Bluestockings Page 2
Various institutions have kindly given me permission to quote from printed and manuscript material in their care. Extracts detailed in my notes and references are reproduced by courtesy of: Ashburne Hall, Manchester; Special Collections, University of Birmingham; by permission of Durham University Library; the Mistress and Fellows, Girton College, Cambridge; Hull University; King’s College London; by kind permission of the Principal and Fellows of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford; the University of Leeds; the University of Liverpool; the University Librarian and Director, the John Rylands University Library, the University of Manchester; Newnham College, Cambridge; Queen Mary, University of London Archives (including Westfield College material); Royal Holloway, University of London (including Bedford College material); St Anne’s College, Oxford; the Principal and Fellows of St Hilda’s College, Oxford; by kind permission of the Principal and Fellows of St Hugh’s College, Oxford; St Mary’s College, Durham; the Governing Body of Somerville College, Oxford; College Collections, UCL Library Services, Special Collections; and the Women’s Library, London Metropolitan University. I also acknowledge with thanks the support and efficiency of the curatorial staff at all these institutions, as well as at the universities of Bristol, Exeter, Leicester, Nottingham, Reading, Sheffield, and Southampton.
Extracts from Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth are published by permission of Victor Gollancz, an imprint of the Orion Publishing Group; I have quoted from Vera Brittain’s Chronicle of Youth by kind permission of Mark Bostridge and Timothy Brittain-Catlin, Literary Executors for the Estate of Vera Brittain 1970; extracts from Miss Weeton: Journal of a Governess, edited by Edward Hall (1936), are published by permission of Oxford University Press; the Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of Virginia Woolf granted permission to quote from A Room of One’s Own.
Finally, I should like to thank the following people for services above and beyond the call of scholarly duty: Pauline Adams; Adrian Allen; Elizabeth Boardman; Mark Bostridge; Elizabeth Boyd; Val Clark; Liz Cooke; Angela Evans; Liza Giffen; Eddie Glynn; Sheila Griffiths; Ele Hunter; Anne Keene; Kate Perry; Deborah Quare; and Anne Thomson. Alison and Rusty listened to two years’ commentary on the book’s progress with humour and forbearance. My sister Hannah Mortimer did sterling work transcribing records, which I much appreciate. My former agent Caroline Dawnay lent expertise and encouragement (both invaluable assets), and my editor Eleo Gordon has been – as any undergraduette worth her salt would put it – a brick. Richard and Edward tolerated my EFV with remarkable kindliness, while Bruce was – and continues – peerless.
While every effort has been made to contact copyright holders, the publishers would be pleased to hear from any not here acknowledged.
Introduction
In mixed company, always keep at least one foot on the ground.1
Alison Hingston was a student at Newnham College, Cambridge, from 1899 to 1902. There are three stout cardboard boxes in the college archives, containing her scrapbooks. It takes two hands to heave out the volume inside each box; as you do so, bits of apparent rubbish escape from uneven gaps between the wavy pages. The covers bulge under the strain of their contents. Most Victorian scrapbooks are dainty little albums with pasted drawings, poems, and paper decorations. Miss Hingston’s are monsters.
They were almost my first discoveries when I began researching this book. Newnham was high on the list of places to visit, being among the earliest women’s colleges in England. And even though Bluestockings covers every university extant in England before 1939, Cambridge – the first to host women students, and the last to give them a degree – seemed the obvious starting point.
I did not have particularly high hopes of Miss Hingston’s college souvenirs. Words, I thought, reveal far more than things. But even after a full two years’ research, happily exploring letters and diaries in scores of libraries, archives, and private collections, those scrapbooks still loom large.
Intensely personal (and slightly weird), Alison’s objets trouvés include a few pale wisps of moss from the college grounds; chips of bark from a tree by the hockey field; a poke of paper with some sweets still inside; a half-smoked cigarette (which, despite the impossibly early date, I have reason to believe was hers); two twigs with their evergreen leaves in shards; a small tooth of unknown provenance; the printed results of university exams; a cryptic note in a strange hand. Yet, eclectic as it is, this collection seems to me to articulate everything Bluestockings seeks to convey about the pioneering women within its pages: enthusiasm, adventure, self-discovery, and the importance of cherishing whatever is most precious.
Newnham College was less than thirty years old when Alison arrived at the close of the nineteenth century. By that time, some 15 per cent of undergraduates in England were women. The proportion had grown to about 22 per cent by 1939.2 Seventy years earlier, when the first women’s college was founded, the total of female university students in the country was a lonely five. Then, a female was politically classed with infants, idiots, and lunatics, as ‘naturally incapacitated… and therefore… so much under the influence of others that [she] cannot have a will of her own’.3 That is why there were such strict regulations governing her behaviour at university (and beyond), not only to protect her moral and physical welfare, but to defend good men, such as undergraduates and lecturers, from temptation and involuntary folly.
No more was asked of a virtuous Victorian daughter than domestic duty. In its first issue, on 3 March 1880, the popular Girl’s Own Paper urged its middle-class readership: ‘amiable ever, but weak-minded never, brave in your duty be, rather than clever’. Intellectually, a young lady was close to nonexistent. Her brain was considered small and dilute compared with a man’s, and her understanding generically shallow. Her constitution was not thought to have the physical, mental, or emotional resources to withstand reproduction and academic study. A fertile womb and a barren brain, or vice versa: the choice, pro bono, was clear.
Therefore, for the first few decades of their admission to university, women were treated with little more confidence than those infants and idiots. When Manchester allowed female undergraduates in the 1880s, it put them in a small room in the attic, sternly guarded by a stuffed gorilla and some moth-eaten lions and tigers from the university museum. Chaperones were required for social and academic occasions, everywhere, until the First World War. Lecturers could refuse to teach or even acknowledge women. For a long time no males – including fathers and brothers – were allowed in women’s rooms; after dispensation was granted to family members and (at a push) fiancés, it was still the rule that the bed should first be removed from the room, and the door propped open.
You might argue the situation was not much better by 1939, the end of the period covered by this book: Cambridge refused to award women degrees before 1948, and it was not until 1959 that the women’s ‘halls’ at Oxford became fully incorporated into the university. Less than a quarter of the country’s undergraduates were women, and when they graduated, they were still encouraged to choose between a profession and marriage.
To focus on these negatives, however, would be unfair. Nothing should distract us from the achievements of ordinary, extraordinary women like Alison Hingston, on whom this book is based. Quietly (or occasionally with some hullabaloo) they cleared the path that hundreds of thousands of women have since followed; most of us without a backward glance.
A word or two about terminology: an undergraduate is taken to be a student at any university, even though women were not allowed officially to graduate from Oxbridge until comparatively late, and were therefore not strictly undergraduates at all. I know Dorothy L. Sayers was not alone in abhorring the term ‘undergraduette’, finding it intolerably patronizing. But in the context of its era (principally the 1920s) it was also used with affection and even pride, both by students themselves, and by their observers. Bluestockings with a capital ‘B’ are those luminous intellectuals who graced the literary and artistic salons of fashion
able eighteenth-century society; stripped of the pejorative gloss the label has acquired since then, it is here reclaimed – with a small ‘b’ – for all the undergraduates who give this book its voice.4
1. Ingenious and Learned Ladies
A Learned Woman is thought to be a Comet, that bodes Mischief, when ever it appears. To offer to the World the Liberal Education of Women is to deface the Image of God in Man, it will make Women so high, and men so low, like Fire in the House-top, it will set the whole world in a Flame…1
Life had not been kind to Mrs Pearson. She grew up around the turn of the twentieth century, when the second generation of women students was enjoying a university education. She might have gone to college herself, but brains and ambition in those days were not enough. She lacked the necessary background and money. Now, in the early 1930s, she found herself impoverished, living in a tiny house in south London, with an unemployed husband in his seventies, their children, and no reliable income. Keeping the family together, fed, and sheltered during the Depression was a struggle to which Mrs Pearson, in her darker moments, felt unequal.
One person kept her going: a daughter, Beatrice, in whom she recognized her younger self. Beatrice – known to everyone as Trixie – was indomitably cheerful. She was also extraordinarily bright. Somehow, Mrs Pearson managed to keep Trixie at school beyond the minimum leaving age of fourteen (even though she could have been earning a wage and off her mother’s hands), and when the girl was encouraged to apply for a scholarship to university in 1932, the whole family was overjoyed. A teacher suggested St Hilda’s College, Oxford. It would have been far cheaper to send Trixie to one of the women’s colleges in London; then she could have lived at home, and walked to her lectures each day. But if she was good enough to try for Oxford, declared Mrs Pearson, then Oxford it must be.
Everyone rallied round. As soon as the incredible news came through that Trixie had been accepted by St Hilda’s, work parties sprang into action to create what her mother proudly called her Oxford trousseau. Convinced (wrongly) that all Trixie’s peers would have their family crests lavishly embroidered on silken underclothes, and engraved on silver knives and forks and napkin rings, an aunt doggedly stitched Trixie’s initials on her clothes and linen, as the next best thing. Fashion magazines were borrowed and scoured, material cadged and bartered for, with the mortifying result that Trixie attended her first ‘cocoa party’ at college clad not in homely winceyette, like everyone else, but in a gloriously sophisticated one-piece ‘lounging pyjama’ in glancing black satin, straight from the pages of Vogue.
One of the most difficult things for Trixie to get used to at St Hilda’s was the silence. On the banks of the River Cherwell, opposite Christchurch Meadows, it was surreally still at night. She had never before had a room of her own, privacy, carpets, so many books at her disposal, and all the food and heat she needed. There was butter at teatime, and jam. She felt guilty. They could afford only a scrape of putty-coloured margarine at home. Never mind, she told herself; her being at Oxford would mean butter for them all in the end.
While Trixie was away, the Pearson family slumped even deeper into poverty. The obvious economy was for Trixie to leave Oxford and find a job. But Mrs Pearson was adamant that her daughter should not even be told about their difficulties and, despite ill-health, went for an interview for a full-time job as a charwoman. She failed to get it: she could hardly bend.
Soon the financial situation became so desperate at home that Trixie had to know. She was distraught, and promptly lined up a post as a bank clerk at £2 per week. Her mother was furious: it was madness for Trixie to mortgage her university career and the whole family’s future for little more than £100 a year. As an Oxford graduate, teaching, she would earn more than twice that, and have a pension. She would be able to climb out of all this, insisted Mrs Pearson, and the family would climb out too, on her coat-tails.
So Trixie stayed at Oxford. The Pearsons went on to poor relief, and discreetly, with infinite sensitivity, the college invented grants and bursaries to help, some of which – Trixie discovered later – came straight from the pockets of her tutors.
Trixie adored university life, and was one of the most popular, shining girls of her college generation. Occasionally, members of her family would come to visit. They had to take turns, once enough money had been scrimped for someone’s train fare, and none of them seem to have resented her being there. Mrs Pearson hardly ever came, so that others could, but when Trixie graduated, she insisted her mother be present. The Dean of St Hilda’s spotted Mrs Pearson in the Sheldonian Theatre, where the ceremony took place, quietly making for the high balcony with the parents of other students. They were supposed to sit well away from the ranks of academic dignitaries below, but the Dean fished Mrs Pearson out, leading her down to the reserved VIP seats right at the front. ‘This ceremony means more to Mrs Pearson,’ explained the Dean, ‘than to anyone else here today. Of course she must have a good view.’ Trixie, waiting behind the scenes, knew nothing of all this until she emerged to receive her degree. Then came the proudest moment of her life:
As Bachelors we naturally came last, of interest only to ourselves and our families. When the Proctor called upon our Dean to read out her candidates’ names and present us, we had to go forward and stand in a group around her. In that position we were face to face with and only two or three yards from the Vice-Chancellor, the Proctors – and my mother.2
I wish those who fought so hard for the right of women to attend university and be awarded degrees could have known about Trixie Pearson. Everything about her story vindicates what they were trying to do. Despite her social background, her academic abilities were recognized and nurtured; she was encouraged to aim for the best, and supported financially, emotionally, and academically to do so; doors opened for her as she approached, and nothing was allowed to stand in the way of her undergraduate career, until she stepped confidently out into the working world as a professional woman. The family did climb out of poverty on her coat-tails, just as Mrs Pearson promised, and through her own teaching Trixie passed on the excitement of learning and the concept – very new to young women at the time – that nothing is impossible.
Trixie graduated in 1936, nearly sixty years after the first degree courses were opened to women at an English university. The image of the ‘bluestocking’ had been a familiar concept throughout those years. It still is, to a certain extent. I remember being thrilled when my English teacher called me a bluestocking the day I won my place at Oxford. Like Trixie, I was not expected to get in, since no girls from my school had been before, and the college to which I had blithely applied was renowned for its clever women. I naturally assumed blue stockings were part of their uniform and that on special academic occasions, with gown, cap, and a sober suit, I should wear them too. One of the first things I did on hearing the news was visit Mr Beckwith, the local draper, to buy a couple of pairs of navy tights (a daring take on tradition). Someone put me right before I embarrassed myself too much, but achieving bluestocking status remained a slightly exotic badge of intellectual honour in my imagination.
The very first bluestocking was not a woman at all, but the naturalist and writer Benjamin Stillingfleet (1702–71). He belonged to a group of fashionably learned friends who met together during the latter half of the eighteenth century in various London salons to cultivate the art of intellectual conversation. The novelty of Stillingfleet’s group was that most of its members were female. Elizabeth Montagu (1720–1800), its ‘Queen’, was a wealthy woman passionately interested in English literature; a patron and an author, she counted the celebrities of the day – writer Samuel Johnson, actor David Garrick, painter Joshua Reynolds – as fellow scholars as well as friends. At first they humoured her because of her income of £10,000 a year, one suspects; later, however, they appear genuinely to have admired her critical flair. Partly thanks to her, being an overtly intelligent woman acquired (fleetingly) the gloss of high culture and became fashionable.
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One evening in 1756, Stillingfleet presented himself at Elizabeth Montagu’s Mayfair house for one of the company’s regular meetings, bizarrely clad not in customary white silken hose, but in workaday knitted blue stockings. Woad-blue wool was cheap and common; Mrs Montagu and her friends thought it hilarious that Stillingfleet was eccentric enough not only to have countenanced possessing such stuff in the first place, but wearing it in public.
Stillingfleet’s solecism was gossiped about throughout literary London, and soon Mrs Montagu’s clique became known collectively as the ‘blue stocking philosophers’. Especially the women. Her house was dubbed ‘Blue Stocking Lodge’ or ‘the Colledge’ and considered an urbane sort of private university over which she and her scholarly lady friends presided as unofficial Doctors of Letters.
Dr Syntax woos a ‘Blue Stocking Beauty’ in one of Thomas Rowlandson’s cartoons illustrating a popular satirical poem, The Third Tour of Dr Syntax in Search of a Wife, by William Combe (1821).
Stillingfleet’s tendency to eccentricity was shared by other members of the group. The very idea of a female’s opinion actually mattering to the intelligentsia was unconventional, for a start. The historian Catherine Macaulay (1731–91) was one of the highest-profile members of the coterie (or ‘petticoterie’, as one wit put it); she was definitely strange, inviting Samuel Johnson’s footman to dine with her, and marrying a man nearly half her age. But she was famous, well connected, and indisputably clever; her idiosyncrasies spiced the image of the whole circle. At least she did marry: a reputation for ostensible moral virtue was still a sine qua non in English high society, and the true Bluestockings always held that dear. Polymath writer Elizabeth Carter (1717–1806) was another member of the group, with essayists Catherine Talbot and Hester Chapone; later the playwright Hannah More joined, novelist Fanny Burney, and – a little jealously on the periphery – poet and diarist Hester Thrale.3