit Somerville and Lady Margaret Hall.
A few of us were divided that day into groups of ‘distinguished students’ - scholars and exhibitioners, Colonials, games captains, ‘notable old students’, and war-workers. I preferred the last of these groups to the first, and stood rather self-consciously between Winifred and a First-Year who had been quartermaster in a Surrey Red Cross hospital. Among the ‘distinguished students’ who awaited the Queen there was naturally no group - though even then its nucleus might have been collected - which described itself, in accordance with the label afterwards bestowed upon it by the popular Press, as ‘the Somerville School of Novelists’. I cannot remember whether, among the Somervillians from previous ‘Years’, Rose Macaulay or Dorothy Sayers or Margaret Kennedy or Doreen Wallace was present in the hall that day, but Winifred Holtby and Hilda Reid appeared there as Third-Years, while among the new students who had come up the previous term was Sylvia Thompson, whose Hounds of Spring was to carry her so early in life into the ranks of the best-sellers. Sylvia, at eighteen, already possessed the luscious beauty of a ripened grape; her elaborate clothes were carefully selected, and she wore large drooping hats and coloured shoes when these were still a daring and unusual fashion. But her reputation for schoolgirl precocity had not the same interest for us who were mature undergraduates with literary ambitions as the rising star of Rose Macaulay, who after pressing slowly towards fame before and during the War with several novels, had suddenly achieved it in 1920 with the brilliant and cynical Potterism. To Winifred and myself she was a portent, a symbol, an encouraging witness to the fact that a university education could produce writers of a non-academic yet first-rate calibre; and we collected all the tales of her, both authentic and apocryphal, that we could gather together from dons and old students.
On the afternoon of the royal visit, those of us - namely, Winifred and myself - who were entitled to active-service ribbons had been ordered to wear them, and as the Queen, followed by Princess Mary and tall, gracious Lady Ampthill, whose appreciative letter about Verses of a V.A.D. I still secretly treasured, moved solemnly up the large oak-panelled dining-hall, I reflected with a slightly bitter satisfaction that, for the first time since returning to Oxford, I hadn’t to feel ashamed of the War.
Noticing the ribbons, the Queen and Princess Mary both stopped in front of me; had I enjoyed my war-work? the Princess inquired. I compromised with truth by saying that I had preferred nursing to anything else while the War was on, and had just begun an enthusiastic conversation with Lady Ampthill about 24 General, when I noticed, as I subsequently related to my mother, that the Queen had ‘suddenly turned round to Winifred who was standing beside me. She had on her blue coat frock and a high white blouse collar; her hair was very nicely brushed and waved and the light was shining on it. She really looked quite beautiful and Mary was evidently rather struck with her appearance. She said to Winifred, “I see you were abroad too - where were you?” and Winifred said, “I was at Abbeville, your Majesty.” The Queen then asked, “Were you nursing too?” and I was terrified she was going to say, “I was in the Waacs,” which would hardly be tactful to the Queen, but fortunately Miss P. came up and said, “This is Miss Holtby, who was in Queen Mary’s Army Auxiliary Corps.” . . . Winifred by this time was scarlet all over, but I wasn’t so much impressed by the Queen as she had been, because her manner is so exactly like Aunt F.’s that it seemed quite familiar. She looked stiff but really very impressive; she is almost as tall as Winifred so no wonder she makes the King look small.’
11
The weeks immediately preceding Schools in the summer of 1921 were as inauspicious for me as for the whole country, which after the evanescent post-war boom was already beginning its long descent into trade depression and unemployment. By the end of the Easter term my sinister hallucinations were practically gone, but I had fought so long against threatening, indefinite neuroses that I fell an easy victim to a sharp attack of influenza. The college nurse for whose institution Winifred and I had contended gave me an efficient care very different from the perfunctory attention meted out to me during the uncomfortable illness of 1915, but I returned to London considerably devitalised, only to find my mother stricken down by the same exasperating disease.
Nearly all my vacations had been - as was perhaps inevitable during those disturbed and difficult years of transition - to some extent interrupted by family illnesses or domestic crises. After the hard-working Bessie had left to get married, efficient single-handed maids appeared, in spite of the general demobilisation, to be almost as difficult to find as they were during the War; the multitudinous obligations of domesticity seemed overwhelming, and I was involved in a perpetual struggle between my clamant reading and my remorseful conscience. Trained nurses were not popular at home owing to the strong probability that a starched, bustling presence would completely demolish the tottering edifice of household organisation; so I nursed my mother by day for about a fortnight, and at night plunged from 10 p.m. until 1 a.m. into a course of belated, frantic revision which quite extinguished my now eager interest in the developing problem of Reparations and Greece’s new war with Turkey. By the time that I went back to Oxford for my final term, the intermittent insomnia of the spring had become chronic, and throughout the weeks before Schools I rarely slept until 5 a.m.
The May and June which began that long, radiant summer had nevertheless their compensations, of which the most spectacular centred round Eights Week. I had by now a good many undisturbing acquaintances among the men undergraduates, and I watched the upward progress of New College from bump to bump in the sociable atmosphere of the college barges. ‘I wore the yellow dress and blue hat on Thursday and Hilda said it was a vision of beauty,’ I told my mother on May 19th; ‘to-day I shall wear the patterned voile dress and the black hat with the feather.’
New College ended as head of the river that summer, but the ex-rifleman was no longer there to watch the races; he had gone down the previous year with a wartime History Degree, with Distinction, in order to become a lecturer in a northern university. I took little interest then in university prizes, which had not been open to women students before Michaelmas, 1920, and did not know until long afterwards that he had broken Oxford’s prize record by winning three of these prizes in eighteen months, as well as being placed proxime accessit for a fourth before he went down to begin a career which was later to include the practice as well as the theory of politics.
On the long, hot evenings which followed Eights, Winifred and I occasionally rested from the race against time of our last-moment revision by taking a punt up the river with Hilda Reid or Grace Desmond (daughter of G. G. Desmond of the Daily News, who later st
ood as Labour candidate for Bath, and in 1923 introduced us to our first Labour rally after Robert Smillie had been elected as M.P. for Morpeth). The placid reaches around the Cherwell Hotel provided an ideal atmosphere for the composition of the Going-Down play, which Winifred and another inventive Third-Year were writing, with the assistance of parodies contributed chiefly by Hilda and myself. It was called Bolshevism in Baghdad, and was based upon the performance by O.U.D.S., the previous term, of Antony and Cleopatra, with C. B. Ramage and Cathleen Nesbitt in the title-rôles. Having seen the two of them walking up and down the garden at Somerville, where Cathleen Nesbitt knew one of the dons, we had drawn conclusions not dissimilar from those arrived at by other junior members of the university, and in November of that year, when we were undergraduates no longer and were about to take our B.A. Degrees, I was able to write triumphantly to Winifred: ‘What a swiz for all the people who swore that there was nothing in it between Ramage and Cathleen Nesbitt . . . If only it weren’t the day we go to Oxford, I would go to the wedding.’
In June 1921, however, the rumours of an impending marriage were still being vigorously denied, and in the Going-Down play I had merely to act the part of the not-yet-attached heroine, Cleopatra O’Nesbitt, a romantic combination of the Queen of Egypt with our Irish History tutor, who as a young Oxford don was being sent to convert the Baghdad Bolsheviks to political sanity.
Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 Page 55