Bluestockings

by Jane Robinson

  Staff and student suicides, and details of those who left before they should, were naturally never publicized. Accusations of hysteria and moral flimsiness had been levelled at bluestockings from the beginning. There was no point fuelling the fire. Internal records were kept, however, to explain or extenuate disaster: ‘She has a difficult temper, poor thing’; ‘She is hysterical, not very clever, and one of her brothers is mortally ill’; ‘Hopelessly bad sight and tendency to melancholia’; ‘Miss Harrison has been ill and now her brain seems really to refuse to do anything’; ‘Miss Muller has been told by her doctor, that it is absolutely necessary, she should not work next term’; ‘This student’s sister died suddenly aged 20. The student has not intermitted her work or indulged herself and is angry’; ‘Leave of absence granted on account of ill health, sleeplessness, and an affected heart.’ There is as much about their health as their academic progress on some students’ end of term reports; what anyone did to make things better, other than send for a doctor, prescribe rest (or exercise), or send them home, is unclear.

  Often, students preferred not to confess to feeling ill. The rules stated that if they were too poorly to get up to breakfast in the morning and sign the register, the maid or a friend told the bursar, and the bursar called the doctor. But doctors were expensive, and unless it was an emergency, such as a new case of flu, mumps, chickenpox, or smallpox during one of the epidemics that visited halls and colleges fairly regularly, it was wiser to keep quiet. The most frequent indisposition was ‘the curse’, but few appear to have been seriously handicapped by their period (despite what those medical Jeremiahs had prophesied – see Chapter 4); even fewer wrote about it. Occasionally someone discussed a friend’s suffering – ‘Letty Chitty has been in bed today, and I went over and read to her out of Kim for a bit. Apparently she gets very knocked up every month’5 – but I have yet to come across a pre-1939 student referring to her own menstrual cycle with anything but the most fleeting exasperation.6

  Disease, when it was present, tended to spread rapidly in close college communities. Whenever outbreaks developed, as notoriously with influenza in 1917, quarantine conditions were immediately imposed, sending students into a kind of germ-ridden purdah. The oppressiveness and sense of apprehension engendered by this were almost as bad as the physical illness. Eye problems were common, attributed to long hours’ study in poor light, and cases of neuralgia, typhoid, pneumonia, bovine tuberculosis, jaundice, even ‘sleepy sickness’, or encephalitis lethargica, all crop up in reminiscences. Katie Dixon of Newnham came down with jaundice during her first term, and because her family, according to Katie, was annoyingly ‘homeopathic’, she was condemned to an exclusive diet of the best natural remedy in the business: celery. ‘Celery, celery at every meal. I remember I was so famished I sneaked down at night to the housekeeper’s room… and asked for a basin of bread and milk. With that I survived.’7

  A student at the University of London during the early 1920s succumbed to encephalitis during her third year, and her obvious decline deeply affected her peers. They remembered her struggling to keep awake during work, collapsing at lectures, begging that no one should tell her tutors she was ill. Finally she was admitted to a neurological ward before returning to college for one last attempt at continuing her Classics course. She was not strong enough to cope; her mother arrived to take her home and, a short time later, she died.8

  This was rather dramatic; generally, students’ letters home were punctuated by nothing more alarming than nose-bleeds, trapped wind (‘grunting away with flatulence all day’), constipation (‘I have taken quantities of the cascara pills, with very little result as yet’), headaches (‘frightful… after the College Dinner… wines, claret and champagne’), and generally ‘feeling seedy’ due to insomnia or – as one girl put it – ‘down-in-the-dumpness’.

  Poor health or death in the family beckoned students home as insistently as their own illnesses. It was as though daughters were only seconded to university, remotely ‘on call’ to return and cope with family crises when required. From the 1860s to the 1930s, there was a constant (though diminishing) rate of attrition as girls disappeared to do their domestic duty. When fathers died, they were summoned to go out to work. When mothers died they were needed to keep house. When sisters or brothers died, they comforted the parents. Having left university prematurely, they rarely returned.

  Changes in financial circumstances also eliminated students; having a bluestocking in the family was too often considered an unnecessary luxury. Whenever economies were called for, through family illness, redundancy, incapacity, or business failure, a daughter’s further education was an obvious target. Not all mothers were as far-sighted as Trixie Pearson’s. As we saw in Chapter 1, she fought to keep her daughter at Oxford, though her family was well-nigh penniless, for the long-term benefit of a graduate salary.

  Religion and politics cast shadows over university careers that extend to this day. One of my correspondents spoke with heartbreaking immediacy of being forced to leave college seventy years ago by her Jewish father, on her conversion to Christianity. She asked not to be named: the loss of her father’s love, and of her university career, is too painful, still, to expose. Another, a German national, was deported at the outbreak of the Second World War. She could not bring herself to tell me how she felt, only that ‘very sad and difficult years followed’.9

  College authorities – or individual tutors – did what they could to help. The much-vaunted ‘family atmosphere’ of women’s university residences came into its own on these occasions. Parents were summoned for interviews, to try to dissuade them from reclaiming their daughters, and students were offered loans and bursaries to tide them over financial storms. Rachel Footman had experience of this, when her father killed himself during her first term, in 1923:

  I still feel cold all over when I think about it… It was the most crushing blow. He rang me up on Friday and said could he come up to Oxford the next day to see me. I said gaily ‘Oh, no, not tomorrow, that is the college dance. Come later, Daddy.’ I feel I can never forgive myself because he shot himself on Monday morning – was he coming to say Good-bye? Or could I have persuaded him not to do it? I shall never know.10

  Rachel’s father left no money to support his family, and it seemed certain she would have to leave. But her college came up with a scholarship, allowing her to continue her university career with the equivalent of about £15 a week for expenses. It was hard, but Rachel managed. Helpfully, there was never any question that she should leave on domestic grounds.

  At Manchester, students themselves donated money to cover the fees of one of their number, and if an undergraduette had trouble paying bills, there was no shame in her doing odd jobs for others, to earn a little money. Favourites were hair-washing, stocking-darning, and errand-running. People appreciated the privilege of being at university, and were glad to help one another if they could. Wasting the opportunity, so hard won, was shameful. It meant letting down all those who had supported you in the past – especially proud parents.

  A second chance occasionally offered itself to ‘drop-outs’: they returned to university as mature students and tried to take up the threads of academic life where they had left off. Reprises like this tended not to happen in cases of expulsion, or ‘sending down’. Being sent down was the ultimate penalty, the ultimate shame. Once a university had issued a ‘request to withdraw’, because your residence was ‘no longer desirable’, you were cast out of Eden (the apple half eaten) and forgotten. Failure to pass exams was a neat, objective means of exit; altogether messier was dismissal due to assumed breaches of discipline or morality.

  The Victorian press may have rattled on about bluestockings, labelling them fierce, desiccated harridans, or silly long-lashed lovelies; to the academic establishment at the time, the corporate body of female university students was imagined rather differently, as a spreading, flaccid figure in need of structure and support. The minute regulations to which that est
ablishment subjected her were designed to act like stays. They laced her tight, kept her standing straight, and prevented unsightly slippages. Uncompromising discipline was generally accepted by the students themselves (with individual exceptions) until the First World War. Thereafter, intelligent and increasingly independent young women began to question such stricture, to break the rules, and agitate for freedom.

  In a petition to the university establishment in 1924, ‘the chief defects of the present regulations’ were listed by Oxford’s women students. The authorities demeaningly treated responsible young women like impressionable schoolgirls; they adhered to the outdated morality of the 1870s ‘when several of the Principals of the women’s colleges were of the age of their present students’; there were too many spurious restrictions; the current atmosphere of oppression created a culture of defiance and contempt, and encouraged an unhealthy, furtive attitude to sex and relationships; finally, this disciplinarian regime was condemning the university’s young women to all the evils of co-education, and none of its advantages.11

  In the early days, a zero-tolerance policy was rigorously maintained towards anything that could conceivably be construed as lax behaviour. At Durham, it was noted in 1908 that

  a Senior Woman had been sent down for speaking to her brother on Palace Green, another student had been gated for the rest of term because she rang the doorbell just after, and not before, the last stroke of six had sounded from the Cathedral clock, despite the pleading of one of the clergy, with whose family she had been taking tea, that the drawing-room clock was slow.12

  Scandal ripped through a university science department in 1895 when a reeling professor reported he had just ‘heard a young man and a young woman engaged in conversation in a room darkened for the purpose of studying optics’.13 Manchester students appear to have been particularly spirited: in 1910, two young ladies were excluded for having occupied with two gentlemen undergraduates a room in the students’ union ‘not used by the Music Society during a Social’; when asked to leave they refused, and stayed there ‘with the light out for a considerable time’, behaving in a blatantly ‘unseemly manner’. A few years later, another Mancunian girl was expelled for unspecified ‘misbehaviour’ in a charabanc on the way home from a sports match against Liverpool university.14 Incidentally, the punishment meted out to the males involved in these outrages was almost without exception more lenient than that inflicted on the females. Boys will be boys.

  A draconian approach is hardly surprising, given the anxiety of those responsible for establishing university education for women about how their protégées would behave, perform, and be accepted. What is shocking is that undergraduettes were still being treated like recalcitrant children into the 1920s and 1930s. The Shawcross Affair at St Hilda’s in 1935 is a case in point.

  There had been a slightly shaky relationship between St Hilda’s students and their superiors for a while. A bust of Miss Beale, the college’s esteemed foundress, used to preside over the dining room; at the beginning of the 1920s, some skittish students decided it was too ugly to be borne, and commissioned boys from Magdalen College School, across the road, to sneak in and abduct it. The joke backfired when no one noticed it was gone, so the boys brought Miss Beale back. The morning after she was reinstated, the students discovered someone else had given her a gaudy overhaul in red, white, and blue paint. Miss Beale was immediately ordered to be scrubbed clean. Soon afterwards, as the final act of an anonymous and sinister comedy, the bust was smuggled down to the River Cherwell, poked beneath the surface with hockey sticks, and drowned.

  Such mutinous behaviour boded ill, and for the next few years various japes, such as booby-trapping dons’ doors, or hiding people’s gowns before chapel, erupted and subsided like dramatic preludes to Dorothy L. Sayers’ Gaudy Night. The apotheosis of this grumbling rebellion was the Shaw-cross Affair. One evening in May 1935, the Principal of St Hilda’s was (according to which report you read) locked either in her room, out of her room, or in the lavatory. Furious at the indignity, she demanded to know who was responsible. She also cancelled the May Dance, to which the whole college had been looking forward all year. When an article about the episode appeared with suspicious promptitude in Isis, the university student magazine, the Principal was even more incensed. She blamed the editor, a sophisticated St Hilda’s student called Edith Shawcross, for the leak. Miss Shawcross, along with her friend Lady Katherine Cairns, offered to take the blame for both the prank and the leak (without acknowledging responsibility) so that the dance could go ahead. Both were asked to leave the college. But then one of the national newspapers got hold of the story – ‘Earl’s Daughter Sent Down’ – and within a day or two St Hilda’s, its choleric staff, and glamorous, naughty students were being talked about not only in British papers, but in America, India, Australia: all over the world.15 The dance, by the way, remained cancelled.

  Despite the general heavy-handedness, the spirits of most English undergraduettes remained robust. There were still plenty of ‘noises off’ behind the scenes. In different locations around the country, girls screamed down college staircases on tea trays, slept illicitly on the roof, consumed secret bottles of sherry, or canoed down streams in the dark. Life as a bluestocking was rarely bland.

  All reminiscences of living in a women’s college or hall of residence, whatever the date, are punctuated by minor mishaps and inconveniences. Snow blew down the chimney and settled on the bedroom floor; dyspeptic plumbing kept you awake all night; fires smoked, coating the walls with a bloom of soot and calling forth chilblains and cold sores. Sometimes burglars or unspecified ‘madmen’ broke in, or exciting accidents occurred. Sarah Mason and some Girton friends were nearly killed in 1880 when their carriage drove on to the kerb in Cambridge, the horse keeled over, and the girls were pitched into the path of oncoming traffic. Women fell off their bicycles with tedious regularity, and sustained impressive injuries from hockey sticks or skate blades: such little disasters are remembered fondly.

  Food generally looms large in letters and diaries. Although they were rarely too awful (in peacetime, anyway), it has always been fashionable to complain about college meals. In the face of such harsh criticism, those who planned and cooked students’ fare must have despaired. A ‘Bursar’s Song’ from the Somerville archives suggests it is not the quality of the food that spoils its enjoyment, but the illogical conviction on everyone’s part that somebody else’s college cuisine must be so much tastier:

  I’ve tried and I’ve tried but you’re not satisfied,

  I can’t sympathise with your attitude.

  You disdain kedgeree, you want cake for your tea,

  You want grapefruit for breakfast each morning.

  Caviare for your hall, but it won’t do at all,

  For the whole kitchen staff would give warning.

  I don’t like to boast but there’s plenty of toast

  And it’s only your greed that reduces it.

  In my College the food is remarkably good,

  And ’tis envy alone that traduces it.16

  The worst food, and most difficult conditions, were experienced during the First World War. None but the most selfish complained, when they realized what their male contemporaries had to deal with on the front lines. But however stoical you were, there was no denying the food really could be dreadful – and less and less plentiful as the war dragged on. Unfeasibly yellow bread and margarine were increasingly substituted for ‘real’ food, and a single sardine each was welcomed as enthusiastically as a banquet. Qualified people to cook meals were in short supply, as more women disappeared into munitions factories. ‘I once found the cook’s blouse button in my rice pudding,’ lamented a wartime student, ‘and then the safety pin that had replaced it.’17 Another described how

  It became so difficult that wages had to be increased to get enough staff to keep things running. When food became very scarce, and very horrid, the students’ ration books would be used to make things more ple
asant for the kitchen staff. We were very near a starvation diet. There seemed to be an abundance of artichokes [and rabbit, carrots, and macaroni] which I detest, and I also have memories of very hard pink pears, stewed for hours but still hard as pebbles.18

  Fuel was scarce during the war; a good idea was to pool resources (two lumps of coal each per day), work together with friends by a single fire, and in winter, to wear your coat and fingerless gloves indoors. When academic work was done, there were always socks to be knitted for the soldiers and plenty of other war work. Lists on JCR notice-boards across the country asked for volunteers for the university Ambulance Corps, Nursing Corps, canteens, hospital laundries, digging land, breeding rabbits, wheeling wounded soldiers around the streets, reading to them, and – in the vacations – flax-pulling in the fields.

  While most women students were pleased to stay at university and do their bit, some found the enormity of the war too much to bear – especially students in the ivory towers of Oxford and Cambridge. They could not justify ‘standing and waiting’ in academia, so far removed, or aloof, from the action. Vera Brittain remembered arriving for the summer term of her first year – in 1915 – the day after Rupert Brooke was killed. Her college at Oxford had been commandeered as a military hospital, and the students evacuated to another college; the city was empty of undergraduates, full instead of cadets and wounded soldiers, and news was filtering through of the second battle of Ypres. Vera’s brother and lover were both away fighting. Her university career, in these circumstances, seemed obscenely irrelevant, and she left.19

  Those who stayed knew they were ‘living in a changing world’, according to a Cambridge student in 1917: ‘The youngest-looking of the Newnham students reading my subject was a war widow.’20 She and her friends bitterly resented paying for the mistakes of the previous generation, and vowed to do all they could, as educated and enlightened citizens, to make things better for the next.