In
the 19th century it was very difficult for women
to obtain a university education. In the early 1870s, two leaders
of the feminist movement, Emily Davies and
Barbara Bodichon, began raising money
to establish a women's college in Cambridge.
Eventually they raised enough money to purchase Benslow, a house two
miles outside the town. In 1873 Benslow House was opened as Girton
College.
The two
women held different views on women's education. Emily
Davies believed that the students should concentrate on traditional
subjects such as classics and mathematics whereas Barbara
Bodichon wanted a more radical approach to the curriculum. The
two women also disagreed on student discipline. Davies favoured a
strict regime compared to Barbara's more liberal approach. Emily also
insisted that the new college must be affiliated to the Church
of England. Students at Girton included Helena
Swanwick, Eileen Power, Dora
Russell, Margaret Llewelyn Davies,
Margaret Cole and Dorothy
Jewson.
(1)
In 1896 Emily Davies wrote a pamphlet Women
in the Universities of England and Scotland where she explained
the need for growth in women's higher education.
Let
it be distinctly understood that the choice is not between a life
wholly given up to study, and a life spent in active domestic duty.
The dilemma thus stated is untrue on both sides; for while on the
one hand, giving to women the opportunity of a complete education
does not mean that they will thereupon spend all their lives in reading,
so, on the other, denying them education does not mean that they will
occupy themselves in household affairs… The aim of these new
colleges will not be directed towards changing the occupations of
women, but rather towards securing that whatever they do shall be
done well. Whether as mistresses of households, mothers, teachers,
or as labourers in art, science, literature… their work suffers
from the want of training.
(2)
Dora Russell, The Tamarisk Tree
(1975)
I accordingly went up to Girton College, Cambridge. Architecturally
rather hideous, Girton was commodious and also, in its way, homely.
At study of your own and an adjoining bedroom separated either by
doors or a curtain, gave you a feeling of privacy and the dignity
of being grown-up. Girton, even more than Newnham, was like a large
girls' boarding school. Intellectually we were reckoned to be adult,
but as young inexperienced women we had to be guarded with care. You
could not receive a young man in your room; you might be permitted
to have him to tea in one of the public reception rooms, but you could
accept no invitation from young men to tea or other entertainment
without a chaperone from the College.
Miss Jex Blake, a classics don, who was thoroughly robust and rather
like a horse; this is not unkindly meant, for I liked and respected
her. She had a great sense of humour.
Eileen Power dealt with history. She became distinguished for her
fine scholarship and her utter charm, which captivated many of both
sexes. We always found it a pleasure to watch her, tall and placid
and very much a personality, as she came in to take her place for
dinner at high table. She had very beautiful, candid blue-grey eyes.
(3) Margaret
Cole, Growing Up Into Revolution (1949)
I can never be sufficiently grateful to Girton College and the University
of Cambridge for the part they played in transforming an unpresentable
tadpole into a moderately decent sort of frog. The carping can, of
course, find things to criticize in Girton. The mile-and-a-quarter
which separates it from the centre of Cambridge is a bit of a nuisance,
and was more nuisance in the days before 1914, when there were no
buses and we had to cycle to and fro.
We were not allowed to go to meetings unchaperoned, so that before
the closing of the debate or whatever it might be we had to rise and
go home with our nurse, as it were, in order to get in before the
Lodge gates closed. The most unintentionally dangerous chaperone was
our junior mathematical don, Miss Cave-Brown-Cave, who was both an
enthusiastic stargazer and an indifferent cyclist, and if she caught
sight of a pet constellation while climbing Castle Hill would curvet
wildly about, head in air, to the great peril of her charges.
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