Bluestockings

by Jane Robinson

  Come grant me the B., come grant me the A.;

  Come make me your equal without more delay;

  Then let each learned maid who loved Pindar or pi,

  Let her hasten to Girton that standeth on high.16

  Women’s suffrage societies featured prominently in university life before 1918. From fighting for academic equality it was only a short step to agitating for political enfranchisement. Membership was divided between suffragists, who promoted votes for women and tried to win support through debate and ideological persuasion, and suffragettes, attacking the political status quo through physical protest and violence. Bluestocking suffragists affiliated themselves to national societies, held meetings, wrote letters, sewed banners, and joined marches; the militant suffragettes courted publicity by shocking the public into taking notice. Both these sisterhoods attracted ridicule, within their universities as well as in the world outside, and from women as well as men. The brilliant scholar Gertrude Bell, for instance, was Honorary Secretary of the British Women’s Anti-Suffrage League, believing the majority of women too dangerously naive to be allowed a political voice. There seemed to be confusion about the cause and effect of supporting ‘the vote’: did those harridans who demanded it do so because they were ugly, or was it being a suffragette that turned them sour? A student writing in Leeds University magazine in 1907 claimed to know the answer:

  There was a girl in the days that were earlier,

  Not very handsome, and so became surlier;

  Ne’er had a lover, ne’er went to a tryst,

  Thus she became the first suffragist…17

  Margaret Ker, a student at Liverpool, was a passionate suffragette. She set fire to a letterbox near James Street Station in 1912, using phosphorus which did little damage to the mail, but badly burned her hand. Margaret was arrested, charged with arson, and sentenced to three months’ imprisonment in Walton Gaol. One would have expected the university authorities to be appalled by her behaviour, and glad to be rid of her. A dossier of correspondence in the university archive suggests otherwise. The Vice-Chancellor, Sir Alfred Dale, was undeniably shocked, and felt the university could not avoid suspending Margaret; after she had served her sentence, however, he wanted her back. He wrote to her mother (herself a militant suffragette): ‘I cannot tell you what pain the whole affair has given me; for the fact that your girl is willing to suffer does not reconcile me to her suffering.’ If Margaret’s education were sacrificed to ‘the Cause’, he continued, he would find it hard to forgive. In an appeal to the Chairman of the Prison Commission at the Home Office, he pleaded Margaret’s case, and to be allowed to visit her. She was only a girl of nineteen, he wrote, and easily led. If he, as Vice-Chancellor, were allowed to talk to her, he could perhaps persuade her to put this peccadillo behind her, and return to serious study and right-minded politics. Otherwise, he worried, ‘enthusiasm without judgement, and conviction without knowledge, may carry her far into folly’. To Margaret herself he sent words of comfort, assuring her she was in his thoughts – ‘indeed, on my heart’.18

  Was Dale being overbearingly patronizing? Or did he, like Gertrude Bell, recognize that what women needed in order to achieve the vote and use it wisely was education? Margaret Ker did go back to Liverpool, and graduated successfully two years later.

  Nineteen-eighteen was a momentous year for several reasons. Girton remembers it as the date the gentlemen arrived: when the first dance to which Girtonians could invite male partners was held. A few ‘advanced’ girls, in honour of the occasion, ventured so far as to apply a little make-up. That same year, permission to smoke in their own rooms was granted to lady students: these were heady times.

  At Girton and elsewhere, there was a strict code of etiquette involved in mixed parties. A male undergraduate describes the drill in 1923:

  One arrived at 7 (thereby having to do without dinner in one’s own College…). The Principal sat on the dais throughout and each female undergraduate was expected to bring her partner up to be introduced to the Principal at some stage in the evening. Sitting out between dances was in the Hall or passages, not in undergraduates’ rooms. At 10.55 an electric bell rang menacingly and after the next dance the Principal rose and said meaningfully ‘Good night, gentlemen’. One’s partner was allowed to accompany one to the front door, but not beyond.19

  It was all very formal, even in the late 1930s. The ladies wore ball-gowns and the gentlemen, evening dress. Prospective partners’ names were neatly entered on to wipe-clean dance cards, and there was, of course, no alcohol. If any bluestocking’s room should be needed for sitting-out purposes, the bed was first removed, as a prophylactic.

  Despite these restraints, dances were keenly anticipated by the students as highlights of university life. Whole afternoons would be sacrificed to clearing out dining halls and common rooms, pooling people’s armchairs and arranging them downstairs; cushions were scattered on the stairs to provide extra ‘sitting-out’ berths, and festive coloured paper fixed to the light shades. Students donated their vases for fresh flowers, and ‘as for our lovely selves’, remembered Jessie Greaves of St Hilda’s, ‘of course, we looked charming’.20

  Private dances for college or hall residents might be held as often as once a week (with dancing club meetings in between); open ones were generally termly. Inevitably, plenty of university romances grew from those termly balls. Despite the advantageous proportion of men to women at most universities (Leicester being a notable exception), it was never easy for a female undergraduate to meet and get to know a male undergraduate, so strictly sequestered were the women, and so lacking in experience. Their tutors, certainly in the early days, were single women themselves, and some colleges cultivated a conventual air that did nothing to boost social confidence. A student at Oxford in the 1890s found the atmosphere in college intensely oppressive. When she was invited to accompany a married lady friend to a musical ‘At Home’ one afternoon in another (men’s) college, her Principal forbade her to go. Men’s colleges were out of bounds unless you were escorted by an official chaperone, or your own parents. ‘It is a bore. Don’t you know the feeling when one wants to have a talk to a man and not everlastingly women – well, I have hardly spoken to a man this term, or been out socially at all.’21

  This young woman was too early for mixed dances. The lack of men in the university lives of the first bluestockings did not, of course, preclude romance. But there was something delicious about meeting a very clever man, dancing with him, and falling in love. Winifred Carter was asked to a May Ball in Cambridge in the mid-1920s by someone she had only just met. He asked her to marry him that very night. She was somewhat surprised, but said yes, whereupon he imaginatively suggested she take off her dress, so that it shouldn’t get too creased when he gave her a celebratory embrace. She refused: ‘because of the narrow shoulder straps I had sewn my undies into my dress and if I had taken it off I would have been left in a very brief pair of briefs. So I didn’t.’22

  It is not just a matter of coyness or reserve: there really does appear to be very little sexual activity reported between male and female students at universities in England before the Second World War. Occasionally someone will mention hearing of an abortion, or even a baby being born to undergraduates; certain loose characters will be discussed at cocoa parties, and the odd renegade will be sent down, or expelled, from college for having stayed out all night (while her male partner will only be cautioned or fined):

  [There’s] a girl up here who shall be nameless but who was ‘only a virgin for a fortnight’. She was indiscreet enough to tell someone. But this someone had indulged in these kind of adventures herself, and under the stimulus of 3 pints of beer, revealed everything!… I feel awfully shocked, but I suppose there must be some such people in every university. What idiots they must be.23

  Men were undoubtedly useful, but not necessarily for sex. One student shrewdly remarked that the way she and her female contemporaries exploited their male undergraduate friend
s differed very little from prostitution, ‘except that we give less than the people who walk the streets’.24

  The lack of reliable contraception – and information – together with uncompromising expectations of unimpeachable morality from home, society, and the college authorities, meant that sex was very much a minority exercise for bluestockings, and rarely casual. One of them, for example, prosaically mentions her very first ‘osculation’ in her diary; it’s the day she and her young man become engaged. Another wonders just where you need to be kissed to get pregnant. These women were institutionally naive.

  Perhaps the romantic stakes were higher in the days when the brush of a hand betrayed a smitten heart, or a lingering look meant true love. Sometimes a bluestocking would be distracted for days by a man who asked to borrow a pencil in the library, or who sat beside her at a concert and smiled. The novelist Barbara Pym seems to have spent most of her university career in the 1930s in a febrile state of unrequited love, and several of my correspondents speak of their work being ruined by an emotional preoccupation with men, or one man in particular. The chasm between life at a girls’ school, and at a mixed university (single-sex accommodation notwithstanding), could be fearsome, and hard to bridge.

  Elisabeth Bishop of St Hilda’s was so frustrated by unresponsive men that she almost gave up on them altogether. They were not worth the trouble. She spent the whole of one Saturday in May 1938 getting ready for the college dance, only to find her partner could hardly arrange one foot in front of the other. He marched her stolidly up and down the dance floor all evening, alternately treading on her frock and kicking her. With a ghastly grin stretched across her face, she kept assuring him she was enjoying herself terribly. In reality, she felt furious, and disillusioned.25

  Weekly dances within college were frequently themed. Fancy-dress parties elicited some bemusing outfits, as on this occasion in 1888: ‘Miss Saunders looked awfully handsome as Coriolanus… Miss Tabor was a capital Heathen Chinee, Miss Perkins a brown-paper parcel, and Miss Purdie a cocoa-party.’26 A book-themed party at Girton in the 1920s required each person to come with an illustrated clue to her identity. One sardonic character came carrying a self-portrait: she was Life’s Handicap. Hard Times was a girl with a notice about the college coal allowance pinned to her breast. Someone had pictures of a Roman soldier, Mussolini, and Stanley Baldwin: Hymns Ancient and Modern; while ‘Doris came with a hopelessly muddled thing, a Russian spiritualist drawing or something like that, for You Never Can Tell.’27

  Cocoa parties themselves, held in students’ rooms after work was finished for the evening, were a social institution. The kitchens supplied milk, and guests brought contributions of cake and biscuits sent from home; everyone got into their dressing gowns (except for Trixie Pearson, of course, who wore her black satin one-piece, as we saw in Chapter 1) and, in the time-honoured tradition of undergraduates, talked ‘till the wee small hours’. Variations on the universal theme included sardine parties at Liverpool, with coffee boiled in a frying pan, and ‘hate’ parties at St Hilda’s, where rebellious young ladies first placed a loud gramophone on the floor of someone’s room, then crouched next to it under their eider-downs, and screamed until their throats burned.

  Any outings to out-of-college parties, or to the theatre or concerts, required written permission, and a promise to be in by the stated curfew time. Transgression meant at least a heavy fine, and possibly suspension. There were ways round the rules. One hall of residence had a secret system involving apples. Before a group of friends went out, one of them would make sure the dining-room window was left ajar, and a row of apples – as many as there were girls in the party – placed innocently on the window sill. As each member of the group came home after hours, she would climb in at the window and take an apple. When the last person returned, she collected the remaining apple and shut the window behind her. It was a risky strategy, since it bypassed the ‘signing-out’ book altogether, and the penalty for being seen out of college without signing was severe. Being seen having neither signed, got permission, nor come home on time, meant catastrophe.

  Another college had a system whereby friends would sign each other back in by proxy, and then the late-comers would climb over a discreetly located wall with the help (for a consideration) of ‘a lady of the night’ whose beat was in the street outside. Students in the hall of residence at Liverpool were more pragmatic: they were fortunate enough to have a somnolent porter. They arrived home at the last minute, woke him up to sign them in, and then simply waited till he had gone back to sleep before creeping out again, at liberty.

  In some senses, female undergraduates enjoyed more freedom than their male counterparts. Not being allowed to take degrees meant not having to wear academic gowns when out and about, so young ladies could walk around Oxford and Cambridge in the evenings (before 1920 and 1948 respectively) unchallenged by proctors and ‘bulldogs’, the university police. Not being a full member of the university also meant avoiding the rules affecting students’ ownership of cars. If an undergraduette was lucky enough to afford one, she was allowed to drive it from her first year, as long as it sported the regulatory green light; men had to wait until they were twenty-two, or graduates.

  In fact life could be full of unexpected joys for the willing and enthusiastic bluestocking, no matter where she was at university, or when. Leta Jones, a student at Liverpool in the early 1930s, remembers the delicious occasional extravagance of a poached egg and cheese at Lime Street Station, tuppence-worth of chips from a shop near her hostel, or – an extra-special treat – some ‘flamboyant ice cream’ from Coopers, helped down by a penny bread-roll.28 Sarah Mason mentions the excitement of a visit to Girton, around 1880, of four Frenchmen with two dancing bears; another Cambridge girl used to love to watch her dons skating soberly up and down the Cam during icy winters.

  Sleeping outside in the summer was a frequent adventure:

  It was great fun… stealing out [to the quad] in the dark with an armful of bedclothes and a mattress, and seeing other sleeping forms strewn about on the grass and stones. Miss Robinson and Miss Lord (our blind student and her companion) were having people to coffee, and it was jolly listening half-asleep to their talk and staring up at the stars which looked such funny twinkling dots in the sky… There was hardly any wind, just a breath of it cold against one’s face, and the bedclothes were deliciously thick and warm. Waking up in the morning was rather fun too, with the air grey and raw, and the sun trying to warm it. I woke K… she was fast asleep with dewdrops shining in her hair.29

  The great thing, almost everyone agreed, was not to fritter away your time at university doing ordinary things. This was an extraordinary place, full of extraordinary people: ‘No one wastes a moment – I don’t mean that they work all day – but they live…’30

  10. Shadows

  The change from schoolgirl to university woman is a very marked one, and for many people it is too abrupt.1

  It is clear that most alumnae remember their college careers with fondness, but not all of them. Almost apologetically, some will admit to having been miserable at university. For them it proved a profitless exercise at best, and at worst a period of deep unhappiness.

  Personality played its part. Several women were crippled by shyness. Without the confidence to socialize, they felt isolated and out of place. Others were too cynical, too quick to find fault with themselves and the system. The short but vertiginous path from school to university was strewn with critical decisions. No wonder some people got the balance wrong: too much work, too little; too many friends, too few. Brooding on mistakes, especially in the internalized atmosphere of a women’s college or hall of residence, could be dangerous.

  Elisabeth Bishop was a rather melodramatic student at St Hilda’s in the 1930s. During her first term, she wrote ecstatically in her diary that now was the happiest she had ever, ever been. But a series of complicated relationships (with women as well as men), family problems, and pressure of work soon combi
ned to send her to the ‘edge of an abyss’. ‘Obviously fate does not intend me for happiness,’ she grieved. ‘No home – no friends – and I could wager my bottom dollar – no lover – no husband – no children.’ She could not sleep: her compound discontent convinced her that life was ‘poisoned at the very root’. Whenever she achieved a minor triumph – a good essay, a spontaneous smile from someone, a moment of self-belief – she could not help looking beyond it to the misery ‘all banking up ready to descend on me… Is it worthwhile going on?’2

  Bravely, Elisabeth persevered, but the university drop-out rate was significant, especially during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Most early leavers could only vaguely analyse what had gone wrong, pleading that university life ‘didn’t agree’ with them, that they found their peers ‘dreadfully depressing’, or that work simply ‘spoiled the head’ and turned them hysterical. Others suffered secretly, unwilling to admit failure. Their college records too often close with a bleak verdict: committed suicide.

  A designated ‘moral tutor’ was supposed to offer comfort and constructive advice to those distressed in any way. Miss Wordsworth of Lady Margaret Hall memorably recommended in 1892 ‘something meaty beside your bed’ – cold stock soup or a beef sandwich – to combat those sleepless hours spent worrying.3 It was difficult for undergraduates to confide in the academic staff. Only a tiny proportion of tutors were parents themselves, and to their students they could seem aloof and impenetrably cerebral.

  If a troubled girl should manage to unburden herself to someone in authority, who would comfort her comforter? On 10 October 1910, Elsie Bowerman contacted home from college to postpone a visit from her mother. One of her tutors had been found dead in her bed that morning. ‘It may be heart-failure,’ wrote Elsie, ‘but they fear it is due to drugs. (Don’t say anything about it to people outside.)’4