High Minds

by Simon Heffer

  Davies despaired at what Sidgwick and Clough proposed, considering the diluted examination as ‘devised to suit struggling governesses’.119 She wanted her students to follow the same courses, attend the same lectures, and take the same degrees as men. This refusal to compromise was logically sound but strategically problematical: it cost Davies supporters and funds. Her vision of a women’s college was achieved not in the first instance at Cambridge, but in a rented villa in Hitchin in Hertfordshire – something Bodichon deplored because she saw the money spent on rent as a waste but which, being halfway between London and Cambridge, Davies considered to be a prime location, and well away from the distractions of male undergraduates.

  Davies took out newspaper advertisements to promote the scheme and ask for money. The shock to the unthinking man was profound: ‘Our age has been so prolific of absurdities, that we cannot well be expected to feel any very great surprise at the incubation of one foolish project more,’ steamed The Imperial Review.120 It went on to condemn ‘this preposterous proposal of a University career for the potential wives of Englishmen’, which was ‘calculated to unfit women for the performance of the very duties to which . . . women only are intended and adapted.’ Davies and her supporters were, inevitably, hardened to their task by such bigotry. Occasionally, there was a sense of the women being carried away. In the autumn of 1868, describing her vision of the college as an integral part of Cambridge University, Davies proclaimed that ‘it will aim at no higher position than, say, that of Trinity College.’121 This attracted the notice of The Times, which noted that ‘such a degree of humility will not be considered excessive.’122

  The Education Department of the Privy Council held back from endorsing the project. The Times itself, for all its irony, conceded that ‘an advance in the system of female education would be of unquestionable benefit’. It admitted that ‘we have advanced, indeed, beyond the time when a knowledge of conversational French and “accomplishments” formed the sole acquirements of a “finished” girl.’ However, the ‘fatal defect’, as it saw it, was that ‘girls do not generally possess the physical strength which minute and thorough study requires . . . the simple truth is that the intellectual work in which men excel requires not only intellectual capacity, but severe physical labour.’ The widespread recognition of this apparently indisputable fact meant teachers would never be so rigorous with girls as with boys, which in turn meant girls were doomed to fail. It could see the benefits of founding a college where women would, in time, be brought up to the level of attainment of the average public schoolboy. It saw no reason why Miss Davies’s plan to have women pursue something beyond this should not be tried: but no one should expect it to succeed, nor to serve any useful purpose in a world where women were designed ‘to make their husbands happy, and to rear and educate their children,’ in a climate in which ‘their very virtue is dependence’.

  Prospectuses to attract students were sent out to girls’ schools in the spring of 1869, and eighteen young women sat an entrance examination at the University of London, under Davies’s supervision, in July that year. Thirteen passed: three more sat the examination in October, in Bodichon’s house in London, and soon afterwards five women began their studies. Dons came by train from Cambridge to teach them, and Davies wished to build a larger establishment in Hitchin. However, Bodichon and others pressed her to move to Cambridge, and in the autumn of 1871 a site was secured in the village of Girton, a couple of miles north-west of Cambridge. It was not merely that land was more easily available outside the town; it was also that the honour of the young women would, it was felt, be better preserved if they were kept at a distance from male undergraduates.

  Davies scaled down her expectations of funding from £30,000 to £10,000, and more than a quarter of that had to be borrowed. George Eliot, who had met Davies and had expressed her support, sent £50 ‘from the author of Romola’.123 Bodichon promised £1,000 for the building of the college provided that her friend Elizabeth Blackwell was appointed professor of hygiene there; that it was entirely secular; and that it was built in the middle of Cambridge. On each she would be disappointed; but nonetheless she gave the money, chaired the fund-raising committee for further buildings, and joined the executive committee that ran the college. Once it was built she contributed books and furniture. For all these reduced circumstances, Davies could still afford to engage Alfred Waterhouse as her architect, and the original college building is one of his finest early works: and the artistic Bodichon superintended all the details closely. Half of Waterhouse’s main block opened in October 1873, with thirteen students admitted and living and studying in what was still a building site. Three women had unofficially sat the tripos examinations earlier in the year, two for Classics and one for mathematics: Davies had not had to dilute standards, but the women were still not permitted to proceed to degrees.

  From 1872 women studying in Cambridge were allowed to attend lectures at the discretion of the lecturer; and in 1881 they no longer had to take tripos exams surreptitiously, but could do so openly. In 1880 Miss C. A. Scott of Girton was placed equal to the Eighth Wrangler in the mathematics tripos when examined unofficially. A huge campaign, reported in the newspapers, was launched for the right of women at Cambridge to enter examinations officially and to take degrees. Henry Sidgwick worked to get a recommendation through the Senate that teaching and examination should be put on an equal footing, even if the women could not take degrees at the end of the process. It passed, on 24 February 1881, by 331 to 32, the enemy having retreated.

  Davies served as mistress until 1875, and then as secretary of Girton’s executive committee until 1904. She oversaw the college’s rapid expansion, being determined that as many young women as possible should have the opportunity of an education there: by 1884 Girton had grown substantially in terms of its buildings, with a library and large kitchens, and more accommodation allowing eighty women to be admitted. This caused tensions between Davies and the teachers, who would have preferred such funds as were raised to support their work and research. Davies remained adamant that broadening access should always be Girton’s first priority. Bodichon gave the college £5,000 in 1884 and left it another £10,000 in her will on her death in 1891, as well as donating the pictures she had lent it. This generosity secured Girton’s finances. Although recognised in 1924 by Royal Charter as an institution for the higher education of women, it did not become a college of Cambridge University until 1948, when its women could at last proceed to Cambridge degrees.

  Cambridge’s other pioneering women’s college, Newnham, had its origins in October 1871 in a house in Cambridge. Whereas Girton was a predominantly feminist-driven enterprise, Newnham came about not least because of the determination of Cambridge dons. Sidgwick played a conspicuous role in its foundation. A committee to raise funds met in the Cambridge drawing room of Millicent Fawcett. She was Elizabeth Garrett’s younger sister, and the young wife of Henry Fawcett, the Liberal MP and campaigner for women’s rights and, at this stage, professor of political economy at Cambridge. Millicent was already a committed member of the women’s suffrage movement, having at an early age come under the spell of Maurice. Sidgwick and others offered their services free of charge while money was raised for teaching: Mill and Helen Taylor offered £40 a year for three years, but the inflow of funds, ironically, raised pressure to find accommodation for students and for teaching.

  Raising money for accommodation and sustenance was, as Emily Davies had found, harder. Although a few others made discreet donations, Sidgwick took the initiative. ‘Mr Sidgwick, acting on his own account, took and furnished a house for five girls in Regent Street. He gave up his holiday for the purpose. “I have no money,” he explained, “the cares of a household being incumbent. As a friend puts it, I am going to have all the fun of being married, without the burden of a wife.”’124 ‘Girls’ is not an entirely accurate description: one, Ella Bulley, was thirty, and another, Mary Kennedy, daughter of the Regius professor of Greek
, twenty-six. The legends of the unprepossessing nature of women students of this era have a rocky basis in fact. Sidgwick was so disturbed by the pulchritude of two – Mary Paley and Mary Kennedy – that he was heard by Mrs Peile, wife of the future Master of Christ’s, to mutter in despair: ‘It’s their appearance, their unfortunate appearance!’125

  Sidgwick and Fawcett invited Clough, who had run a girls’ school in the north of England, to come and superintend the house in Regent Street. Following the failure of her father’s Liverpool cotton business in 1841, she had set up schools and taught in them to earn a living. Since her brother’s death she had lived with her widowed sister-in-law in order to educate his children. One, Blanche Athena, would become her protégée and devote her life to Newnham. Clough had founded the North of England Council for Promoting the Higher Education of Women, with herself as secretary and Josephine Butler, the prominent feminist renowned for work for the welfare of prostitutes, as president. ‘It was generally imagined that a severer intellectual training than women had hitherto received would make them unwomanly, hard, unlovely, pedantic and disinclined for domestic duties, while the dangers to physical health were dolorously predicted by medical men.’126 Mrs Butler’s response was ‘No! It would not impair the Home; it would extend the best home influences from where they were at present penned up, to humanise the mechanical charities and cold, large institutions of men. It would be a setting-free of feminine powers from narrow and listless lives.’ Clough had written for periodicals about the advantages of a school in training the minds of girls, compared with teaching them at home. She made a name for herself with this, and also by her work in having Cambridge academics come to the provinces to give lectures, the beginning of the extension movement.

  Davies, who had felt piqued about the rival project, was less impressed with Sidgwick. His willingness to compromise about standards outraged her. He said she had written to him describing him as ‘the serpent that was eating out her vitals’.127 In 1873, as Girton opened, Sidgwick and Clough formally appealed for building funds, with the distant reinforcement, from Oxford, of Jowett. The Ladies Lectures Committee became the Association for Promoting the Higher Education of Women at Cambridge. Sidgwick’s first success came in 1874: two women – Mary Paley (later Mrs Alfred Marshall) and Ella Bulley (later Mrs Brooke), unofficially took honours in the moral sciences tripos, invigilated upon by Professor Kennedy.

  Demand for places rose steadily and quickly. In 1874 St John’s College sold a lease on the land for what became Newnham. Newnham Hall opened in 1875, a healthy three miles from Girton, and by the following year had sixty students. Clough remained principal, though took no salary. Mindful of her late brother’s torments over religion, she insisted on Newnham’s being non-sectarian; though to avert claims of the college encouraging godlessness, she made a point of asking each student about her place of worship. If anyone under twenty-one answered that she had none, this would be tolerated only after the girl’s parents had given consent. In the early years Newnham’s facilities, as with Girton’s, were rudimentary: no space was set aside for a chapel, and a bathroom had to serve as a laboratory until 1879. That same year the governing bodies of both King’s and Christ’s agreed that women could attend lectures in their colleges, following the example of several professors who had admitted women to their lectures since the mid-1870s: a breakthrough had been made. Although Newnham was later into the field than Girton, by 1880 it had 258 students against Girton’s 113, thanks to the flexibility offered to women who needed more preparation for their courses.

  In 1876 Sidgwick married Eleanor Mildred ‘Nora’ Balfour, sister of the future Prime Minister Arthur James Balfour, and a member of the political and intellectual aristocracy. Her husband had got to know her when he sought support – moral and financial – for Newnham; it is not believed their marriage, which was happy, was consummated. She was well read and deeply religious and became active in the Society for Psychical Research, which her husband had founded. She wrote that the 1860s was an exciting decade for new ideas, which came so abundantly that ‘even sluggish minds were caught by the current, and swept into new regions’.128 Nora was not the humourless old bluestocking her photographs may imply. Her niece, in her memoir of her, recalled how in 1872 she had accompanied her sister and brother-in-law, the future Nobel-prize-winning scientist Lord Rayleigh, to Egypt. Nora had recalled ‘at about eighty, being asked if she had ever smoked: “Once I smoked, in a harem”.’129 Nora gave Newnham £500 on its foundation, and founded a scholarship; in the end, her donations totalled £30,000. She was Newnham’s treasurer for thirty-nine years, presiding over its constant development and expansion, with her husband negotiating the acquisition of the freehold of the site from St John’s. She became vice-principal in 1880.

  Gladstone’s daughter Helen came to Newnham in 1877, and later became Mrs Sidgwick’s secretary. Nora inspired awe in those women who met her. Helena Powell, who came up in 1881, said that ‘when I saw the Vice-Principal, very slight and fragile, her smooth fair hair covered with a little lace cap such as young married women used to wear in those days, almost as shy as myself, fear went at once, to be replaced by a wondering awe, which grew and grew as the years went on, as slowly I learnt how all greatness is spiritual.’130

  Clough remained principal until her death in 1892, when Mrs Sidgwick succeeded her. Until the Great War the college educated women to whatever standard they could comfortably attain, since many were still handicapped by lack of a formal school education. However, by the second decade of the twentieth century an expanding network of girls’ schools, staffed and led not least by alumnae of Girton and Newnham, had raised the calibre of the woman undergraduate. Most could take, and succeed in, the examinations taken by men, though they still could not proceed to degrees.

  During the 1870s Parliament began to take an active interest in women’s education, not least because of a prevailing mood that the country was neglecting this human resource, and would suffer accordingly. Former Liberal minister William Cowper-Temple, in a Commons debate on 12 June 1874, said that:

  the chief nations of Europe were in advance of Great Britain in the higher education of women. In the University of Paris 10 female students were to be found at that moment, and Englishwomen went there for medical degrees. Women might take degrees at the Universities of Lyons and Montpellier, at all the Universities of Italy, at Vienna, and Leipzig. At St. Petersburg 250 young women were receiving medical education; some had gone from Russia to the University of Zurich, from whence they were recalled for political reasons, as Zurich was the resort of refugee Poles. The Universities which had taken the lead in this important matter were the University of London, the University of Cambridge, and the University of Edinburgh. 131

  Women had just moved in to Girton, and Newnham was being developed, and at University College, London, about 300 women attended classes specially for them, and about 150 attended mixed classes. London University awarded them certificates of efficiency, but a memorial signed by 500 graduates of University College said degrees ought to be given to women. Oxford followed shortly behind Cambridge. A group of dons and women educationists formed a committee in 1878 to establish a college: but two factions immediately fell out over the question that consistently dogged education: religion. One wanted an Anglican college; the other did not. They went their separate ways, the Anglicans establishing Lady Margaret Hall in 1878, and those who wished education to be free of religious considerations founding what would become Somerville in 1879.

  Despite the evidence of women’s ability to cope with intellectual rigour, there were still politicians uneasy about academic equality: whether out of fear of what educated women might do to men’s privileges, or out of genuine but patronising concern for their welfare, it is hard to tell. In the 1874 Commons debate Lyon Playfair observed that ‘it may be that the Universities, which by long experience have been adapted to men, may not in their present form be fitted for women. There is, at least, suffici
ent doubt on the subject to make us cautious in legislation. So far as American experience of mixed Colleges has gone, it appears, on the ground of intellectual teaching and morality, that the fitness of both sexes is the same—but on the ground of health, it is still doubtful whether women can bear the strain of University studies. This subject is being fully discussed at present by American medical men, and is exciting keen interest in this country.’132

  However, Playfair was at least willing to countenance a concession to what appeared to be the weaker sex. ‘I do not attach much force to the objection, because I think it could be obviated by a postponement of the age at which female students might be matriculated. But I do not think it improbable that a different course of studies ought to be followed for male and female students. We ought to give the women of this country a higher and nobler education, instead of the narrow and trivial education which they now receive. But if our Universities were thrown open tomorrow to women, are there half-a-dozen in any University town who by their school training could follow the courses necessary for one of our degrees?’

  This was to an extent a fair point – it was the argument of Sidgwick and Clough, for which the former was reviled by Emily Davies. Although she was unwilling to make any concessions, Playfair felt that without them women would be at a severe disadvantage. ‘The degrees in Arts, Law, Divinity, or for Doctor of Medicine, all involve a knowledge of Greek. I know of only two small schools in which that is given as a subject of female education. That which I have given as an illustration in regard to Greek holds also, in a less degree, as to other fundamental studies, such as Latin and mathematics. Therefore you must make female degrees lower than male degrees—that is, you must fundamentally change the educational requirements of graduation, or you must revolutionize the preparatory schools of the country in regard to female education.’