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”.’7
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.8
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!9
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
Such comparisons encouraged reform, and led to progress. Everywhere, that is, but at Oxford and Cambridge. There, degrees for women remained elusive and apparently undeserved.
Admission was one thing; assimilation quite another. The German visitor’s observations prove that. Publicly, this new species must be seen to be coping well. Jessie Emmerson of St Hugh’s was well aware of this: ‘So greatly did the responsibility of keeping up the honour and dignity of my sex press upon me,’ she confided, ‘that I hardly dared address a word to anyone around me. One false step – and – for all I knew – they would never allow another woman student…’15 Pioneers of LMH made the same point, reminding the first residents that ‘nothing should happen in any way to make college authorities anxious, or to strengthen the very decided initial prejudice of the undergraduates against the s
upposed “bluestockings”… invading Oxford’.16
Society at large, and university communities in particular, needed persuading that this hazardous innovation was working well. So did the parents paying for it. It was therefore in students’ interests to present as appealing a picture of their university life as possible in letters home. What appealed to Bessie Macleod’s family was obviously flat-out activity. Bessie describes a typical day at Girton for them, during her first term in October 1881. It starts at 6.30, with the shriek of an alarm clock, and Bessie fumbling about in the dark, with chilblained fingers, for a candle. Once it’s lit, she wraps up warmly and takes it through to her en-suite study to do an hour’s Latin. She has to pick her way through the debris of last night’s revels (she had a cocoa party, and her guests brought cake). The ‘Gyp’, or maid, will clear that up later, after she has delivered Bessie her daily ration of coal for the fire and a jug of hot water for washing.
At eight o’clock it’s prayers. As a fresher, Bessie has to sit at the back, which means she is last to breakfast. By the time she gets to the dining hall, there is nothing left but an unalluring cocktail of cold ham and treacle. She has a cup of tea instead, and making sure there are no tutors around to see, sprints straight back upstairs to continue her Latin prose, which she has until 10.00 a.m. to complete. Sprinting is not what Girtonians do.
She rushes her work to the post room (the ink still wet) just in time for it to be bundled up and dispatched to a tutor down the road in Cambridge. There are several postal collections and deliveries a day, and it is quicker to mail essays and assignments than physically to take them. The rest of the morning is spent on theology, Greek, and maths.
Lunch is at 1.00 p.m., and to signal that she is not in the mood for conversation, Bessie arms herself with a stern expression and a book. Neither works: with awful inevitability, Girton’s dreariest daughter makes straight for her. The college population is encouraged to take a constitutional stroll around the grounds after lunch; at two o’clock Bessie has a lecture, and the rest of the afternoon evaporates in work.
The menu for dinner at six o’clock is unpromising: fish, mutton casserole, potatoes, turnips, and sago pudding. Feeling weary and weighed down by stodge, Bessie looks forward to a little free time – and then remembers tonight is fire drill night.
Every women’s college in the country had its own fire brigade, unless it happened to be in a city centre (which very few were). In Bessie’s era there was still candlelight; surprisingly soon, smoking was to be allowed in students’ rooms, and open fires were everywhere right up to the Second World War. Girton especially relied on its brigade: it would be ages before the Cambridge fire fighters got there on their horse-drawn cart in an emergency. The brigade boasted buckets, hoses, and a portable chute for dramatic bedroom rescues. There are several photographs in university archives of young women beaming from top-floor windows, holding the cavernous mouth of a rickety-looking canvas tube, down which they must plummet when the flames start pulling at their stay-laces. One of the maids at LMH was so plump that she was excused the chute, for fear of getting stuck. Death rather than indignity. Bessie describes the Girton fire drill:
A student at Manchester University in 1905 depicts the frequent ritual of the fire drill at her hall of residence, Ashburne Hall.
Within three minutes all the corps are drawn up in their respective places. Each corps (there are three) has a captain and a sub-captain, who stand near, and overlooking all is the Head Captain. It is a bucket practice today, the one least liked by the Brigade, for there is not much incident in it, to say the least, especially in the winter when we have beans to weight the buckets instead of water… we go at a quick trot to the Middle Corridor. There we draw up in two long lines; one end joining the ‘Gyps’ Wing’, where the taps of water are. From here the buckets are handed out full – passed down to the pump at the other end (at the supposed seat of the fire) and passed back empty along the other line… At last after a weary twenty minutes of Halt! Move on! Pass buckets! – the welcome order is heard… ‘The fire is over’ is said by the H.C., and instantly everyone falls out and begins talking hard to make up for twenty minutes’ silence. Now what time is it? Five minutes to seven!…
Well now I must tackle my ‘Prometheus Vinctus’ [Aeschylus].17
Bessie works until just after 9.00 p.m. Then it’s off to a dress rehearsal for the Drama Society play (Thackeray’s The Rose and the Ring) and at last, when everyone else is tucked up asleep, she returns to her room. The fire has long since died down, so it is rapidly growing cold. Breath steaming, her last task of the day is to set the alarm for next morning: 6.30 again.
How this indefatigable chronicle was meant to encourage Bessie’s family is unclear. Maybe they, like Florence Nightingale, could appreciate how gratifying it must be for an intelligent, energetic young woman like Bessie to fill her day like this, instead of sitting in the drawing room at home, measuring life out in coffee spoons and loops of crochet.
Not everyone lived a life of such breeziness. The fabric of daily existence at college, for the first few student generations at least, was slubbed with masses of little obstacles and inconveniences. It was unnerving, for example, to be laughed at so uproariously by locals when turning up for one’s first (ever) hockey match, on a cowpat-splattered field in Durham, just because no one had told you how to hold a hockey stick and you assumed it was like a walking cane, curved end up.18 When the first women arrived at Manchester University in the 1880s, they bravely signalled their intention to stay by installing an umbrella stand for their parasols in the original Owen’s College building. But when they asked for a common room of their own, they were allotted a small storeroom in the attics of the University Museum, which they shared with several large stuffed fish, goggling at their temerity much as the old-school academics did. When female medical students were admitted to Manchester in 1899, they were required to keep well in the background, so as not to distract the ‘real’ doctors, and to eat their lunch in an unappetizing corner of the dissecting room.19
Most students had their meals provided for them in college or their hall of residence. Typical menus would render present-day undergraduates comatose, but the quantities and choice available were quite normal for the middle-class trencher-women of the age. At Newnham, for example, breakfast was usually porridge, eggs, ham, bacon, and smoked haddock; lunches included four or five meat or fish dishes – a roast, boiled leg of mutton, minced rabbit, giblet pie, salmon mayonnaise, stewed tongue – and sponge, milk, or fruit puddings; for dinner there might be boiled cod, galantine of veal, curried eggs, macaroni cheese, and any amount of stewed prunes. Afternoon tea involved heaps of bread and butter (cold suet pudding being a Manchester alternative), sometimes cakes, and after dinner there would be private ‘revels’, like Bessie Macleod’s cocoa party, to which everyone brought precious biscuits or fruitcake sent from home. Sarah Mason, a former North London Collegiate pupil at Girton in the late 1870s, was outraged when Miss Buss turned up on a surprise visit one teatime and proceeded to make a great ‘hole’ in her term’s supplies.
If a young lady was forced to cook for herself, over-enthusiasm and lack of experience could result in chaos. Constance Watson of Somerville, in digs in Oxford in 1909, decided to make her own broth for visiting friends. Its ingredients were hair-raising: ‘a ham bone, a mutton bone, macaroni, buttered eggs, toast, two apples, herbs, almonds, sultanas, peas, a date, pepper, salt, milk, mushroom ketchup, and essence of lemon’. She declared it tasted ‘grand’.20
Etiquette at mealtimes was bewildering. There were unwritten rules about who could talk to whom, in terms of seniority, and the rituals of processing into Hall, or dining at High Table, were fraught with danger – even if, as in the early days at Girton, High Table only sat two people. You had to change for dinner – nothing too gaudy – and, either on an ad hoc or rota basis, accompany the Principal into Hall every so often, and sit at her right hand making polite and erudite conversation. These
occasions were completely terrifying (the Principal was often as shy as you were), and usually happened when there were undercooked peas or overcooked meringue on the menu, liable to shoot off your plate at the merest touch of a fork.
Often university would be the first place young women mixed relatively freely with others outside their own social circle. A glimpse at the variety of entries in the space for ‘father’s occupation’ on student registration forms suggests what a melting pot colleges and halls of residence were. At King’s College, London, among those matriculating in the first few years of its existence were a shopkeeper’s daughter laden with prizes and scholarships in Classics; a hatter’s daughter from Crystal Palace (‘the best student in her year’); a builder’s labourer’s daughter who had to cope with her course being frequently ‘interrupted by home anxieties’; and an Indian girl – whose father was listed somewhat starkly as a dead doctor – struggling with work, health, and homesickness, and eventually achieving a BA in history.21 But there were professors’ daughters there too, and those of MPs and diplomats, all studying together in what one of them called a scholarly sisterhood. In Durham, a mine-owner’s daughter might be reading for the same degree as a collier’s; lawyers’ children mixed with commercial travellers’, bishops’ with boiler-makers’, and civil engineers’ with fishmongers’.22 In a country still stratified by social distinctions, this was a quiet revolution.
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