FEATURE For Christine Andrews (née Harbottle), coming to Homerton in 1947 changed the course of her life. We talked to her on International Women’s Day about feminism, raising aspirations, and how the world has changed for women.
WE STILL HAVE A LONG WAY TO GO O
ne of five children – “three girls, bookended by boys” – Christine had received what she describes now as “a wartime education – I’d been to four schools in five years and I didn’t really know anything.” Having left school without much sense of what she might do next, she accepted the nudging of her “pushy mother”, who got her a job as a nursery assistant at Newcastle Church High School. “The very fierce head-teacher called me in and said ‘What are you going to do for a career?’ which hadn’t really occurred to me. But I loved working with children, so she suggested I train as a teacher.” Although Cambridge at the time was in the midst of the debate over women’s degrees, which were only awarded from 1948, Christine doesn’t remember this imbalance generating anger among the Homerton students, whose own qualifications were unaffected. “We weren’t feminists – it hadn’t occurred to us. We accepted our place in society. It was only in the 1950s and 60s that we realised we were being put upon!” Instead, she remembers a Homerton which was seen very much as part of the wider university, thoroughly integrated into a social network of dances, mixed hockey games, and cycling back from town to meet the 10pm curfew. In the context of a male undergraduate population which was older than usual, having been through the war, Homerton was “not differentiated from the rest of the university in people’s minds. It was a source of women!”
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HOMERTONIAN
Christine Andrews at home in 2020
But between the socialising and the boys, and the excitement at being away from home, Homerton also gave Christine, now 92, a hunger for learning which she has never lost. “It excited my brain,” she says now. “It gave me a real interest in learning, and set me on a pathway which was quite different from the aspirations of my parents and most of my contemporaries.” While her parents were already unusual for the time in their willingness to fund higher education for their daughters, Christine used Homerton as a launchpad to far greater autonomy than they had envisaged. Until just three years before she trained, teachers had been expected to give up their jobs on marriage. Far from following suit, Christine carried on working throughout the childhood of her own four children. “My husband, Michael, was very accommodating – several friends said
