Bluestockings

by Jane Robinson

  You’re quite the most sporting horse I ever jockeyed – as far as I can see you did it all in the last lap – and I’m hugely delighted…

  My best jubilations.34

  That is an extraordinary response. Reactions were usually more measured (‘Dear Miss Worthington, I wish it had been a third instead of a fourth but still it has been well worth doing’).35 Elsie Phare’s reward, after becoming the first woman to win a starred first in her English Tripos (Part I) and the Chancellor’s Medal for English Verse, was to recite her poem in the Senate House. Being a woman, she was not, of course, allowed to wear a gown: this was Cambridge in the 1920s. The most brilliant English student of her generation, she was still treated like a fish out of water.

  For those (unlike Elsie) allowed to graduate officially, Degree Day was an iconic occasion. Its formality presented problems to those with little experience. Sarah Beswick – the unsophisticated girl from Derbyshire who had settled in so well at Manchester – remembered hers clearly. She invited her mother, a close female friend, and Miss Axon, the teacher responsible for getting her to university in the first place. The outing had been carefully budgeted by her mother: Sarah’s father was on short time (during the Depression), and money was tight. There was just enough for the tram fares, and a cup of tea after the ceremony at Houldsworth Hall. It was only when the party arrived at the Hall that they were told white gloves were essential – and Sarah possessed none. Someone dashed off to the nearest draper’s shop and managed to buy a pair in time – but that meant no money left for tea. For one last time, Miss Axon came to the rescue and treated them all. The day was saved.36

  At Birmingham, Degree Day was one big party. Here is the programme for July, 1926:

  11–12 University Organ

  12–1 Ceremony

  1.15–2.15 Guild of Graduates’ Luncheon

  2 Outdoor play

  2.15 Tennis tournament finals

  3.30 Band (Regimental)

  4 Tea. Motor cycle gymkhana

  6.30 Reception of Flannel [informal] Dance

  7 Dancing

  11.45 Lights out37

  And after that? What might a degree lead to next? For women prior to 1939 (especially on non-vocational courses), despite all the eff orts of the pioneers, it was best to assume nothing. A student at the Society of Home Students put it well: ‘Oxford was the end of my youth, not the beginning of my adult life.’38

  8. Blessed Work

  Don’t write anything you can possibly keep in.1

  The novelist Dorothy L. Sayers was at Oxford from 1912 to 1915. Contemporaries remembered her as an intellectually gifted young woman; somewhat eccentric, but definitely a serious thinker. The impression she liked to give was different. When asked to describe a working day at college, she came up with the following unlikely timetable: eat breakfast at 9.30 (thus neatly missing a nine o’clock lecture); mess about cleaning tennis shoes, catching up on gossip, and collecting post from 10.00 to 11.00; enjoy a leisurely coffee with friends until 12.00; ‘cut’ a lecture in favour of composing a sonnet; have lunch at 1.15 and then go punting; tackle tea at 4.00; go canoeing and eat a picnic dinner on the river at 6.30, then attend a Bach Choir rehearsal; have more coffee and cakes in a friend’s room at 9.30; finally, retire to bed at midnight, unless anyone should happen to fancy a chat. ‘From time to time,’ she observed, ‘some unfortunate who had “got an Essay” – an affliction always referred to as though it were a kind of recurrent distemper – was forced to go into retirement to write the thing.’2 But Dorothy herself – blithe spirit – claimed immunity.

  It might be an attractive scenario, some sort of nostalgic remnant of la belle époque, but this cannot really be how Dorothy and her high-achieving friends whiled away their days at university. Always, chuntering along in the background, squatting immovable beside you, or soaring over everything, was work. Work, after all, was the undergraduate’s raison d’être, the commodity parents paid for, the excuse for opting out, for a while, from real life. It is true that reminiscences of student life before the Second World War tend not to dwell on academic routine. Nevertheless, that routine, with the response it generated, underpins the history of the bluestocking.

  A student’s relationship with her work proved an emotional, private thing. She was judged both within and beyond the university by how successful that relationship was, and how intense; she judged herself by how fulfilled it made her feel. The stakes were high. Whether through cause or effect, those who failed academically in the early days of further education for women rarely found peace of mind in other areas of their university careers, and the pressure of keeping up with work, or even holding back, produced a significant rate of attrition (see Chapter 10). There is a sense in their documents that intellectual effort was the only currency many women students felt they possessed; squander that, or be caught short, and the shame would be overwhelming.

  It was in everyone’s interests, therefore, to make sure each bluestocking maximized her talent. A solid structure helped. There was an intractable rhythm to the days, weeks, and terms of the academic year, marked by lectures, tutorials or ‘coachings’ (at some universities), classes, and exams. No matter what subject they were reading, students could choose any course of lectures they fancied at Oxford or Cambridge, guided by tutors and their own inclination. Elsewhere lectures were prescribed. A typical weekly timetable might be five lectures, as many classes (group teaching sessions), and perhaps one or two tutorials, when students learned singly or in pairs. A minimum of six hours’ academic work a day was encouraged, with Sundays off for church, exercise, and letter writing. Factor in travelling time to lectures (especially from home, out-of-town colleges, or halls of residence), waiting for chaperones, the hour or two’s recommended leisure time, practicals for scientists or practice sessions for musicians, and the days were soon filled.

  With such a hectic schedule, minor disasters were inevitable. Work always came first for the conscientious scholar, but sometimes at a cost. Molly McNeill’s Irish temper was roused by one of her lecturers at university during the First World War who habitually droned on too long, making Molly late for lunch. When she eventually arrived breathless in the dining hall, there was ‘practically nothing left’: a poor return for her diligence.

  I got some sort of carrots and onions and meat mixed in watery gravey [sic], and managed after much searching to secure the scrapings of a potatoe [sic] dish which amounted to a helping about the size of an egg. There was absolutely no brussel sprouts left at all. When it came to pudding there was some scraps of tart which I avoided and took some fig pudding. What was in it I don’t know, but it sounded and felt like emery or fine sand. I was frightfully angry because really when you come in after sitting freezing in a cold lecture room you do expect something warming.3

  Exams were held at strategic points during the course, arcanely known as ‘inters’, ‘prelims’, ‘Little-Go’, ‘mods’, ‘responsions’, ‘collections’, and so on. Some were more significant than others; most were frighteningly formal, and required the wearing of ‘subfusc’ or academic dress. More than one girl wore fake glasses to help her feel suitably studious, or simply went into denial. Maude Royden, a student during the 1890s, was in the latter category, never seriously believing her exams would materialize: ‘I always thought I should die, or the sky would fall, or the process of manufacturing paper and pens fall into disuse, or something of the sort.’4

  Freshers at Girton were informed soon after their arrival that if they failed to secure a first or second class in their first-year Tripos, they would be out. Elsewhere it was possible to re-sit elements of exams, as long as you had the time and money. Candidates for pass degrees took shorter, less demanding courses than those reading for honours. It was not necessarily intellectual ability that made the distinction between the two: many young women could not afford three years at university, so opted for one or two, and a pass. But no one could avoid finals, which leered over the last summer term, beckoning
with an ink-stained finger. I still dream about mine, thirty years on.

  Intelligent young women who chose to go to university, rather than those forced there, generally coped well with the work, finding their own level, settling down, and getting on with it. People like Dorothy L. Sayers – possessed of a brilliant mind – achieved the highest possible results without appearing to try at all. Disguised harmlessly in mannered college photographs as vivacious beauties, dumpy maiden aunts, or schoolgirls wearing gymslips and complicated woollies, such scholars were quickly labelled geniuses, and somehow untouchable. The girl-wonder Gertrude Bell, Agnata Ramsay (who got the only Class I, Division I result in Classics at Cambridge in 1887), Philippa Fawcett (placed above the senior wrangler, or top undergraduate performer at Cambridge, in maths in 1890), Marie Stopes (the first woman Doctor of Science in England)5 – these were lofty role models, beyond the reach of normal intellects.

  Girls who had grown up on the fringes of academia had a natural advantage when it came to understanding the university routine. Mary Plant’s father was a senior lecturer in chemistry at Oxford. She used to play in the laboratories as a child in the 1920s and ’30s, growing copper-sulphate crystals, prowling among Florey’s mysterious penicillin cultures, rolling wondrous balls of mercury around in the palm of her hand. When her father’s former student Dorothy Hodgkin interviewed her for a place at Somerville, the great scientist’s opening words were ‘I last saw you in the bath.’6

  Ordinary mortals tried to do what was required in the way of work as best they could – with the help, if necessary, of constant cigarettes, sugar lumps, swigs of Sanatogen (a tonic wine), and wet towels for the fevered forehead.

  Success was sweet, as this Cambridge bluestocking found in the 1870s:

  Work doesn’t seem work, but rather some delightful form of amusement. I can’t tell you how happy I am this term. All my imaginings of what it was going to be like to have nothing but mathematics to work at were small compared with the real thing. I do a little other work besides – my half-hour of Odyssey after dinner; and every day except Thursdays and Sundays I work at my embroidery for the two hours immediately after lunch.7

  ‘Studying is really the nicest kind of work one can do,’ declared Jane Worthington in the 1890s; ‘the only difficulty is it may become a little too absorbing.’8 Her contemporary Lettice Ilbert worked hard simply because she found it made her ‘unreasonably happy’,9 a sentiment Eglantyne Jebb agreed with rapturously. One of Miss Jebb’s letters, dated 1896, almost burns the fingers: ‘But my work, oh Dorothy, my work, my work, my work! Dear work, blessed work, my heart and soul go into my work.’10

  Emma Pollard of Somerville went to two universities at once. Oxford still declined to award women degrees when she matriculated there, so she enrolled at University College, London, too, nipping down to London periodically to fill any gaps in the Oxford syllabus. She sat two lots of final exams, and passed both. Another student, profoundly deaf, qualified in medicine at Leeds in the early 1920s to the delight of her peers. Blind students, the terminally ill, orphaned, or even widowed young women were not only accepted on to courses (if they passed the entrance qualifications), but much admired; sadly the shy, ugly, or over-earnest ones, like Mabel Fuller in Rosamond Lehmann’s novel Dusty Answer (1927), were generally not. Nor were those who conspicuously struggled academically, or refused to seize the opportunities university offered them. The former group usually left, with relief or in shame; the latter stayed, and were simply unhappy. ‘If I wanted to marry an explorer,’ complained one of them, ‘or bring up twenty sons, or head the suffragettes, or take up lion taming, I would feel it worth while being so bored here.’11 The implication is, poor girl, that she anticipates life after college will be just as dull. A university education, for her, will lead to nothing. On the principle that you don’t miss what you’ve never had, she thus avoids enjoying herself at all.

  It was not always easy to concentrate on work, however passionate you might feel about it. Practical problems offered unexpected challenges. St Hilda’s College library in Oxford was in the basement of a building next to the river, and Joan Hunt, working there one summer evening in about 1930, remembers it being inundated by hundreds of tiny frogs leaping wetly round her ankles. Irene Rowell’s digs in the 1920s were fine until the show started at the cinema next door. Then all hope of work was lost, as waves of frenetic music from the piano accompanying the silent movie surged and eddied around the room for hours. Unimaginative tutors set class essays based on a text of which there was only one copy in the library, so all the students ended up having to take turns with it, a couple of hours apiece, day and night. You might easily be distracted at a lecture by the endless clacking of chaperones’ knitting needles, by the sniggering of male students waving a pickled penis around in the biology labs (that happened at Durham in the early 1900s)12 or covertly tipping back your chair with their feet till you fell, legs asprawl, to the ground.

  Over-enthusiasm about work was rather bad form (‘At Oxford we do not hold with zeal,’ warned a St Hilda’s tutor in the 1920s). Cynthia Stenhouse discovered how risky it could be, one evening in the early 1930s. She had been working on some geological specimens in the Pitt Rivers Museum, and was so engrossed that she forgot the time. An employee was supposed to come round and check that there were no stragglers anywhere, just before the museum closed, but either he missed Cynthia, or she was too busy to notice him. By the time she had finished her work, the doors were locked and everyone else had gone. She tried telephoning for help, but all the phones were on internal lines. She thought about trying to escape, but the windows were too high. So arming herself with a serendipitous tin of biscuits, she settled down for the long night ahead, worried that college would contact her parents when she didn’t turn up for dinner, and not at all sure how she would cope with the Pitt Rivers collection of shrunken heads and voodoo dolls once it got dark. Slowly, she began to panic.

  Luckily, it wasn’t long before the Bach Choir turned up for its rehearsal, held in the booming acoustics of the museum’s Gothic hall, and Cynthia was set free. She was never tempted to work so late again.13

  As well as being frightening on occasion, work could be downright dangerous, especially for inexperienced scientists. Rachel Footman, conducting a chemical experiment in a laboratory in 1924, was almost killed:

  [A]s the sulphate was dissolved in ether I had to evaporate the solution over a water bath. I was getting on quite well but rather slowly and I wanted to go to a special tennis practice with the men’s University Team, so to hurry things up I lit the Bunsen burner under the water bath… Whoosh!… the whole apparatus went up in flames and me with it. I shall never forget the strange sensation of being entirely on fire, my hair, my overall, a ring of fire.

  Rachel lost consciousness, and when she came round in hospital, confidently assumed she had died, ‘seeing all white ceiling and walls and hearing hymns being sung’. In fact a church service was going on in the ward, and the nurses had arranged white screens around her for privacy. She was in agony, and suffered hideous burns to her face, but with care and time, the scars wore off.14

  More mundane distractions involved difficult tutors. One ‘used to put newspaper down to save his carpets and in the middle of talking about the woollen industry he’d suddenly leap across the room to shift the newspaper because the sun had moved’. Another would reach for the phone, in the middle of an essay reading, and order ‘four plump herrings and 3 fishcakes’ for tea.15 There could be other interruptions too:

  During one tutorial… our tutor, Mlle. Hugon, excused herself because she said she had to change her dress. She had a ‘date’ she said with an African tribal chief. [We] were surprised and not a little amused that she had changed into another dress identical to the one she always wore. Then she went out and, in stately fashion, rode off on her bicycle!16

  Not everyone knew how to work at university level. Telling a fresher in 1910 to conduct a physics demonstration, without explain
ing some fundamental basics, was unkind: ‘Dolly had great difficulty… rushing around the lab apparently trying to move faster than gravity – and it nearly led to her giving up – but happily not quite.’17 Daphne Hanschell, who went straight to Somerville in 1929 from a small convent school, recalls being utterly nonplussed when her tutor issued her with an essay title (‘The Primitive Sense of Law’), expecting not to see Daphne again until it was written. What did it mean, and where should she start? Barbara Hutton felt similarly at sea ten years later: ‘I found my academic life rather disappointing. Only after most of my time was up did I discover how to search for original historical material, and reading other people’s views was frankly dull. I never dared say anything about this to my tutors, my fault not theirs.’18 Not her fault, nor Dolly’s or Daphne’s: part of a university tutor’s job is, and was then, to equip his or her students for original thought. Poor teaching was a significant factor for those bluestockings who found work difficult, frustrating, or boring.

  Perhaps the tutors themselves lacked instruction. They tended to be selected for intellectual prowess rather than communication skills, and are frequently described as shy, aloof, distant, even cold. For much of the period before the Second World War they were required to be unmarried women, or childless widows; they were poorly paid; at Oxford and Cambridge they were not even official members of the university until the 1920s at the earliest. Many swapped straight from student to tutor (like superior sort of pupil-teachers) and so never left academia at all. From their mid-fifties onwards they were either encouraged or obliged to make way for their successors. Little wonder, then, that some, especially in the ancient universities, felt socially ill-equipped, academically sidelined, and trapped.