OPENING OXFORD TO WOMEN

Press, 21 October 1978, Page 10

OPENING OXFORD TO WOMEN

Reluctant Pioneer. By Georgina Battiscombe. Constable. 311 pp. Appendix and index. $18.75. (Reviewed by Meriel Farnsworth)

Elizabeth Wordsworth was the Principal of Lady Margaret Hall, the first Anglican Women’s hall at Oxford University. As the daughter of a bishop, the grand-daughter of a Master of Trinity, great-niece of a renowned poet, and a personality well-known and well-liked in Oxford, she was eminently suited to the post. Of formal education she had little — a universal deficiency among women of the day — but she was an omnivorous reader and from her brother John’s grammars she acquired a sound knowledge of Greek, Hebrew and Latin, studies encouraged by her scholarly father and put to use in the assitance she gave him in compiling his great commentary on the Bible. She was also fluent in French, German and Italian, a proficiency acquired on Continental travel. In addition, she had courage, determination, a great liking for and understanding of young people, and a gift for teaching.

Pioneer as she was, she neither supported nor opposed the movement for the emancipation of women. In sharp contrast to her Cambridge contempories she had no wish to alter the position of women in the world. Rather, she saw an educated woman

as a person who could play with more intelligence, and therefore more efficiency and pleasure, her accepted role in society. Her object was to give women the chance to share with men in the intellectual pursuits and pleasures which she had enjoyed in her own scholarly home. Vocational training as such she deeply mistrusted, possibly because her social and financial security precluded any necessity to earn her own living. Not surprisingly with her background, she believed passionately that the best form of education was one which had a religious basis. In 1879 the Hall opened with eight students. Unlike the Cambridge students at Girton, these girls were not encouraged to look on themselves as dedicated to a career. In fact, for its first years, the Hall had about it very much the same atmosphere as the Wordsworth home, religious, intellectual, upper middle-class and slightly old-fashioned. Students were expected to behave like ladies and to cultivate the social arts of a lady. Vera Brittain described them as “resembling daughters at home with a unique, original and much respected mother who knew everybody worth knowing.” As the Hall grew this friendly, informal approach had of necessity to give way to a more disciplined order, a necessity which Elizabeth Wordsworth greatly regretted. In 1886 she founded a second Hall

“for the reception of students of narrower means at lower fees and with a different scale of living and accommodation.’’ Undaunted by her lack of business acumen she went ahead with this new project, with funds inadquate but from her own inheritance. From the first St Hugh’s was a success.

After 30 years she retired in 1908 to make her home in Oxford. Honours were showered upon her in her retirement — an M.A. (the first given to a woman), in 1928 a Doctorate of Civil Law, honours which must have caused her wry amusement as her support for the admittance of women to full membership of the University had been, at best, lukewarm. Finally she was made a Dame of the Order of the British Empire. The author quotes much from her written works, both prose and poetry, and both are less than memorable. It was not her abilities that impressed her students and her friends, but her charm and the warmth of her personality, the most elusive of qualities. As one student wrote: “How can one catch a breeze and fix it on a piece of paper?” Another said that just to know her was in itself a liberal education. The second half of the book is a long appendix written by E. M. Jamison, one of her students. It was the beginning of a biography, but the writer died before the work was completed.