Bluestockings

by Jane Robinson

  Their appearance could be disturbingly eccentric. Undergraduates report being confused by female teaching staff dressed precisely as men from the waist up (as was the fashion at the end of the nineteenth century), with short-cropped hair and a gruff voice to match. Some neglected their appearance altogether. The first Principal of St Hugh’s, Miss Moberley, lacked ‘any conception of either comfort or beauty. She was always dressed in a great many thick black clothes and always wore a black silk apron that seemed a vestigial appendage of episcopacy.’19 Miss Rogers, of the same college, was terrifying, according to former students. She was thickset and looked strangely menacing in her soiled clothes, bulky woollen stockings, and heavy boots. She wore the same outfit every day. She was also considered rather mean. When she invited students to tea in the 1920s, she was notoriously stingy with the food. It thus became a tradition that if you were asked to Miss Rogers’ rooms, you ate beforehand. ‘She became wise to this, so when it was time to cut the cake, of which there was always one, she would say “I’m not going to cut the cake, as I suppose you had your tea before you came!”’20

  One tutor conducted interviews with her students entirely in Latin. One murmured into the fireplace. One made and served tea, forgetting to include the tea leaves. One boiled marmalade on her fire during tutorials. One laughed uproariously at her students’ (very solemn) essays; another remained silent for the whole session. One cheerily warned everyone that ‘my mind is going, you know’ before the tutorial began, while another took students on her lap, ‘which, as I was rather tall, and she was rather bony, was embarrassing’.21

  Others were exciting and affectionate, of course, and remained loyal to their students all their lives. Certain names recur in reminiscences with great fondness, and it is clear that inspirational tutors changed lives. The colonial historian Margery Perham, ‘reputed to have shot a lion and published a novel’, was ‘young, energetic, full of vitality and enthusiasm for emergent Africa, none of which qualities impaired her scholarly integrity’.22 One of the most popular tutors was Miss Ady of St Hugh’s in Oxford. She was even approachable enough for student Molly McNeill to risk inviting her to tea one autumn afternoon in 1916 – although not without considerable trepidation:

  About 2.30 I started my preparations feeling all the time as if I’d never be ready. I got the fire lit first of all, then I changed my dress, I put on the red tartan and it looked lovely. I thought I should try to appear as decent as possible for Miss Ady. After that I started getting the food ready, buttered the scones and laid the table. Then I tidied up my room, put my suitcase under the bed, it usually stays out for convenience sake, dusted my chest of drawers and altogether got the room to look very nice. I was all ready, kettle boiling and everything, by about 25 minutes to 4, and Miss Ady arrived quite punctually at a quarter to. As soon as she came I infused the tea and in a few minutes we started. She thoroughly enjoyed her tea. She had one scone, one bit of seed cake, 2 penny cakes, and a piece of my birthday cake, which was excellent, and three cups of tea. It was most delightful to see that she appreciated it. Everything did look quite nice and appetising. We also got on magnificently in the way of conversation. I was rather dreading that… She really is a perfect angel, and the cleverness of her is wonderful.23

  Molly was pleased as Punch the next day when her essay for Miss Ady was declared ‘almost alright’.

  Intense friendships between female students at university were common, and we shall come across several instances, healthy and otherwise, later in this book. Similar friendships between those students and their tutors, male or female, were not encouraged. This did not stop young women ‘falling in love’ with soulful-looking lecturers like Mr Moulton at Cambridge, who taught maths during the early 1870s. Emily Gibson, one of the first Girtonians, remembered her friend Sarah and herself being thoroughly distracted by Mr Moulton’s ‘dangerous fascination’; she even goes so far as to attribute her early departure from Cambridge, in part, to him (although there is no suggestion anything actually ‘happened’).24

  Nor did discouragement prevent certain senior staff taking advantage, cynically or not, of star-struck and often vulnerable undergraduettes. Women’s diaries and reminiscences of the first seventy years of university education commonly talk of ‘pashes’, ‘smashes’, and crushes on male and female tutors, and several make coy mention of having married a member of the academic staff soon after leaving. I have never come across a first-hand account of the developing sexual relationship, while in statu pupillari, of an undergraduate and her tutor before 1939 – which should not imply it never happened; just that it was rarely articulated on paper. No one speaks about sexual harassment; perhaps it was unworthy of note in an era of chauvinism and cultivated naivety. Yet one women’s college Principal, when students went to her with worries or problems, used to take them to her bed, for ‘comfort’.25 And it is difficult to believe that there was not considerable stirring in the fusty loins of old-school academics once ‘the ladies’ arrived in their lecture halls. As far as I know, and possibly thanks to those ubiquitous chaperones, they kept continent. After all, if Philip Larkin is to be believed, sexual intercourse only began in 1963. But the inevitable frisson between certain relatively impressionable girls and their senior (temporary) guardians, of either sex, must have added something to the university experience of both.26

  Parents were certainly aware of the impact a traditionally virile college education might have on ingenuous daughters. Their concerns, and those of the academic authorities, meant that pioneer bluestockings were rarely taught biology, let alone medicine, and Classics courses strenuously avoided mentioning Oedipus Rex. English literature had its risky moments: a letter in the Liverpool University archives from a Reverend Procter, dated 1927, complains to the Vice-Chancellor (no less) that his daughter has been asked to study Byron’s Don Juan for her English course. He strongly objects, and asks whether she will be disadvantaged in exams if she skips it. The Vice-Chancellor courteously replies that while we are right to take exception to the lifestyles of Byron and Shelley, we should not censor their work. University teachers must be allowed to do their jobs in preparing students as conscientiously as possible for their finals. Personally, however, the Vice-Chancellor assures the reverend gentleman that he has ‘the greatest possible sympathy’ with his conviction.

  Like reading someone else’s diary, there is an illicit pleasure in eavesdropping on academic reports. These were transcribed by hand in huge ledgers, until the fuzzy violet-ribboned typewriter took over, and one or two university archivists were reluctant to let me see theirs. But provided I maintained anonymity, and did not stray beyond 1939, I was usually allowed access.

  They are fascinating: as eloquent about the sensibilities of teaching staff as they are about students. The Warden of Weetwood Hall, a women’s residence at Leeds, could be scathing. She noticed a clear split in the 1935 cohort of leavers between those with little money, heavy family responsibilities, and an eagerness to take part in the cultural and corporate life of the university, and those spoilt by too much cash and with too little imagination. The former group she encouraged academically, with extra tutoring; the latter behaved with ‘characteristic stupidity… [and] the tastes and sense of humour of the average preparatory school boy’. It is significant, she wrote, that ‘they left nothing behind them, material or otherwise, except two tattered schoolbooks’. A couple of years later, she commented on six ‘very able but psychologically peculiar’ students, and bewailed the modern tendency for undergraduates to be entirely absorbed by their private lives, to the detriment of their work. ‘Sheer mental laziness’ should never be tolerated.27

  The record books at King’s College London read more like a series of school reports. All the right phrases are there: ‘has ability but lacks application’; ‘weak’; ‘very much improved’; ‘good but must not overwork’; ‘should do well when she gets into the spirit of her work’; ‘able, but the breadth of her interests may sometimes be incompatible w
ith detailed work in all subjects’. Some comments invite questions. What are the stories behind these, for example? ‘Maths… failure probably due to fact that her father was dying during the exam’; ‘Work interrupted by home anxieties’; ‘Work much interfered with’; ‘Rather disturbed by examinations’; ‘Failed all subjects’.28

  At St Anne’s, formerly the Society of Home Students, remarks entered neatly into the Terminal Report Book for 1898 are a little more detailed. One tutor habitually damns with faint praise: ‘capable at times of work of good 2nd Class quality’; ‘exceedingly clever, but immature in mind’; ‘has worked steadily, but is much hampered by not knowing any grammar, French or English’ (and those were the subjects she was reading for her degree). Elsewhere we are advised that certain bluestockings ‘ought to have had a good deal more teaching’ before they came up. One is ‘a hard worker, [but has] not learnt how to work. Wastes time through failing to grasp the essential.’ Again, is that her fault? Another ‘lacks polish and she has a strong tendency to diffuseness’, while her peer is ‘rather puzzling. Has intelligence and a clear head but does not quite rise to her work.’ Finally, there is an overseas student who has clearly overwhelmed her director of studies. She has ‘abilities of a very high standard. Quite remarkable grasp of leading principles and even of niceties and subtleties which a foreigner could not be expected to attempt to understand.’ Clever, female, and a foreigner? She was obviously something special.

  Academic record books were not only a means of monitoring individuals’ progress; they were also used by the college Principal to help pad out the awful end-of-term interview she was obliged to hold with each student. You would be summoned to her room, where (according to her degree of eccentricity, gracefulness, or irritation) she might perch awkwardly and purse-lipped on a stiff-backed chair, slump rather grumpily in a chintzy settee, or loll in gleaming satin on a chaise-longue, like Eleanor Sidgwick used to at Newnham in the 1890s, looking terrifyingly elegant and artistic. You would be asked how you thought your work was progressing, then probably be told, in paraphrase or directly from the tutors’ reports, how very wrong you were. The book at St Hilda’s, full of scrupulously balanced observations, was obviously designed to be read from word for word. Substituting ‘you’ for ‘she’ makes it eerily personal: ‘You have not given me an impression of much power, but with more knowledge you ought to do very fairly’; ‘Occasionally you do a bit of work which surprises me, and I think surprises you. You underrate yourself habitually’; ‘You have a clear head and a vigorous style, but are rather afraid to let yourself “go”’; ‘Your work is strangely unequal, being at times quite promising. But you are rather too diffident and seem oppressed with the difficulty of arranging your ideas.’29

  The most trenchant of all reports appear in the Royal Holloway College students’ record books for the period 1907–22. These were patently not for undergraduate consumption, and today might be actionable. In fact precious few remarks concern themselves with academic ability at all. They attempt instead to encapsulate personalities in single phrases. ‘Abrupt manner. Noisy’; ‘Loud voice. Efficient’; ‘Rather breathless in manner’; ‘Quite nice, rather casual’; ‘Curious accent. High voice’; ‘Forward’; ‘Pretty manners’; ‘Rather antagonistic and obstinate’; ‘Peculiar’; ‘Rather difficult. A lady. Weak ankles’; ‘Excitable and unbalanced’; ‘Nice-looking’; ‘Tiring to listen to’; ‘Rather a cushion in character’; ‘Tight’.30 Thus Royal Holloway unfortunately (and unfairly) emerges in the early twentieth century as a slightly worrying institution, peopled by young women with a bizarre assortment of character flaws.

  This was by no means an uncommon perception of women’s colleges. With an echo of the misogynistic days when women first invaded academia, once they started achieving in finals at the same level as men, there were plenty of snipers at their backs. ‘Women!’ urged an article in the Birmingham University magazine,

  why try to be so learned? Because in gaining knowledge you lose all else, and become to all intents lifeless encyclopaedias. We have enough Professors to cram this little all into us. Do we want the gentler sex to join them? I appeal to students, and I hear their gentle voices crying ‘No! No! No!’31

  The author of a piece entitled ‘The Intellectual Inferiority of Women’, published in the Durham University Journal, concurred:

  Woman acts within her natural rights when she demands the opportunity at least of increased scholastic freedom; the mistake she makes is in imagining – as so many seem to do – that she can surpass or even equal the intellectual achievements of man. All history, all experience, goes to prove how great is the delusion.32

  Critics were silenced for a while by the First World War, when women students were welcomed everywhere. Lacking male undergraduates, universities needed the numbers, and the money they brought with them. But after 1918, and for the next year or two, there was a backlash. The academic establishment felt it owed soldier survivors an education, at the expense of the current cohort – infestation – of bluestockings. ‘They were glad enough to have us when they had no one else,’ noted a student tartly in 1919; now she and her peers were literally being denied entrance to lecture halls because there was no room for them. Sixteen thousand men were admitted to Oxford that year; the number of women was limited to well under 750.33 This pattern was repeated, to a greater or lesser extent, around the country.

  Sometimes opposition came from closer to home. One young woman called Jane overcame considerable difficulties to join a prestigious women’s college in the 1930s. She was an outstanding student, and embarked on her course with great confidence. During her second year she married, and was told by her husband that this disqualified her from being a student (it didn’t). She believed him, and left. Her hard-won place at university had meant so much to this young woman; she was devastated.34

  Despite outbreaks of jealousy and ill-will, it remains obvious that most bluestockings’ experiences of academia were positive, and that they met with more support than opposition once within the university precincts. They might be teased about their preternatural cleverness, but it was usually with more fondness than disdain. Jessie Emmerson, one of the first students to join St Hugh’s in Oxford, summed up this affectionate attitude perfectly, in her reminiscences of university life in the 1880s. She read natural sciences, but being a woman, was not allowed to study biology. The knowledge she might have picked up about the human body and its various systems might well have corrupted her morals, as well as her mind. So she concentrated on physics and chemistry:

  I was amused to find that my chaperon always deserted me at the door of the laboratory in which I was to work for the rest of the morning and – as it were – ‘threw me to the lions’. As I was the first woman to work in the… laboratories I felt that the responsibility for the future admission of women rested on my shoulders. Everything was done by my lecturers to make things easy for me.

  Because Jessie was small, and some of the lab apparatus roosted well above her head, her tutor provided her with a set of library steps ‘so that I could get up and down with ease and dignity’. She went back to visit the labs after leaving university, and in that tutor’s office found the steps with something chalked on them: ‘Sacred to the memory of Miss Emmerson. Never to be used again.’ That made her feel decidedly proud and happy.35

  When Constance Maynard arrived at Girton in 1872, having whimsically chosen a degree course in preference to a new pony, her intention was to read ‘Mental and Moral Sciences’, or philosophy. The prospect was pleasant: she looked forward to communion with keen minds and ancient arguments; to wisdom and enlightenment. Not only would she discover long-sought answers at university, but frame more searching questions. This filled her with an almost religious fervour for scholarship. What Constance had not grasped before arriving at Cambridge was that just as engaging as the subject of one’s studies, was studying itself. That moment of realization – an epiphany – came on a visit to a sympathetic tutor, who,
with the aid of rather thrilling props, conjured up in Constance a quality of curiosity and awe that lasted a lifetime. They pored over a human skull together, wondering at its perfect design; he showed her ‘a real cheek, ear, tongue and throat all together’ dreadfully preserved in alcohol, and then soothed her with an entrancing experiment involving ‘bubbles of gas (phosphoretted hydrogen, I believe) coming up through water and bursting into flame, leaving behind lovely even rings of white smoke, which whirled round at a great rate as they floated gently upwards and remained unbroken’.36 Constance was enthralled.

  Women, during the earliest decades of university education, were not usually encouraged to make discoveries. They were there to learn received wisdom, in a suitable manner, to an acceptable standard. When they left, it was to regurgitate their learning for the nourishment of their own, or other people’s, children. Constance’s intellectual curiosity, and the privileges she enjoyed from indulgent parents and progressive tutors, led her beyond mere expediency. She shared with later women students the sense that a university education was more than the sum of its parts. Gwendolen Freeman, at the same college fifty years later, had her own way of putting it. ‘Looking back now over the plains of life,’ she wrote some sixty years after leaving university, ‘I see the three Cambridge years as a walled garden separated from the rest – a garden full of voices, freedom and some intimations of immortality.’37

  Gwendolen’s garden, like Princess Ida’s, may well have been enclosed and isolated, but the scent of it lingered all her life.

  9. Spear Fishing and Other Pursuits

  Joan took an Egyptian fresher out in a punt. After a puzzled silence, the girl asked Joan what fish she was trying to spear with the pole.1