Bluestockings Page 6

  Some of these women were vicariously academic: professors’ wives, sisters or daughters, perhaps in middle age, desperate, like Florence Nightingale, to find a place for the ‘passion, intellect, and moral activity’ so inconveniently lodged in their breast. Others were girls in their late teens, who had finished with school but not with scholarship. They might hope to be teachers themselves, like the students of Queen’s or Bedford; maybe, like George Eliot’s heroines, they felt a moral – almost physical – compulsion to use their minds. Many, quite simply, had nothing else to do.

  A cynical survey of the opportunities open to the educated woman in 1916, all of them useless, distasteful, or laughable.

  Constance Maynard and Mary Paley were in this latter category. Once Constance had done with her governesses and notional schooling, she found herself incarcerated by home life, shut up like an eagle in a cage, unable to summon the energy or courage to break free. She felt external events were passing her by. ‘Out in the world, artisans received the franchise and the first Education Act foreshadowed changes even greater than those it enforced, and trade-unionism came into the open, and Gladstone succeeded Disraeli.’20 Meanwhile, Constance festered. By 1872, aged twenty-three, she had had enough.

  Mary Paley, who knew what to do in a thunderstorm at night, felt the same sense of ennui vegetating at home while her fiancé was posted to India for three years. Somewhat bolder than Constance, she announced to her family, rather than requested, that she intended to ‘go in’ for the new examination available to women in England, the Cambridge ‘Higher Local’. It would, she said, be something harmless to occupy her mind.

  At this point, it might be useful to draw a deep breath and try to explain the system of public exams at the time. For that we have to return to one of the Langham Place Ladies, Emily Davies (1830–1921). Influenced by the feminist philosophy of Barbara Bodichon and the dazzling effrontery of Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, who (unsuccessfully) demanded admission to London University as a medical student in 1862, Miss Davies and her sympathizers set out on a personal crusade. It is said that she first articulated it while sitting with Garrett Anderson by the fireside one evening in 1860. They were chatting about hopes and ambitions. ‘Well, Elizabeth,’ declared Emily at the end of the evening, ‘it is clear what has to be done. I must devote myself to securing higher education while you open the medical profession for women. After these things are done, we must see about getting the vote.’21 Come 1918, Emily was indeed one of the first women to vote in England, at the age of eighty-eight – but that is another story.

  Emily remembered being wildly jealous of her brother when he went to Cambridge. Jealousy fermented into anger, and she determined to offer the sisters of the next generation of undergraduates all the educational opportunities denied to her. Having failed in her petition to London to make the matriculation or entrance examination available to women in the early 1860s, she turned her attention to Cambridge. Logically, she reckoned that if girls took the same exams at school as boys did, then it would be harder to refuse their progress to the next stage of education. So in 1863, with the support of Miss Buss and other pioneering headmistresses (but not the more cautious Miss Beale), Emily managed to persuade the authorities that girls should at least be allowed to attempt the Cambridge ‘Junior Locals’, the precursor of today’s GCSEs, which had been available to boys of sixteen or so since 1858. The girls were required to sit them in seclusion, engage qualified people to mark them, and do without the results being published; it was also made clear that this was an experiment, likely to fail because girls would not be up to the task. Indeed, Emily was warned, the effort of taking them might well prove injurious to female health.

  In fact, good schools welcomed the introduction of a benchmark qualification for girls, and the experiment was a success. In 1865, the Locals were permanently opened to girls. ‘The idea almost takes one’s breath away,’ wrote one horrified critic, convinced that the Empire’s mothers-to-be were being mentally and probably physically addled by spurious intellectual competition. Most people concerned with the general progress of education in England, however, were in favour. The corresponding Local exams administered by Oxford were opened two years later.

  The next stage in Emily Davies’s crusade was to institute more advanced exams – ultimately ‘A’ levels – which had not existed for boys before but, because of the demand for a plenary test at the end of a girl’s career in education, soon became commonplace in schools for both sexes. The Cambridge ‘Higher Locals’ came into being in 1869 (and Oxford’s in 1875). Constance Maynard took Cambridge Highers, as entrance exams to Girton.

  She had to travel to London during the hot summer of 1872 to sit the exams. There were several papers, and after overcoming an initial conviction of ‘bewildering incompetence’, Constance relaxed. She was thrilled by the complete silence of the examination hall (but for the scratching of pens), the urgency of the occasion, the intense collective concentration of her fellow candidates. And when the morning exams were over, she loved the novelty of ‘turning out alone into the streets of London, choosing a shop and ordering coffee for luncheon’.

  The series of papers went on. The New Testament was quite obvious, the Euclid would have been perfect had I had more time, but my distinctly slow hand-writing was against me, and the dreaded Arithmetic let me do fully nine out of twelve questions. The Drawing was nothing, the Greek so hard I heartily wished I had taken German, the Grammar (English) I did badly as I thought, but the Essay was charming… Counting all together it was absurd to think I might have failed, but I did, and returned home late on the 21st June, sometimes rejoicing in the new experience, and sometimes almost bent double with fear that my last chance had gone…

  On 27th came the splendid word ‘Passed’.22

  Constance was bound not for Girton village, where the college now stands, but for Hitchin, an inoffensive market town in the heart of middle England. In 1869, Emily Davies’s quest had led to her renting a building there, Benslow House, for herself and five other women.23 They were orphan Anna Lloyd, aged thirty, whose sisters were so outraged at her selfishness in abandoning them that they forced her to leave college after a year; Louisa Lumsden, twenty-nine, later Dame Louisa, who took Classics and became a lecturer at Girton herself; Emily Gibson, a shipbuilder’s daughter who had been working as a pupil-teacher and was subsidized through college by her brother; Sarah Woodhead, a mathematician, who at eighteen was the youngest student in residence; and Rachel Cook, another Classicist, whose father was Professor of History at St Andrew’s University in Scotland. With the support of visiting professors from Cambridge, less than an hour away by train, the five would live together, learn together, and become the first women to study a degree course at any English university.

  Emily Davies had campaigned long and hard for this. She depended on the headmistresses of girls’ schools: if they did not enter their most able pupils for the Junior Locals and Highers, the cause was lost. And even though her college had no official connection with the University of Cambridge, she relied on the authorities’ goodwill and forbearance. High-profile members of the Langham Place Ladies helped too, by publicizing the venture and arguing its advantages in print. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, not surprisingly, did all she could to further her old friend Emily’s enterprise, and Barbara Bodichon was a stalwart champion. Funds were raised, prejudices whittled away (just enough), and students recruited so that by October 1873, when Benslow House was forsaken for Girton College proper, there were fifteen women on the roll.

  Constance Maynard was among them, and felt, for the first time, that she had found her spiritual home. ‘That’s what you’ve been waiting for!’ she told herself. At last.

  3. Invading Academia

  Gently, gently

  Evidently We are safe so far,

  After scaling

  Fence-paling

  Here, at last, we are!1

  Meanwhile, a couple of miles down the road from Girton at 74 Re
gent Street, Cambridge, Mary Paley and four other women were settling in to a very similar community to Constance Maynard’s. This little ‘garden of flowers’, as one of the kinder critics put it, blossomed into Newnham College, and was ‘planted’ in 1871 by Professor of Philosophy Henry Sidgwick (1838–1900). He was a gentle soul with a stammer and an impish sense of humour, and his dedication to the cause of university access for women was unstinting.

  Sidgwick supported Emily Davies at Girton, but disagreed with aspects of her approach. With his wife, Eleanor, and a firebrand from the North of England Council for Promoting the Higher Education of Women, the Liverpudlian teacher Anne Jemima Clough (1820–92), Sidgwick planned ‘a place of academic excellence’ like Girton, to provide an edifying home-from-home for clever women attending Cambridge lectures.

  Girtonians, once they were comfortably ensconced in their college, were expected to pass the dreaded ‘Little-Go’, a preliminary qualification usually taken during the first year of a degree course including compulsory elements – whatever one’s subject – of Latin, Greek, and divinity. For the majority of girls, lacking the standard classical education trotted out in boys’ schools, it was a tiresome hurdle and delayed engagement with the Tripos (honours degree) course they had chosen. But it was what undergraduates at Cambridge had always done; therefore, insisted Emily Davies, her girls must do it too. There must be no question of concession.

  The Sidgwicks and Miss Clough were more circumspect at Newnham. They refused to prescribe the Little-Go, since it offered no intellectual advantages. The newly available Cambridge Higher was stringent enough, in their view, to test a student’s abilities. Newnham girls were to be allowed to work for the Tripos from the beginning. There was nothing to stop them; the college (actually a small rented house at this stage) was not yet affiliated to the university, nor subject to its regulations. It relied like Girton on the goodwill – or reluctant chivalry – of visiting lecturers and accommodating examiners.

  To Miss Davies the fight for university access was all about equality, and Girton was a public statement of her demands. For the Sidgwicks and Miss Clough, at Newnham, it was the individual’s intellectual development that mattered, and appropriately, they chose a kinder, more secluded environment for their students.

  In 1873, Girton moved to its startling new buildings, designed by the municipal architect Alfred Waterhouse to rear out of the Cambridgeshire cabbage fields with uncompromising trenchancy, like a dowager duchess at the WI. The grounds were, and are, lovely, but even now they hardly soften the maroon Gothic bulk of the college.

  That same year, the more discreet Newnham relocated, too. Regent Street was too noisy, and the house’s inhabitants, whose rooms abutted the road, were being peered at. Miss Clough chose Merton Hall, an old and picturesque house in Northampton Street, principally because of its gardens. Mature trees screened her students from impertinent passers-by, and though the bedrooms were uncomfortable, with several girls having to share, and water slithered down the dining-room walls when it rained, the privacy and quiet were welcome. Professor Sidgwick paid the first year’s rent himself, and bought extra furniture.

  Two years later, the college moved again, this time to Newnham Hall, the nucleus of Sir Basil Champney’s purpose-built accommodation in the gracious, domestic style reminiscent of a Queen Anne country house.2 Indeed, for all the new women’s colleges the suggestion of country-house ambience was quite deliberate. It was supposed to lend an air of well-ordered conviviality and social propriety to comfort the students and confound those who thought you might as well let cretins or criminals invade academia, as women.

  In the early days, not all of those who came up to college stayed the full three years. Options included living in while attending one or two series of lectures, and then leaving; working for a ‘pass’ or ‘ordinary’ degree (that is, a lower-calibre course), or buckling down to full honours – including, at Girton, ‘Little-Go’. It has been a feature of women students’ lives across the span of this book, however, that at any time the call might come from home to abandon the life of an intellectual sybarite and return to reality. As Anna Lloyd from Girton knew (whose sisters’ disapproval grew too strident to ignore), for women domestic duty was too often pitted against scholarship, and reputation against self-fulfilment. Welsh girl Dilys Lloyd Davies was another reluctant drop-out: she had gone up to study natural sciences at Newnham after a brief stint as pupil-teacher at her old school – Miss Buss’s North London Collegiate – in 1877.

  Dilys wrote letters home every Sunday, like everyone else, and hers shimmer with enthusiasm. She drew a careful plan of her room for her family. It had three chairs, a chest of drawers, a washstand, a curtained-off corner for hanging dresses, and a dressing table under the window next to her bed ‘with a snowy quilt’; she used her tin trunk for a bedside cabinet. Most of the college furniture was donated by well-wishers, or found by the Sidgwicks in antique shops around Cambridge. The wallpaper and curtains were riotously floral (mostly passionflowers), and clashed with the cheerful green and red carpet. At night, Dilys was kept awake by nightingales.

  The other students were fascinating. One was a thin girl whom Dilys was shocked to realize wore no petticoats.

  She is given just a little to manly or rather masculine movements of the lower limbs: sitting on tables now and then and spreading her feet out a little but I dare say she is nice… One or two are rather given that way.

  She found the ‘ladylike ones’ a great comfort. They did not gossip or use slang, and though they could be rather earnest and drab, at least they were safely conventional. The young men she saw at lectures looked equally fascinating; especially one who asked if he could walk along beside her. ‘That is against the rules, I find, but I didn’t know.’ He asked her and a chaperone to come on the river with him, but Miss Clough said it was out of the question, ‘so that’, Dilys wrote regretfully, ‘is the end of that’.3

  Chaperones were an unavoidable feature of university life for women right through to the 1920s, and even, in some archaic cases, beyond.4 They were married ladies or widows engaged as guardians. Guardians against moral, perhaps physical, violation when students were out and about among undergraduates and university staff; and against moral, perhaps physical, turpitude if students were tempted to interact in any way with said risky gentlemen. In other words, they were paid to safeguard young women from themselves as much as others. Their presence was also a comfort to parents at home, worrying about their unprotected daughters at large in a man’s world. Chaperones were issued with cheap tickets to lectures where, having corralled their charges into a corner of the hall, they sat and noisily knitted. If a woman student wished to go to a concert (only with her college Principal’s permission, of course), to tea with family friends, to conduct an experiment in a laboratory, for a little stroll along the river, anywhere indeed, without a chaperone she could not do it.

  Naturally enough, these duennas were resented as being staid, strict, interfering, and inconvenient. No doubt many were all of these things, but it could be a thankless task, and those who volunteered were doing the cause of higher education for women a considerable service. Eventually, women undergraduates were trusted enough to manage life by themselves, but it took a good half-century for that to happen.

  No chaperones were required for life in college. There the staff and senior students took their place. As a ‘fresher’, or first-year, Dilys Lloyd Davies was forbidden to go to a college dance at Girton (an all-female affair), but she wrote home breathlessly describing those lovely creatures who were allowed, accompanied by Miss Clough:

  Miss Bettany wore a very pale blue cashmere trimmed with silk, a fan, gold bracelet, snowdrops and heath[er] in her head and dress… Miss Gill, who is about 5 feet nothing wore a white lama [fine woollen fabric] with snowdrops in a chain round the square body and on the elbow sleeves and fan – and in her hair. She looked a regular little doll. I wished I were a man to dance with her… Miss Prideaux, a long
and narrer [sic] lady wore a dark green velvet dress; Miss Harrison white silk and gold beads on neck, wrists and head. She is very graceful. Miss Richmond wore pink silk with white crocuses. Miss Clough wore grey slate silk, so pretty.5

  No wonder Professor Sidgwick was worried that his college would not be taken seriously: the girls, he said, looked far too lovely to be clever.

  Dilys stayed only a year at Newnham. During her first summer term, she was summoned by Miss Buss, who needed a new member of staff at the North London Collegiate and thought Dilys would do. The young Welsh girl was reluctantly forced to accept the post. It is ironic that someone who did so much to promote the university careers of such crowds of young women should be responsible for denying an individual student the same. But Miss Buss was not renowned for her empathy.

  In 1881, the University of Cambridge formally opened its examinations to women, a move welcomed by Girton and Newnham with slightly exasperated gratitude. (The next step would be the granting of a degree to those candidates who passed them.) This may have been a local triumph, but by now Cambridge had relinquished its place at the vanguard of higher education for women, never to regain it. The university itself had never been proactive: it just suffered pioneers like Miss Davies and Miss Clough to fuss about in its shade for a while. London University had a tradition of dissent, however, and in 1878 radically announced that, following the passing of the Enabling Act two years previously, all scholarships, prizes, and degrees (except medicine) would henceforth be open to men and women equally. Soon a dedicated hall of residence was established for those women undergraduates attending University College; others went to Bedford College, now an official part of the university establishment; Constance Maynard set up Westfield College in Hampstead in 1882; Royal Holloway was opened on the outskirts of London in 1886, and was later presided over by Miss Tuke, who wore silver slippers and, naturally enough, azure blue silk stockings. Then there was King’s College for Women in Kensington, with the following also opening their doors in due course to women as well as men: Imperial College (formerly the Royal College of Science), the London School of Economics and Queen Mary College in the East End.