Bluestockings (26 page)

In some senses, female undergraduates enjoyed more freedom than their male counterparts. Not being allowed to take degrees meant not having to wear academic gowns when out and about, so young ladies could walk around
Oxford and Cambridge in the evenings (before 1920 and 1948 respectively) unchallenged by proctors and ‘bulldogs’, the university police. Not being a full member of the university also meant avoiding the rules affecting students’ ownership of cars. If an undergraduette was lucky enough to afford one, she was allowed to drive it from her first year, as long as it sported the regulatory green light; men had to wait until they were twenty-two, or graduates.

In fact life could be full of unexpected joys for the willing and enthusiastic bluestocking, no matter where she was at university, or when. Leta Jones, a student at Liverpool in the early 1930s, remembers the delicious occasional extravagance of a poached egg and cheese at Lime Street Station, tuppence-worth of chips from a shop near her hostel, or – an extra-special treat – some ‘flamboyant ice cream’ from Coopers, helped down by a penny bread-roll.
²⁸
Sarah Mason mentions the excitement of a visit to Girton, around 1880, of four Frenchmen with two dancing bears; another Cambridge girl used to love to watch her dons skating soberly up and down the Cam during icy winters.

Sleeping outside in the summer was a frequent adventure:

It was great fun… stealing out [to the quad] in the dark with an armful of bedclothes and a mattress, and seeing other sleeping forms strewn about on the grass and stones. Miss Robinson and Miss Lord (our blind student and her companion) were having people to coffee, and it was jolly listening half-asleep to their talk and staring up at the stars which looked such funny twinkling dots in the sky… There was hardly any wind, just a breath of it cold against one’s face, and the bedclothes were deliciously thick and warm. Waking up in the morning was rather fun too, with the air grey and raw, and the sun trying to warm it. I woke K… she was fast asleep with dewdrops shining in her hair.
²⁹

The great thing, almost everyone agreed, was not to fritter away your time at university doing ordinary things. This was an extraordinary place, full of extraordinary people: ‘No one wastes a moment – I don’t mean that they work all day – but they
live
…’
³⁰

10. Shadows

The change from schoolgirl to university woman is a very marked one, and for many people it is too abrupt.
¹

It is clear that most alumnae remember their college careers with fondness, but not all of them. Almost apologetically, some will admit to having been miserable at university. For them it proved a profitless exercise at best, and at worst a period of deep unhappiness.

Personality played its part. Several women were crippled by shyness. Without the confidence to socialize, they felt isolated and out of place. Others were too cynical, too quick to find fault with themselves and the system. The short but vertiginous path from school to university was strewn with critical decisions. No wonder some people got the balance wrong: too much work, too little; too many friends, too few. Brooding on mistakes, especially in the internalized atmosphere of a women’s college or hall of residence, could be dangerous.

Elisabeth Bishop was a rather melodramatic student at St Hilda’s in the 1930s. During her first term, she wrote ecstatically in her diary that now was the happiest she had ever, ever been. But a series of complicated relationships (with women as well as men), family problems, and pressure of work soon combined to send her to the ‘edge of an abyss’. ‘Obviously fate does not intend me for happiness,’ she grieved. ‘No home – no friends – and I could wager my
bottom dollar – no lover – no husband – no children.’ She could not sleep: her compound discontent convinced her that life was ‘poisoned at the very root’. Whenever she achieved a minor triumph – a good essay, a spontaneous smile from someone, a moment of self-belief – she could not help looking beyond it to the misery ‘all banking up ready to descend on me… Is it worthwhile going on?’
²

Bravely, Elisabeth persevered, but the university drop-out rate was significant, especially during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Most early leavers could only vaguely analyse what had gone wrong, pleading that university life ‘didn’t agree’ with them, that they found their peers ‘dreadfully depressing’, or that work simply ‘spoiled the head’ and turned them hysterical. Others suffered secretly, unwilling to admit failure. Their college records too often close with a bleak verdict:
committed suicide
.

A designated ‘moral tutor’ was supposed to offer comfort and constructive advice to those distressed in any way. Miss Wordsworth of Lady Margaret Hall memorably recommended in 1892 ‘something meaty beside your bed’ – cold stock soup or a beef sandwich – to combat those sleepless hours spent worrying.
³
It was difficult for undergraduates to confide in the academic staff. Only a tiny proportion of tutors were parents themselves, and to their students they could seem aloof and impenetrably cerebral.

If a troubled girl should manage to unburden herself to someone in authority, who would comfort her comforter? On 10 October 1910, Elsie Bowerman contacted home from college to postpone a visit from her mother. One of her tutors had been found dead in her bed that morning. ‘It may be heart-failure,’ wrote Elsie, ‘but they fear it is due to drugs. (Don’t say anything about it to people outside.)’
⁴

Staff and student suicides, and details of those who left
before they should, were naturally never publicized. Accusations of hysteria and moral flimsiness had been levelled at bluestockings from the beginning. There was no point fuelling the fire. Internal records were kept, however, to explain or extenuate disaster: ‘She has a difficult temper, poor thing’; ‘She is hysterical, not very clever, and one of her brothers is mortally ill’; ‘Hopelessly bad sight and tendency to melancholia’; ‘Miss Harrison has been ill and now her brain seems really to refuse to do anything’; ‘Miss Muller has been told by her doctor, that it is absolutely necessary, she should not work next term’; ‘This student’s sister died suddenly aged 20. The student has not intermitted her work or indulged herself and is
angry
’; ‘Leave of absence granted on account of ill health, sleeplessness, and an affected heart.’ There is as much about their health as their academic progress on some students’ end of term reports; what anyone did to make things better, other than send for a doctor, prescribe rest (or exercise), or send them home, is unclear.

Often, students preferred not to confess to feeling ill. The rules stated that if they were too poorly to get up to breakfast in the morning and sign the register, the maid or a friend told the bursar, and the bursar called the doctor. But doctors were expensive, and unless it was an emergency, such as a new case of flu, mumps, chickenpox, or smallpox during one of the epidemics that visited halls and colleges fairly regularly, it was wiser to keep quiet. The most frequent indisposition was ‘the curse’, but few appear to have been seriously handicapped by their period (despite what those medical Jeremiahs had prophesied – see
Chapter 4
); even fewer wrote about it. Occasionally someone discussed a friend’s suffering – ‘Letty Chitty has been in bed today, and I went over and read to her out of
Kim
for a bit. Apparently she gets very knocked up every month’
⁵
– but I have yet to come across a pre-1939 student referring to
her own menstrual cycle with anything but the most fleeting exasperation.
⁶

Disease, when it was present, tended to spread rapidly in close college communities. Whenever outbreaks developed, as notoriously with influenza in 1917, quarantine conditions were immediately imposed, sending students into a kind of germ-ridden purdah. The oppressiveness and sense of apprehension engendered by this were almost as bad as the physical illness. Eye problems were common, attributed to long hours’ study in poor light, and cases of neuralgia, typhoid, pneumonia, bovine tuberculosis, jaundice, even ‘sleepy sickness’, or encephalitis lethargica, all crop up in reminiscences. Katie Dixon of Newnham came down with jaundice during her first term, and because her family, according to Katie, was annoyingly ‘homeopathic’, she was condemned to an exclusive diet of the best natural remedy in the business: celery. ‘Celery, celery at every meal. I remember I was so famished I sneaked down at night to the housekeeper’s room… and asked for a basin of bread and milk. With that I survived.’
⁷

A student at the University of London during the early 1920s succumbed to encephalitis during her third year, and her obvious decline deeply affected her peers. They remembered her struggling to keep awake during work, collapsing at lectures, begging that no one should tell her tutors she was ill. Finally she was admitted to a neurological ward before returning to college for one last attempt at continuing her Classics course. She was not strong enough to cope; her mother arrived to take her home and, a short time later, she died.
⁸

This was rather dramatic; generally, students’ letters home were punctuated by nothing more alarming than nose-bleeds, trapped wind (‘grunting away with flatulence all
day’), constipation (‘I have taken quantities of the cascara pills, with very little result as yet’), headaches (‘frightful… after the College Dinner… wines, claret and champagne’), and generally ‘feeling seedy’ due to insomnia or – as one girl put it – ‘down-in-the-dumpness’.

Poor health or death in the family beckoned students home as insistently as their own illnesses. It was as though daughters were only seconded to university, remotely ‘on call’ to return and cope with family crises when required. From the 1860s to the 1930s, there was a constant (though diminishing) rate of attrition as girls disappeared to do their domestic duty. When fathers died, they were summoned to go out to work. When mothers died they were needed to keep house. When sisters or brothers died, they comforted the parents. Having left university prematurely, they rarely returned.

Changes in financial circumstances also eliminated students; having a bluestocking in the family was too often considered an unnecessary luxury. Whenever economies were called for, through family illness, redundancy, incapacity, or business failure, a daughter’s further education was an obvious target. Not all mothers were as far-sighted as Trixie Pearson’s. As we saw in
Chapter 1
, she fought to keep her daughter at Oxford, though her family was well-nigh penniless, for the long-term benefit of a graduate salary.

Religion and politics cast shadows over university careers that extend to this day. One of my correspondents spoke with heartbreaking immediacy of being forced to leave college seventy years ago by her Jewish father, on her conversion to Christianity. She asked not to be named: the loss of her father’s love, and of her university career, is too painful, still, to expose. Another, a German national, was deported at the outbreak of the Second World War. She could not
bring herself to tell me how she felt, only that ‘very sad and difficult years followed’.
⁹

College authorities – or individual tutors – did what they could to help. The much-vaunted ‘family atmosphere’ of women’s university residences came into its own on these occasions. Parents were summoned for interviews, to try to dissuade them from reclaiming their daughters, and students were offered loans and bursaries to tide them over financial storms. Rachel Footman had experience of this, when her father killed himself during her first term, in 1923:

I still feel cold all over when I think about it… It was the most crushing blow. He rang me up on Friday and said could he come up to Oxford the next day to see me. I said gaily ‘Oh, no, not tomorrow, that is the college dance. Come later, Daddy.’ I feel I can never forgive myself because he shot himself on Monday morning – was he coming to say Good-bye? Or could I have persuaded him not to do it? I shall never know.
¹⁰

Rachel’s father left no money to support his family, and it seemed certain she would have to leave. But her college came up with a scholarship, allowing her to continue her university career with the equivalent of about £15 a week for expenses. It was hard, but Rachel managed. Helpfully, there was never any question that she should leave on domestic grounds.

At Manchester, students themselves donated money to cover the fees of one of their number, and if an undergraduette had trouble paying bills, there was no shame in her doing odd jobs for others, to earn a little money. Favourites were hair-washing, stocking-darning, and errand-running. People appreciated the privilege of being at university, and were glad to help one another if they could. Wasting the opportunity, so
hard won, was shameful. It meant letting down all those who had supported you in the past – especially proud parents.

A second chance occasionally offered itself to ‘drop-outs’: they returned to university as mature students and tried to take up the threads of academic life where they had left off. Reprises like this tended not to happen in cases of expulsion, or ‘sending down’. Being sent down was the ultimate penalty, the ultimate shame. Once a university had issued a ‘request to withdraw’, because your residence was ‘no longer desirable’, you were cast out of Eden (the apple half eaten) and forgotten. Failure to pass exams was a neat, objective means of exit; altogether messier was dismissal due to assumed breaches of discipline or morality.

The Victorian press may have rattled on about bluestockings, labelling them fierce, desiccated harridans, or silly long-lashed lovelies; to the academic establishment at the time, the corporate body of female university students was imagined rather differently, as a spreading, flaccid figure in need of structure and support. The minute regulations to which that establishment subjected her were designed to act like stays. They laced her tight, kept her standing straight, and prevented unsightly slippages. Uncompromising discipline was generally accepted by the students themselves (with individual exceptions) until the First World War. Thereafter, intelligent and increasingly independent young women began to question such stricture, to break the rules, and agitate for freedom.