Girton, trail-blazer for women, admitted men century later

Press, 27 September 1988, Page 13

Girton, trail-blazer for women, admitted men century later

LOANNE METCALFE,

a Shirley Boys’ High School

chemistry teacher, writes about Girton College at Cambridge, where she recently studied on a School Teacher Fellowship.

"But of all the Cambridge heroes There’s none that can compare With Woodhead, Cook and Lumsden The Girton Pioneers.” When Girton College for Women was founded at Cambridge in 1869 it aroused a great deal of interest. Much of it was unfavourable. “Shocking, unChristian,” even "infidel” were some of the descriptions used. At that time, the old tradition “A woman’s place is in the home” was very strong. Women were regarded as hopelessly inferior to men, not only in physical strength but also in intellectual power. The college’s establishment did not meet widespread approval; that it succeeded at all was due to the dedicated organisation, diplomacy and energy of Emily Davies, the founder. Miss Davies, who never married, was the daughter of an Anglican minister. Her own education was typical of that given at the time to girls of educated fathers — she learned Latin with her brothers and wrote an essay for her father each week, which he then corrected with her. She later worked in her father’s parish for several years and came to realise that the employment of women who needed to work was made very difficult by their lack of education. Between 1860 and 1868, she published papers on the employment and education of women. At the same time, she united a band of prominent London and Cambridge men and women to raise money to build a college for women. The purpose was to secure higher education for women which allowed them exactly the same opportunities as those given to men. Among the first five pupils were Miss Lumsden and Miss Woodhead of the song. Miss Cook joined them later in the term. The college opened in a house in Hitchin, a town some miles from Cambridge. It was not until four years later that the new' building at Girton was ready. Even then, the site chosen was two miles from the centre of Cambridge, where all the older men’s colleges were situated. It is said that the site was decided so that women students would have privacy and remoteness so they would not be distracted from their studies. Others feel that authorities of the men’s colleges we;e even more fearful of distractions. From the start, Miss Davies determined that everything was

to be done as it was in a men’s college, down to the smallest detail. In true Cambridge fashion, the students sat at one table in the small dining room, while the mistress and lecturers who came down once or twice a week from Cambridge sat at the High Table alongside. The young women students were very hard-working. They had to prepare for othe Cambridge examinations in the set time allowed — three years — while making up for their very poor educational background. Special examinations were offered to the women, but Miss Davies would have none of them. She didn’t want separate standards for women; to her, different meant lower.

So in 1873, the Misses Woodhead, Cook and Lumsden were carefully chaperoned into Cambridge and took their Tripos examinations in a special room in a hotel. When the news that they had passed arrived, they were so excited they climbed on to the roof and rang the fire bell.

Their trail-blazing achievement is marked every year at the College Feast, when all six verses of the song, which has its refrain at the beginning of this article, are sung to the tune of a march, “The British Grenadiers.” Although the three women had passed the university examinations, it was a long time before women were admitted to full membership in the university. It was only in 1921, after the motion had been defeated several times, that a regulation was passed giving women titular degrees. From 1926, women could be appointed to university lectureships, but it was not until 1948 that they were admitted to full university membership and allowed to take part in its administration. The Queen at that time (now Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother) accepted an honorary degree to mark the occasion. It was the first time women were allowed to wear academic dress

and actually graduate with their degrees. Cambridge, the first of the 'British universities to have a residential college for women, was the very last to fully admit them. Girton itself has come a long way from the small house of 1869. In 1873, the new red brick building had rooms for 21 students. Miss Davies decided that each student should have a bedroom and a sitting room. She felt that parents would not allow their daughters to attend unless the accommodation was adequate. All the rooms opened to one side of long corridors, and the same plan was kept as each wing was added. The building now consists of four courtyards surrounded by three-storey wings. There is room for about 500 students. Just 110 years after its foundation, Girton opened its doors to its first men undergraduates. The college has now an almost equal balance of the sexes, students

and- teachers alike. In a subtle way, however, it reveals its past — in amending the statutes to admit men to the college, it was agreed that any reference to women should refer also to men.

Practically all of the Cambridge and Oxford colleges are now mixed. The last of the Cambridge colleges to change, Magdalene, will admit its first female students in October this year. Girton has one of the most beautiful sites of any of the colleges. The buildings lie in 53 acres of mixed woodland and pasture, and the private paths and secluded gardens are very beautiful, especially in the spring. The facilities include a swimming pool, squash courts, lawn and hard-surface tennis courts, and even a croquet lawn. Students can eat in the very large dining hall where the gowned Fellows of the college dine at the High Table, or they can use kitchens off every corridor to cook for themselves. v Early students used to be taken to lectures by carriage. Now the bike traffic is heavy, and Girtonians are very fit. As the first college for women, Girton provided a focus for both the friends and enemies of women’s education. The “Girton Girl” was the title of a threevolume work in 1885. “Dusty Answer,” by Rosamond Lehmann, describes in some detail the heroine’s life at Girton where the author, still living, spent some years herself. Even Virginia Woolf was inspired after a visit to Girton to write “A Room of One’s Own,” a powerful defence of the feminist cause. Girtonians still blaze trails. Two of the six honorary degrees given at Cambridge this year went to Old Girtonians: Baroness Platt, former Chairman of the Equal Opportunities Commission, and Dame Rosemary Murray, a former Cambridge chemistry lecturer who was a Fellow of Girton and who later became the first female vice-chancellor of Cambridge. When I told one of the retired fellows here of my plan to visit Singapore on my way back to New Zealand, I was advised to “drop in” on Mrs Lee Kuan Yew, another old Girtonian. What would Emily Davies make of Girton today? She might not recognise her college in the bustle, the single rooms and the bikes, but she would have to admit that the admission of men was evidence that her greatest ambition has been realised “to provide women with exactly the same educational opportunities as those given to men.”