Bluestockings

by Jane Robinson

  Essex girl Kathleen Lonsdale had nine elder brothers and sisters; her parents had separated while she was a child, and her mother (like Trixie Pearson’s in Chapter 1), recognizing a spark, fought to keep Kathleen at school, even though her siblings all left at the age of twelve. When Kathleen was offered a place at University College, London, in 1922, it was acknowledged as Mrs Lonsdale’s triumph as well as Kathleen’s.32 Daphne Harvey, who matriculated in 1937, relied on her father’s support, in the teeth of active opposition from everyone else. ‘My mother did not believe in education for girls… and I disliked living at home where, apart from my father, the family was anti-Bluestocking.’33 When her contemporary Edith Wood won a place at Oxford, her father refused to pay, until her headmistress sent for him and gave him a brisk talking-to. He gave no trouble after that.34

  To girls like Trixie Pearson, Hannah Cohen, Kathleen, and Daphne, university meant escape. Not all escapees found a better life, however. Doris Maddy’s lonely path to university was strewn with obstacles. She had always (improbably, given her background) dreamed of going to Cambridge. Her single mother, by whom she was brought up, ‘didn’t agree’ with school, let alone university, and refused to pay Doris’s fees when she became a teenager. So Doris left home and became a pupil-teacher. With the support of her school she won a place at a teacher-training college, and then a teaching post in Grimsby, where she saved all her money while studying Greek for ‘Little-Go’ in the evenings. After two years, in 1919, she finally had enough money to afford the entrance examinations for Girton, which she stormed through, with the award of one of the highest open scholarships available.

  She carried on working in the vacations as a supply teacher, or selling souvenir gift books of Grimsby to tourists (a meagre occupation): it was hard keeping her head above water financially, but her pride in fulfilling her ambition should have made the struggle worthwhile.

  It did not. Doris had expected too much of Cambridge. She perceived that to fit in you must either be a bright young thing or an earnest ‘dowdy’. The former was out of the question: she was too exhausted, and hated the strenuous posing of those around her, refusing to ‘dance at the crossroads under a full moon’ with the others. She could not afford membership of any college or university societies: they all needed subscriptions. Nor could she afford an evening dress. Even the ‘earnest set’ demanded money: they went round relentlessly ‘doing good’ to those students they judged less fortunate than themselves. Once, they tried to recruit Doris for a college campaign ‘to make Hermione happy’.

  She was a fat, plain fresher, slow of speech with a complacent ox-like gaze. There was no pretence that any of us liked her. ‘We’re inventing little treats for her. She must feel she has friends.’ Notes were passed under my door. ‘We’re giving a late feast for Hermione. Do come, and bring a banana.’

  I did not go. Next morning I was told ‘Hermione was such a stodge. But at least she must have enjoyed it. Do let’s plan something more for her.’

  I could not enjoy any of this. Soon, with more sorrow than anger, I was dropped by the whole group.35

  Doris was too experienced, too different. So was an anonymous ‘Miner’s Daughter’ who wrote a bitter little piece for the Daily Herald in 1935, complaining that her student career at St Hilda’s College, which she must have fought to achieve, had ruined her prospects and happiness. It had seduced her with inappropriate ambitions; she mistook its intellectual glamour for real life; except to those who could afford to love learning for its own sake, it was no use. Worse than no use: ‘Oxford, the city which destroys in order to construct… certainly destroyed most of me.’36

  Those of us inspired by the first few generations of university-educated mothers or schoolmistresses must be grateful that there were not more people like Doris and the girl from the collieries, nor more who listened to the critics and doom-mongers; whose parents had neither the money, courage, nor imagination to support them; who were prepared to fill the mauvais quart d’heure – which sometimes lasted for ever – with the requisite round of dull duties. We had the benefit of precedent, but it takes true conviction to break the mould.

  5. What to Do if You Catch Fire

  There is a story that the only child of a particularly intellectual family not to get to university was apparently so mortified that she never managed to complete a sentence for the rest of her life.1

  Before the Second World War, when admissions processes had not yet been formalized, parents were expected to play the decisive part in their children’s further education. That, of course, was when eighteen-year-olds were still officially children. Christina Roaf was a student at Somerville during the 1930s. It was entirely her mother’s idea that she should go to Oxford, and when the time came to choose a college, Mother smartly made appointments with the principals of Lady Margaret Hall and Somerville. LMH was impressive; it had tasteful modern pictures on its walls and an air of brisk efficiency, and Miss Grier, in charge, was polite and businesslike. Somerville, however, ‘was another kettle of fish. Miss Darbishire had forgotten the appointment, her sitting room, full of books and papers, was austere, but when she did arrive she was very friendly, if rather vague.’ The decision was easy: ‘“I think you will be happier at Somerville, darling,” said my mother. So to Somerville I went.’2

  Christina was indeed happy at Somerville, both as an undergraduate and a Fellow. Hers was the academic equivalent of an arranged marriage, and it worked very well. Her parents had a stake in the success of her university career; she was absolved of the responsibility of making a life-changing choice; the whole venture became a family affair.

  A woodcut by a student at one of the women’s colleges at Oxford, illustrating their joint magazine, Fritillary, in 1924, when academic dress was still something of a novelty.

  Thanks in part to the close involvement of far-sighted parents, and the proactive support of teachers, as the first few decades in the history of university education for women slipped by, the idea of sending a daughter to college gradually became less shocking. Other factors contributed to progress, so that the image of a drab, maverick bluestocking began to metamorphose into a far more luminous creature, the ‘undergraduette’ who worked hard but also enjoyed herself. By the 1920s, an undergraduette was what more and more girls aspired, and were likely, to be.

  The cumulative effect of precedent was bound to play a pragmatic part. Graduate mothers tended to produce undergraduate daughters. Learned aunts took clever nieces to their proud bosoms, and thrilled them with iridescent tales of college life. Sophisticated friends seduced impressionable girls (like Katie Dixon in 1879) with the promise of arcane glamour:

  While I was at the High School, I used to do my prep. upstairs in the old school room. One evening my mother brought in a visitor whom she had met abroad, and plumped her down at the table with me. That was Sarah Prideaux… Sarah you might say was all in with the new way of dressing. She wore a cotton gown with a blue design, clinging rather, but what took me by storm was that she had stockings to match, the same blue…3

  Sarah was a Newnham girl; so, within a very short space of time, was Katie.

  The increasing number and value of endowments to women’s colleges, from the 1880s onwards, were vitally important in encouraging candidates to apply. More money for university and college bodies meant more places and better facilities, and the publicity generated by any ostentatious philanthropy to do with women was always useful. Although she is not connected to an English university, it is hard to resist introducing Mary Ann Baxter at this point. Miss Baxter was not famous, nor particularly political; she was simply a wealthy, curious, and far-sighted woman who realized what a difference it would make to her home town’s prospects if its people had access to a university, women as well as men. Dundee College, which became the nucleus of a fine university, opened – thanks to her – in 1883.

  Happy Miss Baxter was immortalized in verse by the peerless William McGonagall (‘For the ladies of Dundee can now
learn useful knowledge / At home in Dundee in their nice little College’).4 No one wrote odes to Anne Clough or Emily Davies, or even to romantic Oxbridge benefactresses like Margaret Beaufort or Devorguilla of Galloway.5 But Mary Baxter and her kind were local heroes: they brought university education, as McGonagall himself put it, ‘to the ignorant masses’, to women and working men, in other words.

  Later, the period between the two world wars witnessed a growing number of scholarships offered to women by universities, schools, local authorities, the state, and a raft of charitable trusts and livery companies. Most of these were competitively awarded for academic achievement in public or entrance exams; others were available to anyone whose case was convincing enough. Adept, impoverished families became skilful at unearthing links to long-gone cordwainers or goldsmiths, so they could approach the appropriate guild for a grant. It was worth doing your homework before you applied. A pupil from the Mary Datchelor School (London) in the 1930s was sent to the Drapers’ Company by her headmistress. Her mother went with her, and the pair took pains to look ‘sort of clean, poor and well darned’. The chairman of the company interviewed them, and asked why the girl was aiming for Girton, which had offered her a £50 scholarship, rather than Westfield College in London, which offered £80. ‘So my mother put her foot in it, in a big way, because she said: “Oh well, of course Cambridge for maths is considered the best.” We discovered afterwards that the chairman was a governor of Westfield – and I didn’t get anything.’6

  With judicious research, and a certain amount of charm, it was possible to build up a portfolio of awards from various sources until not only were university fees and accommodation covered, but there might be a modest profit left over. Awards like these widened social catchment, and for many girls meant the difference between going to university and not. External funding relieved the pressure of family sacrifice, with all its hardships and complex obligations; it brought emotional as well as physical independence, and encouraged self-esteem.

  It is humbling to realize what ‘sacrifice’ involved, and how valuable university education was perceived to be, especially during the Great Depression of the 1930s, by parents anxious to equip their children for a better future. There are tantalizing glimpses of domestic lives turned upside down by the determination to educate a daughter. Widowed mothers sold up, left friends and family, and moved to strange university cities so their daughters could live at home while studying, and lodgers be taken in. Daughters were consigned to more prosperous relations (and perhaps rarely seen again) to give them a better chance. Heartbreaking choices were made between equally keen and clever sisters in a numerous family, when there was only enough money to subsidize one. Opportunities were rarely bought without personal, as well as financial, expense.

  Sometimes daughters had to fight for support. Neither Louisa nor Bella Macdonald knew any women graduates, but both were desperate, in the teeth of family opposition, to get to university. Their father had died and brother William was the head of the family. William did not hold with educating women, and refused to provide financial help (including senior schooling), so the girls enrolled on correspondence courses with their hoarded pocket money, walked miles to public lectures, and eventually graduated (bringing shame on the family, according to William) from University College, London, in the 1880s. Louisa went on to be the first Principal of the women’s college at Sydney University, and Bella became a doctor.7

  Bessie Callender’s story was singularly unpromising. Her mother died a fortnight after she was born, when her father was in his early twenties. She was sent to her grandparents (strict Scottish puritans), since her father was a farmer and had no time to care for her. Financial struggles soon resulted in Mr Callender having to sell the farm, so when Bessie was told at school that she should try for a place at Girton, the plan was immediately rejected. What about Oxford, then? That was out of the question, too: the place was riddled with Anglo-Catholics. But so passionate was Bessie to escape that she was eventually allowed to sit the Cambridge exam on the bleak understanding that even if she got a scholarship, she could not afford to accept. She did get a scholarship, the only one the college possessed at that time (1899), and was forced to refuse it.8 Fortunately, as we shall see, that was not quite the end of her story.

  The academic barriers so strenuously erected in the early years to keep bluestockings well corralled began to founder once women gained the confidence to demand a wider range of degree courses. All medical schools were open to women by 1894, and (with very few exceptions, such as law or theology) they could study what they liked from then onwards. It took some lobbying to win degree status for practical subjects like horticulture or ‘home economy’ (domestic science), but by the 1930s women were emerging from university as virtually anything from aviation engineers to professional academics.

  With higher achievement came higher expectation. For girls apt to ‘catch fire’ intellectually (the chapter title comes from an article in the Girl’s Own Paper),9 it became a duty, a right, for the good of society, not to extinguish the spark, but to fan the flames. Many of the first few cohorts of women graduates became inspirational teachers, with the expertise to coach promising pupils for entrance exams, and spot ‘unsuspected brains in out-of-the-way places’.10 The pioneer bluestockings fought battles, proving points for ‘the cause’; their successors were therefore comparatively free to concentrate on themselves, and on scholarship, undistracted.

  During the first two decades of the twentieth century, the significance of going to university, usually leaving home to do so, changed subtly. Commentators were still keen to stress how much better value women graduates would be to their husbands and sons: that attitude did not disappear entirely until after the Second World War. Qualification was important – vocational and non-vocational – but so, paradoxically, was the idea of intellectual accomplishment as some sort of moral ornament. After 1918, however, women felt able to acknowledge the need to escape oppressive or unsympathetic families, to enjoy time to themselves, take charge of their own lives, be proactive. What is more, there began to emerge a heady sense of obligation on women to use their learning to change not only their lives, but the war-torn world. Virginia Woolf, speaking somewhat wryly to Newnham and Girton students in 1928, chided her audience for not taking advantage of growing opportunities in education and the workplace to make their mark on society:

  Young women… You have never made a discovery of any sort of importance. You have never shaken an empire or led an army into battle. The plays of Shakespeare are not by you, and you have never introduced a barbarous race to the blessings of civilization. What is your excuse? It is all very well for you to say, pointing to the streets and squares and forests of the globe swarming with black and white and coffee-coloured inhabitants, all busily engaged in traffic and enterprise and love-making, we have had other work on our hands…11

  Role models like Woolf (although she was not university-educated herself ) were undeniably influential in advancing the progress of ‘the undergraduette’, but none worked as hard for the cause as dedicated, ambitious teachers. As we saw in the previous chapter, some schoolmistresses were quite irresistible, like Edith Wood’s in London, sternly hauling Edith’s reluctant father into her office and convincing him that, contrary to his own impression, he did want to pay for his daughter’s place at college – and so he did.

  Florence Rich’s headmistress was determined her prize pupil should try for a university scholarship. Miserly Mr Rich refused to let her sit the exam, saying the journey and administration fees would be too expensive, and that even if Florence were successful, he was not prepared to waste the balance of funds required for life at college. Nothing daunted, the headmistress marched Florence off to Oxford, treated her to an opulent private suite at the Randolph Hotel and, when she duly won the scholarship, demanded of her truculent father that she be allowed to accept it. He capitulated.12

  Some parents needed only gentle persuasion. There were ten s
ixth-formers at Kathleen Edwards’ single-sex grammar school in 1934, most of whom were traditionally destined for teacher-training colleges. But her headmistress had other plans for Kathleen, and suggested the possibility of university to Mr and Mrs Edwards. ‘Neither I nor my parents had considered this,’ remembers Kathleen, ‘but they liked the idea, and so did I, though I knew nothing about universities.’13 Kathleen lived in Walsall, about ten miles from the University of Birmingham; if she lived at home and took the bus to the campus each day, the family could just about afford this unexpected venture. The local authority came up with a scholarship to fill the gap, and off went Kathleen. She flourished.

  Another Kathleen, Kathleen Byass from Driffield in east Yorkshire, would never have got anywhere near university had it not been for vigilant teachers throughout her school career. She was a farmer’s daughter, born in 1898, whose primary-school teacher insisted that instead of leaving with her friends at eleven she should be sent to the local grammar school; her headmaster at the grammar had taught previously at a school near Oxford, and recognizing Kathleen’s potential, he suggested she try for Somerville. Kathleen had not heard of Somerville, and had no idea where Oxford was, having never been further away from home than a day trip up the road to York. After a bewildering interview she was invited to sit at High Table with Miss Penrose, the Principal, and was terror-stricken on being asked ‘and what are your feelings, Miss Byass, on the Turks’ reported treatment of Santa Sophia?’14 Still, she got her university place. So did Mariana Beer from a small village in Cornwall, the first in her family (and the only one of eleven siblings) to go to university. As soon as she heard she had been accepted to read English at Bristol in 1921, her proud headmistress declared a half-day holiday for the whole school.15