Bluestockings

by Jane Robinson

  This meant practically as well as ideologically. Everywhere there was an annual ‘rag week’, a festival of fund-raising when ‘gown’ donned bizarre costumes and performed various stunts for the amusement of ‘town’, and collected money. Women’s colleges also offered opportunities for voluntary charity work during term and in the vacations. This might be fairly small-scale, such as inviting children from the slums to tea in the dining hall, or going carol singing; it might also involve serious commitment of time and energy. Inner-city ‘women’s settlements’ were sponsored by individual colleges, or national, university-based associations, to which students were seconded to work (on social welfare projects) in the holidays.21 During the Spanish Civil War, and the lead-up to the Second World War, undergraduates aided refugee camps around the country, and raised money to support Jewish students and their families. There is evidence throughout academia of a muscular social conscience among women, and the will to act on it. They acknowledged the flipside of privilege to be responsibility.

  One of the keenest delights of university life for the bluestocking was friendship. After a degree (or its equivalent), friends were the most precious legacy of this heady period in her life. Friends formed her college ‘family’, and her happiness depended on how satisfyingly relationships developed. As Elisabeth Bishop discovered – she who found herself ‘on the edge of an abyss’ at St Hilda’s – ‘mucking up’ socially could be profoundly upsetting. Those who had been to boarding school, had large families or a wide social circle at home, coped better with the vagaries of popularity and commitment than loners. There was no advice available on how to cope when things went wrong. In an atmosphere lacking the fresh air of self-reliance, close friendships, or ‘pashes’, could soon curdle and turn sour.

  Popular nineteenth-century literature throbs with examples of loyal, loving girls who demonstrate their sentimental affection for one another by stroking, kissing, and embracing. They might be even more intimate, without losing their innocent charm. When two boarding-school mistresses were charged with ‘improper and criminal conduct’ in 1819, for climbing in with their pupils at night, lying on top of them and ‘shaking the bed’, they were acquitted because the judge blithely declared that ‘according to the known habits of women in this country, there is no indecency in one woman going to bed with another.’22 Constance Maynard was actually advised by the college doctor in 1883 to bring one of her students at Westfield to bed with her, to calm the girl’s nerves:

  [Maynard] then had to lie down with her on the bed, which gave the girl the opportunity to grasp her tightly and to declare that they were now married. In ‘solemn tones’ she insisted ‘we are two no longer. I am part of you and you are part of me…’ The next day the girl was quickly taken away and returned to her family for care.23

  The emotional stakes were high, for those who were not equipped to make a distinction between ‘healthy’ (that is, platonic) friendship, and a homoerotic ‘pash’.

  Constance is an interesting example. She was always a highly religious woman, very loving too, and she considered it her duty to act on that love for the mutual spiritual development of herself and her closest companions. In the cultural (and linguistic) idiom of the day, she expressed her love for special colleagues and students in terms of a wife’s for her husband, often giving them male nicknames. She writes about the end of an affair with a tutor at Westfield most movingly:

  [‘Ralph’] was not very well, and I went up to see that she was rightly attended to. As I left she said with gentle hesitation ‘You never bite my fingers now, as you used to do.’ ‘Oh no, never,’ I replied lightly. ‘And you never snarl and growl like a jaguar when you can’t express yourself. I never heard anyone growl as well as you.’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘it’s useless. I’ve been cured of that.’ The sweet low voice went on, ‘And you never rock me in your arms and call me your baby.’ ‘No,’ I said in the same even tone, ‘I’ve been cured of that, too.’ ‘Oh!’ she said, with quite a new meaning, ‘oh, I see.’ Here was a spot too painful to be touched, and I said ‘Goodbye, dear,’ and left the room. I will not go into the desolation I felt when alone again. I was like a pot-bound root all curled in upon itself, like an iron-bound bud that has lost its spring, and now no rain and no sunshine can open it.24

  Was this a lesbian relationship, or just intimacy of the sort women like Constance were brought up to admire? Here was the dilemma of those trying to regulate bluestockings’ sexual behaviour. Colleges and halls were full of animated, like-minded young women, hemmed in with one another and sharing the same new experiences and sense of self-discovery. ‘Pashes’ were bound to develop. A student at Oxford in the 1880s learned that ‘sentimental devotion’ was all too apt to degenerate into emotional obsession: every girl about to go to university should guard against worshipping another, she warned, or becoming an object of worship herself. There was too much ‘loss of dignity and self-respect’ involved.25

  Parents, and those at university in loco parentis, were unwilling to spell out to their charges (if indeed they recognized it themselves) the moral danger of such intensity, in case they corrupted them. It is as though young women – even the intelligent, independent thinkers who got themselves to university – had only to be aware of perceived immorality to commit it themselves. Sexual gratification should not even cross their minds, subconsciously or otherwise, before marriage (and maybe not even then). But what would happen, wondered those responsible for the moral and academic welfare of women students, if they let such ‘pashes’ be? Might that prove injurious? Perhaps women needed a physical sexual outlet, as well as men? Marie Stopes, herself an undergraduate at University College, London, before lecturing at Manchester University, believed they did. But ‘unsuitable friendships’ were not the answer. ‘Solitary self-abuse’ was preferable to mutual masturbation, she advised, which was ‘very apt to lead to grosser and more abominable vices… against which a warning is not superfluous in these days when a cult is being made of homosexual practices’.26

  The ‘cult’ she refers to was really a heightened awareness, fed by a growing number of high-profile authors. A few examples might include the psychologist Havelock Ellis, whose Sexual Inversion – including references to lesbianism – was published in 1897; the popular novelist Clemence Dane (Winifred Ashton), who published the novel Regiment of Women in 1917 about a cruel lesbian schoolteacher; and, of course, D. H. Lawrence (The Rainbow, 1915). All of these have women physically and emotionally engaged in same-sex relationships. God forbid such Sapphic monsters should stalk the hallowed corridors of academia…

  The following extracts, even though they might read like sensational fiction, are taken from the school and university diaries of a maths student at Royal Holloway College.

  19th June 1906. Baby came and sat on my knee… but I will draw a veil over the rest of the evening…

  23rd June 1906. We tried to find a secluded spot, so after a bit we got into a sort of wood and lay down under a huge tree, with my umbrella over us and, I am ashamed to say, flirted terribly…

  20th February 1909. I met May who said all her family [group of friends] were going to Hockey Tea so I suggested we should have it together in her room. We were quite mad and the furniture kept giving awful cracks. Our snug tete-a-tete was suddenly rudely interrupted by an awful knock on the door and we heard Miss Thompson’s voice in the passage. May gave a huge cackle of laughter and said ‘Come in.’ I, from May’s account, went a vivid crimson and gabbled away as hard as I could to hide my confusion…

  12th June 1909. [I] went up to May at about 11, just before, I think it was. We talked till about 12, and then proceeded to sleep but at first kept waking up, finally got off to sleep at about 2 or so. Awfully shocking behaviour.27

  According to this diarist, girls often ‘nighted it’ with one another, and spent all day not working, but dreaming of what the dark would reveal. Tucking a friend into bed, or making sure she got up in time (or not) for breakfast, could be a lengthy pr
ocess, and if it became obvious that love was unrequited – or, worse, unnoticed – the pain and frustration were hard to bear.

  Sex loomed over friendships, according to Elisabeth Bishop, like ‘a dark shadow’. For a long time, the only accepted way to dispel that shadow, for heterosexuals and lesbians alike, was to get married to a healthy young man as soon as possible. How a bluestocking, corralled in her college, was to meet and get to know such a man, and what she was to do with her useless degree once married, were questions society preferred to ignore.

  11. Breeding White Elephants

  The female undergraduate: Eve in the Home of Lost Causes.1

  It may have been an odyssey, and the territory hostile, but led by some of history’s most determined and diplomatic pioneers, the quest for women’s higher education finally succeeded. Visionary retreats imagined like mirages by Mary Astell and Daniel Defoe resolved into adamant seats of learning. ‘Bonnets’ and ‘pretty dominae’ matured into rigorous scholars, and by 1939 every university in England (except one) awarded them qualifications on the same terms as men. ‘There is a wonderful exhilaration about getting a degree,’ wrote a female graduate of Manchester in 1926. ‘It is something more than the degree itself. It feels like coming into an inheritance of tradition.’2 Achieving a share in that tradition was a marvellous thing. But what did it mean? What was a university-educated woman for?

  Teaching was the original raison d’être, and remained the most acceptable career for a female graduate until her real vocation expressed itself in marriage. At a time when choice was limited, teaching was a way of life thousands of strong, imaginative women relished, and at which they excelled. Thousands more were as miserable as their pupils.

  The decision facing the majority of nineteenth-century bluestockings was not what they would be when they left university, but whether they would spend the period before marriage (which might never happen) teaching or at home. For those at the Leeds, Liverpool, and Manchester campuses of Victoria University, whose degree courses and further training were financed by King’s scholarships from the Board of Education, there was no alternative. The conditions of those scholarships stipulated at least three years in the classroom. Even when I went to university at the end of the 1970s to read English, the widespread assumption was that afterwards I would teach. Teaching offered one of the few opportunities, I was told, for an arts graduate to use her ‘book-learning’ and earn a respectable wage. There is a remote possibility I might have been good at teaching, but I resented the fact that it was still the default career for every woman undergraduate (unless a medic or lawyer or similar): her apologia for indulging in a university education. This assumption had a dual effect. It put eligible students off a valuable and gratifying profession, and encouraged those who avoided it to clutch at any alternative, with sometimes feckless enthusiasm.

  At least I could carry on working when I married: that was a luxury denied conventional students before 1939. Statistics suggest that had I been at university earlier still, marriage would probably have eluded me anyway. A survey of the ‘after-careers’ of Oxbridge alumnae published in 1895 reported that they were ‘more likely to be a teacher than a wife’. Of the 720 students who attended Newnham College between 1871 and 1893, 16 died, 37 were foreigners who returned to their original countries, 155 married, and 374 (52 per cent) went into teaching. Of the rest, 230 were living at home (of whom 108 were married), five did medical work, two were missionaries, one was a market gardener, one a book-binder, and the remaining handful worked for charities or did secretarial work. Of the 335 who got degree certificates from Girton during the same period, 123 (37 per cent) taught, only 45 married, two were missionaries, six were employed by the government, four did medical work, and six were dead. The rest, presumably, did nothing.

  Fewer Girton graduates married than Newnham ones (1:10 against 1:9); the subject least likely to produce a wife at both colleges was modern languages. The compiler of the report concluded that although its findings might be considered ‘puerile and foolish’, it did have its uses. The modern girl was free to decide for herself whether marriage should be considered ‘an achievement or a come down, but mothers will be prudent if they realise that… marriage is [n]either desired [n]or attained by the majority of very highly educated women’.3

  The implication was that anyone seriously ambitious to become a grandparent should not send their daughter to university. It is unclear where that leaves the mother who told her plain but earnestly intelligent girl that she was too ugly not to go to college, ‘to increase [her] chance of a prize in the matrimonial lottery’.4 If she did go, there was a vociferous argument that she should not be burdened further by a degree. That would surely threaten her tenuous femininity. Depend upon it, ladies, wrote a journalist in 1891, after the latest Cambridge revolt against admitting women to full membership of the university: no man in England wants a wife who would sooner concentrate on differential calculus than on him.5

  The venerable philologist Walter William Skeat agreed:

  If given the BA, they must next have the MA and that would carry with it voting and perhaps a place on the Electoral Roll… Even the BA would enable them to take 5 books out of the University Library… I am entirely opposed to the admission of women to ‘privileges’ of this character. And I honestly believe they are better off as they are.6

  Dean Burgon of Chichester, whose sermon declaring women eternally inferior to men had caused such a stir in 1884, put it even more apocalyptically:

  The admirable Ladies who preside over ‘Lady Margaret’ and ‘Somerville’ Halls, and the charming specimens of young womankind who have made those Halls their temporary home, – proved irresistible [to those Fellows who allowed them into Oxford]. The men succumbed. I remember once reading of something similar in an old Book. The Man was very sorry for it afterwards. So was the Woman.7

  Back to square one.

  Novelist Winifred Holtby remembered Burgon when she pictured the ‘modern’ undergraduette of the 1930s as ‘Eve in the Home of Lost Causes’: someone of whom so much was expected, and to whom so little was allowed.

  Somerville College responded to critics like Skeat and Burgon by issuing what would now be called a mission statement, declaring its objective to be ‘to afford young women, at a moderate expense, such facilities for their higher education as will enable them better to fulfil the duties of life, and, if need be, to earn an honourable and independent livelihood’, preferably preparing or inspiring younger women to follow them to university.8 Even in this fine and progressive declaration, duty comes first. It still did when I left the same college soon after its centenary year. My duty, I felt, was to teach; to use the education bestowed upon me in public service. I abdicated that duty, felt guilty, and so shared the unwelcome legacy of anyone who ever questioned the right of a woman to graduate from university.

  It is ironic that, by the turn of the twentieth century, the forebodings of Henry Maudsley and his medical colleagues, that university education would render women sterile (see Chapter 4), had to some extent come true. Scholarship might not physiologically prevent conception, but it had an effect on the birth rate in other ways. Career women chose not to marry, apparently preferring independence to domesticity. Not that marriage and other careers were always mutually exclusive. During the First World War and occasionally thereafter, married women taught in schools and universities, and general practitioners who were wives and mothers were not unusual (although married female hospital doctors were).

  Perhaps it depended on your husband. Fully dedicated tutors declared themselves married to their colleges, like Anna Paues of Newnham, who wore a wedding ring. It also depended on your employer’s attitude. When Elsie Phare requested leave for ‘a few days’ from the English Department at Birmingham in the 1930s (in order to give birth), she was promptly denied it, on the irrefutable grounds that no male employee would ever ask for time off to have a baby…9

  Gwyneth Bebb would appear to have got th
e balance right. She earned a first-class law degree at St Hugh’s in 1911, and was a thorough pioneer. She campaigned for the admission of women to the legal profession, bringing a landmark case – Bebb v. the Law Society – to court in 1913. The case sought to define her as a ‘person’ within the meaning of the Solicitors Act 1843, so that she could be admitted to the preliminary examinations of the Law Society. Gwyneth lost, the court bewilderingly holding that women were not to be deemed ‘persons’ in this case, and therefore that they were disqualified from training to become solicitors. She appealed, but the decision was upheld. However, partly as a result of Gwyneth’s case, the law was eventually changed. The Sex Disqualification Removal Act was passed in 1919 (which also led to Oxford granting degrees to women); the day afterwards, Gwyneth was admitted to Lincoln’s Inn to read for the Bar. She was married by now, and gave birth to a daughter while studying at the Inns of Court; she then went on to take a first-class degree in criminal law.

  She sounds like the model of a successful working mother. But even someone as feisty as Gwyneth could not renounce the cruellest and most womanly of fates: in 1921 she died in childbirth, aged only thirty-two.10

  How a fin-de-siècle cartoon imagines a Cambridge alumna will conquer the old world, armed with a degree, a pair of bloomers, and a golf club.

  For the entire period from 1869 to 1939, the question of whether a woman’s degree was a social asset was argued, and remained unresolved. When Emily Davies founded Girton’s mother-house in Hitchin, her aim was to offer students an intellectual refuge. Her college was an almost spiritual place of learning, removed from the distractions of mundane domesticity and meaningless accomplishment. ‘The accepted idea was that we had come… because of our love of study and not in order to qualify for earning a living.’11 Qualification was a distasteful concept for ladies – it smacked of commerce. No one in the early days of Girton or Newnham, Somerville or Lady Margaret Hall, imagined ladies would ever feel the sordid need to become professionals. Perhaps that is why Cambridge only offered its lady ‘guests’ a scrap of paper (rather grandly referred to as a certificate) recording their achievements in the Tripos, instead of ceremonially conferring the signed and sealed degree awarded to real undergraduates. When Oxford agreed to grant its female students degrees in 1920 (having not offered them anything before), the common rooms of Cambridge, yet again, went wild. ‘We won’t have women!’ brayed the undergraduates – and nor did they, until 1948.