Jane Robinson: Meet the Pioneers – 100 Years of Degrees for Women

Meet the pioneers: 100 years of degrees for women

One hundred years since women won the right to graduate with full degrees from the University of Oxford, author Jane Robinson (English, 1978) looks back on how Somerville’s patient, optimistic and occasionally ‘bloody-minded’ pioneers won the argument for inclusive education.

Patience, they say, is a virtue. No doubt we’ve all tried our best over the last few months, but sometimes it’s hard not to feel a little frustrated when denied the luxury of autonomy. Of course, you realise what’s at stake, so buckle down and do the right thing. But you’re ineluctably a Somervillian: someone who questions, likes to think for themselves - and can be bloody-minded (dare I say it?) when the occasion arises. This is a tricky dilemma, which I’m sure you’re negotiating gracefully. After all, our collective heritage as members of this college is one of pragmatism and optimism, no matter what the challenge.

The pioneers knew a great deal about patience. They had to, operating at a time when women tended to be regarded as cardboard cut-outs. In fact it can seem at times that the whole of 19th-century Britain was peopled by stereotypes. Think of a Victorian gentleman: he wears a top hat and stiff collar, has extravagant whiskers and carries a cane. All day he sits in a vast mahogany office, where banks of clerks endlessly transcribe verbiage in the background. His porcelain wife is installed in

Students cycle in the quadrangle c.1930

their suburban villa, her stays too tightly laced for her to move; an innocent ‘angel in the house’ of whom nothing more is required than devotion to domestic duty.

Meanwhile the lower classes work industriously, grateful to keep their heads above water. Down in the depths, the poor struggle desperately to survive: that is their lot in life. There is a middle class of men who make their way in the world by means of art, literature, science or religion, or as academics in a university environment like an extended gentleman’s club. A corresponding class of discontented women floats around, slightly out of focus; their only chance of prosperity is to marry well. Once married, they are safe. Impotent, but safe.

In our reductive hindsight this is a world of caricature. So it appeared to many who lived through it: a society governed by clearlydefined boundaries, where success meant doing exactly what was expected. And women were not expected to attend the ancient universities.

Main image, left:Jane Kirkaldy (middle row, 3rd from right) pictured in 1896 with women scientists from across the University

Women were not expected to attend the ancient universities.

Top: A women’s hockey match c.1900

He believed in including the excluded, just as we do so passionately today

Why would they? Their brains were demonstrably smaller than men’s, implying a corresponding lack of intellectual power. Women were assumed by the medical elite to have a finite supply of life-force; if this were sent north to the brain, there would be none left to expedite matters further south. As the eminent Dr Henry Maudsley put it in 1874:

“It is not that girls have not ambition, nor that they fail generally to run the intellectual race which is set before them, but it is asserted that they do so at a cost to their strength and health which entails lifelong suffering, and even incapacitates them for the adequate performance of the natural functions of their sex.”

In other words, thinking withers the womb. It also, incidentally, makes you unmarriageably unattractive: a dried-up bluestocking who wears glasses and a perpetual frown.

Parents considering sending their children to Somerville in the early days thus faced a choice: enjoy the dubious privilege of possessing an educated daughter, or the benefits of grandchildren. You can’t have both. Fortunately for us, the college pioneers were courageous and/or eccentric enough to dismiss these axioms. By pioneers, I mean the founders, the first tutors, their first students and their students’ families.

John Percival

John Percival, for example, served on the committee responsible for founding Somerville Hall. At various stages he was Master of Trinity (Oxford) and Bishop of Hereford: a pillar of the Establishment. But he was also a founder of Clifton High School for Girls in Bristol, and employed the first female member of staff to teach in a boys’ public school. A surprising man, his unorthodox ideas about women’s education might have stymied his career, had he not combined conviction with discretion. He believed in including the excluded, just as we do so passionately today.

Early Somervillian Emily Penrose was our third Principal. She was in the vanguard when women were first granted degrees at Oxford exactly 100 years ago. Always aware that feminine outspokenness could be taken for stridency, and determination for hysteria, she nonetheless navigated a path – heavily thicketed with prejudice – to academic parity. She did so with gravitas and wisdom.

In 1888, Somervillian scientists Jane Kirkaldy and Catherine Pollard became the first women at Oxford to study Zoology. None had tried before, because the professor in charge was firmly opposed to ‘petticoat pioneers’. But he was on long-term sick-leave when Catherine and Jane niftily applied, and his deputy – something of a feminist – was pleased to admit them. If either had applied alone, she would have had less chance of success, needing an expensive chaperone at lectures and in the labs. As it was, the two of them could chaperone each other.

There was no guarantee that the professor wouldn’t dismiss them on his return. It was an act of faith on their part – and the deputy’s – to commit money and time to an uncertain future. In the event, they were allowed to stay and in 1891, both achieved a first. Or that’s what they would have got, had they been allowed a degree.

All these women, and their male champions, were heroes. They proved the nay-sayers wrong by opening a non-denominational college for women; funding it (although hand-to-mouth in the early days); staffing it, and studying there. They hoped for the best, cherished their integrity, and were rewarded. Dr Percival prospered in academia and the church; Dame Emily Penrose was the first female academic to be awarded a DCL. Miss Kirkaldy wrote definitive textbooks and passed her love of science to hundreds of students, and Catherine Pollard married, had four sons (so much for Dr Maudsley) and became a lecturer.

All of them were role models for their time – and ours. It must often have seemed that survival for women at Oxford was unlikely at best; at worst, impossible. But because they were patient, optimistic, and yes, bloodyminded when necessary, they not only survived, but flourished. And so will we.

Jane Robinson is author of Bluestockings: the Remarkable Story of the First Women to Fight for an Education, published by Penguin. The book is currently in development as a TV drama series.

Somerville Principal Emily Penrose at her graduation in 1920 with Gilbert Murray, Regius Professor of Greek and President of the Somerville Council, who presented Penrose with her degree in the Sheldonian Theatre