Bluestockings

by Jane Robinson

  There were different age groups, too: gauche eighteen-year-olds straight from boarding school, well-read debutantes bored at home, women who worked to finance their courses (one, at Manchester, was a charlady), young widows, or – very occasionally – mothers with children at home. Pitched into the mixture were lonely, self-conscious students from Europe, America, and the British colonies around the globe, forging a strange new world in which most early women undergraduates flourished, but some inevitably failed and fled.

  To all the early women students, this unprecedented way of life was a challenge. It could be coped with using common sense and open-mindedness (qualities not fostered much in late-Victorian England), or by adopting defensive strategies. Some women shut themselves away, working eleven or twelve hours a day and emerging only to eat and take the odd stroll round the grounds or in town. There is a cautionary tale about one of these, from Leeds:

  In a college, in a city, in a building large and fine,

  There is many, there is many, there is many-a Clementine.

  One there was among the others, like the college, very fine,

  Sweet she was and very pretty, such a darling Clementine.

  She delighted all Professors, and they said ‘Would she were mine!

  She’s so clever, more than ever I did see a Clementine!’

  She went in for Honours Classics, and her brain was like a mine,

  Full of knowledge and of college, such a marvellous Clementine…

  She refused to join societies or go out with friends – too busy working:

  As Exam time was approaching, thinner got poor Clementine,

  Then a white and pale and withered, beauty-faded Clementine.

  But she still worked hard at Classics, poor demented Clementine,

  And she took the examination, classic, classic Clementine.

  On the day results were issued, to the coll. crept Clementine;

  From the list her name was missing; thunder-stricken Clementine…

  When she asked her professor why, he explained:

  ‘For I hear you’ve ne’er attempted in your life to merry be,

  So the Senate have decided not to give you a degree!’

  She departed from the college, left the University,

  Soon she wearied of existence, and she laid her down to dee.23

  Poor Clementine: the archetypal bluestocking swot.

  One way to accommodate the pressures of university life was to retreat – or blossom – into eccentricity. Somerville College in Oxford seems to have had more than its fair share of the weird and wonderful. Portia Hobbs went everywhere with roses threaded into her hair and a flowing silk gown made from sample squares from the draper’s.24 Agneta Ruck had a white rat called Martin, which she took to lectures: ‘I think she was one of the first to exhibit an open neck… and obvious lack of corsets,’ remembered a wary contemporary.25 Martin obviously had free range of her clothes. Another ‘original’ girl cleared out all the furniture in her college room, and remodelled it. The walls were stripped bare, but for a portrait of Edward Carpenter (a radical socialist of rather beautiful aspect); she arranged a cluster of green balloons in one corner of the room and a bunch of dried honesty in the other. Two lonely daffodils sprouted from a tub, and cushions littered the floor, with a blowsy design of delphiniums on them exactly matching the queer cretonne frock she always wore. She festooned her bookcase with a wizened garland of rosehips, and the effect, all together, was ‘most sinister’.26

  To preserve the decorum and reputation of these undergraduate pioneers, university authorities, as well as issuing them with chaperones, resorted to exhaustive lists of rules, regulating everything. They stated exactly whom one could meet, in what circumstances, when, where, wearing what, and for how long. Most students, like Katie Dixon, at Newnham from 1879 to 1882, took them in good part, accepting them as a condition of their admittance to academia:

  [College] was bound really in those days to be prim and respectable, the reason being that we needed the support, financial and moral, of the prim and respectable, a mistake in that way would have put us back a lot. We weren’t going to ‘give occasion’, a perfectly reasonable point of view, and I for one wasn’t going to do any mischief that way. But it makes me laugh rather to think of hedging in all those extraordinarily serious and hard-working young women, as they were, who would hardly have known how to kick over the traces, even if they had been given the chance…27

  Feistier individuals were not so submissive. Sarah Mason, whose biscuits had been demolished by Miss Buss, did kick at the traces. She was constantly being hauled up before her college Mistress, or Principal, for minor misdemeanours such as refusing to wear a hat in public (‘“If any undergraduates saw you, they might think you villagers!”… at which I grinned, but maintained a rigorous silence’). When she and her friends were asked to make less noise in the corridors and their rooms, they pinned up sarcastic notices around college wanting to know: 1) at what pitch to raise their voices; 2) what precise thickness the soles of their shoes should be; and 3) how they could have fires that required no poking.

  Worst of all, Sarah and her closest friend, Charlie (Charlotte), brazenly walked around Cambridge without a chaperone, and were witnessed one Sunday being escorted into King’s College Chapel by some ‘wicked’ male undergraduates. ‘I’m afraid our behaviour was not quite comme il faut throughout the service.’28

  It is a credit to the college authorities that they managed Sarah’s rebellious behaviour without sending her down (expelling her). The resultant fuss would have been desperately damaging at this early stage in the history of women students, and there were plenty of greedy Jeremiahs both within and without the university system ready to pounce on mistakes. They hoped to prove the university experiment a joke – just as Gilbert and Sullivan tried to do in Princess Ida (1884):

  They intend to send a wire

  To the moon – to the moon;

  And they’ll set the Thames on fire

  Very soon – very soon;

  Then they’ll learn to make silk purses

  With their rigs – with their rigs,

  From the ears of Lady Circe’s

  Piggy-wigs – piggy-wigs.

  And weasels at their slumbers

  They trepan – they trepan;

  To get sunbeams from cucumbers,

  They’ve a plan – they’ve a plan;

  They’ve a firmly rooted notion

  They can cross the Polar Ocean,

  And they’ll find Perpetual Motion,

  If they can – if they can…

  As for fashion they forswear it,

  So they say – so they say,

  And the circle they will square it

  Some fine day – some fine day,

  Then the little pigs they’re teaching

  For to fly – for to fly,

  And they’ll practise what they’re preaching

  By and by – by and by,

  Each newly joined aspirant

  To the clan – to the clan,

  Must repudiate the tyrant

  Known as Man – known as Man.

  They mock at him and flout him,

  For they do not care about him,

  And they’re ‘going to do without him’

  If they can – if they can.

  These are the phenomena

  That ev’ry pretty domina

  Is hoping at her Universitee we shall see.29

  Sending women to university was a travesty of common sense, scoffed the critics, a wanton waste of time and money, which upset the natural order of things, and made monsters of England’s daughters. Women undergraduates should be content to go home and remain ‘the soft and milky rabble’ God designed.30 Then gentlemen scholars could reclaim their seats of learning, and all would be well again. ‘Woman was created as an helpmeet for man, not as his equal or rival,’ explained an article called ‘The Disadvantages of Higher Education’, from 1882, ‘and woman nowadays is apt
to forget that fact.’ It advised the wise young lady to concentrate on life’s ‘little things’, such as soothing a baby or mending a shirt, since

  Little things

  On little wings

  Bear little souls to heaven.31

  4. Most Abhorred of All Types

  A Cambridge professor who is in the habit of addressing his students most pointedly as ‘Gentlemen!’ proceeded to his lecture room on Ash Wednesday, to find only the ladies present. With head erect and eyes riveted on the opposite wall, he announced, ‘As there is nobody here, I shall not lecture today,’ and with stately dignity made his departure.1

  Invisibility was the least of their problems. The ignorance, distrust, derision, and abuse the Establishment displayed (like a respectable-looking flasher) to women undergraduates throughout the period covered by this book were shocking. There is little wonder the vanguard was so anxious its students should keep their heads below the parapet, behave impeccably, work hard, and keep quiet. ‘Never argue with your opponents,’ advised one lady tutor, ‘it only helps to clear their minds.’2

  Opposition came from all sides, but although vociferous, it never was very clear-minded. The medical fraternity shouted loudest, watching their backs for a similar invasion of ‘petticoat pioneers’; peevish academics and male undergraduates joined them, with commentators on the moral and cultural welfare of the country. All of them tried to weaken young women’s resolve to become scholars, and shame their friends and families into keeping them at home and out of trouble. From the 1890s onwards, there emerged in literature discussing the advisability of university education for women the sense of society having a moral choice. A suitable school, supported by a well-disciplined family life, would produce young women of gentility and firm principle. Send them to university, and they would either mutate into bluestockings – creatures with deviant minds and corrupt femininity – or become nervous wrecks. One of the few women students brave enough publicly to dispute this wrote in the Durham University Journal of 1899 how hurtful that assumption was to ordinary, hard-working women students like her: ‘This was, indeed, the most unkindest cut of all – to assert that because a woman uses the brain which nature has bestowed upon her, even as a man does, she is therefore a blue-stocking – most abhorred of all types.’ She resented being thought to belong to a ‘shrieking sisterhood’ of freaks, dressed in ‘green spectacles and a classic frown’, just because she enjoyed scholarship. It was as though women could not cope with learning, as though assimilating too much knowledge choked their minds to poetry, romance, humour, and integrity. This was so unfair.3

  The ‘shrieking sisterhood’ was a favourite term for the collective voice of Britain’s suffragette movement, with whom Emily Davies of Girton was so careful not to be identified, for all her support of its ambitions. People assumed the stridency of those agitating for ‘the vote’ to be shared by those working for wider university access for women; hence the gentler campaign suffered. This lone voice from Durham recognized that those quietly encouraging equal opportunities at university in terms of degrees, prizes, scholarships, and employment were hindered by what was in most cases spurious association with violent political activists. She also realized that some influential physicians considered it arguable whether nature had bestowed upon woman a brain worth using. One of the most prominent was Dr Henry Maudsley, after whom the Maudsley Psychiatric Hospital in London is named.

  It is neither surprising nor wholly their fault that doctrinaire medics considered women physiologically incapable of scholarship. There might be circumstantial evidence to the contrary, they admitted, but no proof, and proof – like reputation – was all. What could be proven was that women’s brains were on average five ounces (nearly 150 grams) lighter than men’s. And that menstruation sapped the body of life-blood. The inference was that a smaller brain meant a weaker one, and that loss of blood meant a periodic loss of vigour, bodily and mental. It was a woman’s duty as national child-bearer to take care of her body, keep it free from stress. Her mind must be pure, too: if a woman was clever she should not squander that cleverness, but hold it pristine in trust for her children, especially her sons.4 Use her brain too much and she would wear it out, compromising her physical and moral femininity. ‘When nature spends in one direction,’ warned Dr Maudsley, ‘she must economise in another.’

  It is not that girls have not ambition, nor that they fail generally to run the intellectual race which is set before them, but it is asserted that they do it at a cost to their strength and health which entails lifelong suffering, and even incapacitates them for the adequate performance of the natural functions of their sex… For it would be an ill thing, if it should so happen, that we got the advantages of a quantity of female intellectual work at the price of a puny, enfeebled, and sickly race.5

  Another commentator was even more blunt, insisting that no woman ‘could follow a course of higher education without running some risk of becoming sterile’.6 Even Miss Buss was inclined to agree that protecting what were called one’s ‘muscles of motherhood’ was more important (in some cases) than academic striving. She was apt to give her pupils’ parents homely advice: ‘I hope your daughter wears woollen combinations in winter. That is of more importance to her than passing matriculation.’7

  The author of the 1882 article urging girls to concentrate on ‘little things’ implied it was not just the physical organization of the female body that prevented intellectual achievement, but her temperament. Much might be heard nowadays about the advantages of producing ‘girl graduates’, the writer allowed, but had anyone thought through whether it was psychologically safe for women to exert themselves mentally? Brain power depends on bodily strength, and as women’s bodies are demonstrably weaker than men’s, so must their minds be. Is it wise to tease women with the promise of intellectual equality? Would it not be kinder to lower expectation, and (revisiting an age-old theme) make home her sphere of accomplishment, rather than university? In any test of nature versus nurture in womankind, nature would always win.

  The author of that article, acknowledged only as ‘M.P.S.’, was not some gravy-stained male academic, but a woman, and though it may be convenient to label the anti-bluestockings as chauvinists or even misogynists, that would be too simplistic. It is true, for instance, that careers for women graduates remained frustratingly limited well after professional qualifications in the form of degrees became available. University broadened the mind (granted women had one), but what for? Did it not dangle possibilities in front of them which, as soon as they left, were whipped away by society? Did it not open tantalizing doors and allow women to peep through, even though everyone knew they would be slammed shut in their faces? Surely, then, university bred discontent?

  There was particular concern among the more bigoted branches of the medical profession that if this movement to make scholars of schoolgirls were allowed to develop, the Englishwoman might end up in the same dire straits as the American, who was – with staggering overgeneralization – acknowledged ‘physically unfit for her duties’.8 Doctors noted what Edward Clarke of Boston had to say in a well-publicized lecture, ‘Sex in Education’, delivered at Harvard in the 1870s. His research into the sexual health of women graduates had produced shocking results. So hard had their brains been worked that their wombs had atrophied, to conserve energy. Occasionally a muffled maternal voice might call a child into existence, but college-educated mothers were unlikely to be able to breastfeed. Brain work was not the only risk: American women students sat down, all slumped, for hours on end, ate too much, and rarely exercised. They indulged themselves in what Clarke called ‘the zone of perpetual pie and doughnut’ and neglected to cultivate the judicious activity, rest, and mental serenity so necessary to bountiful mothers. This resulted in a ghastly merry-go-round of leucorrhoea, amenorrhoea, dysmenorrhoea, chronic and acute ovaritis, prolapsus uteri, hysteria, and neuralgia, from which, if she emerged at all, the learned lady emerged infertile and – probably – in
sane. No good to anyone.

  Mens sana in corpore sano: Regular callisthenics were a feature of the university routine for all Victorian and Edwardian women students.

  Suddenly, we are back in the realms of the fruitful womb and barren brain.

  Emily Davies’s friend Elizabeth Garrett Anderson read Dr Clarke’s lecture, and was furious. On his own terms, as a professional medical practitioner, Garrett Anderson published a riposte.9 Women need not be incapacitated by their periods, either in the short or in the long term, she stated. Manual workers manage perfectly well, and domestic servants are not allowed to rest for a week each month. Exercise is an integral part of the curriculum at most girls’ schools and colleges, which refreshes both mind and body. In fact, she argued, not going to university is far more perilous than going. To keep a bright young mind at school for long enough to grasp at new ideas and then to cast her into an exile of dull domesticity is dangerous. Boredom and restlessness breed unhappiness, and unhappy people are vulnerable. Their health tends to falter, their moral fibre frays. They become self-absorbed, depressed, hysterical, perhaps anorexic – or so ‘languid and feeble’ in feeding themselves, as Garrett Anderson puts it, that their menstrual cycle shuts down.

  If they had upon leaving school some solid intellectual work which demanded real thought and excited genuine interest, and if this interest had been helped by the stimulus of an examination, in which distinction would have been a legitimate source of pride, the number of such cases would probably be indefinitely smaller than it is now.10