Bluestockings (29 page)

She sounds like the model of a successful working mother. But even someone as feisty as Gwyneth could not renounce the cruellest and most womanly of fates: in 1921 she died in childbirth, aged only thirty-two.
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How a fin-de-siècle cartoon imagines a Cambridge alumna will conquer the old world, armed with a degree, a pair of bloomers, and a golf club.

For the entire period from 1869 to 1939, the question of whether a woman’s degree was a social asset was argued, and remained unresolved. When Emily Davies founded Girton’s mother-house in Hitchin, her aim was to offer students an intellectual refuge. Her college was an almost spiritual place of learning, removed from the distractions of mundane domesticity and meaningless accomplishment. ‘The accepted idea was that we had come… because of our love of study and not in order to qualify for earning a living.’
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Qualification was a distasteful concept for ladies – it smacked of commerce. No one in the early days of Girton or Newnham, Somerville or Lady Margaret Hall, imagined ladies would ever feel the sordid need to become professionals. Perhaps that is why Cambridge only offered its lady ‘guests’ a scrap of paper (rather grandly referred to as a certificate) recording their achievements in the Tripos, instead of ceremonially conferring the signed and sealed degree awarded to real undergraduates. When Oxford agreed to grant its female students degrees in 1920 (having not offered them
anything
before), the common rooms of Cambridge, yet again, went wild. ‘We won’t have women!’ brayed the undergraduates – and nor did they, until 1948.

There is a distinction to be made here between ladies and women. In 1881, the constituent colleges of Victoria University declared that female students would be allowed to work for degrees on the same terms as men; henceforth they were no longer referred to as ladies, but women. London University welcomed ladies to lectures, but once they enrolled as undergraduates, they too metamorphosed into women. At Durham, incidentally, there were neither ladies nor women: only Doves, who inhabited their own little ‘Dovecot’ in 1901 (Abbey House on Palace Green) and fluttered about the city cooing prettily.

Females were further subdivided by the popular press into ‘womanly’ or ‘true’ women, and ‘strong-minded’ ones. The former, though perhaps spuriously over-qualified, were still reasonably attractive, and capable of benign moral influence within their families; the latter (cartoon bluestockings) were an embarrassment. As late as 1933, strong-minded female academics were described generically as ‘enforced celibates, predestined spinsters. And women cunning enough to maintain complete secrecy in their sexual relations [that is, lesbians]… a prospect that fills a good many people with horror.’
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But such bombastic over-generalization meant far less in the 1930s than in the 1870s. The number of women students had grown prodigiously, yet English society had still managed, somehow, to resist being brought to its knees.
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Perhaps bluestockings were not as corrosive as first thought.

This gradual acceptance of women graduates was not supported by any imaginative careers advice. London and the civic universities had better services than Oxbridge (which is not saying much), but nowhere did aspiration seem to play a part in planning a female student’s future. True, the First World War allowed women into professions left short-staffed by fighting men. Alumnae records of this period in women’s college archives specify a professor of West African languages, an inspector at the Ministry of Labour, a medical officer in the British Army, a Deputy Directress of Public Instruction, a house surgeon at Clapham Maternity Hospital, an anatomy demonstrator at a teaching hospital in London, and a physicist doing research work at Woolwich Arsenal.
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Precedent is useful, but there was no guarantee that any appointments or promotions made during the course of the war would last. Once it was over, there was an obligation to move aside and offer your nice, warm seat to its rightful
tenant. If positions were scarce, married men stood at the head of the queue, with families to support. Single men came next, then single women, and, last of all, wives. They had no need to earn money of their own, nor (it was argued) any right.

An exception to this pattern was Edith Morley. In 1915, she produced an important book on prospects for women graduates in the workplace;
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even though the seven professions she listed in it were predictable – teaching, medicine and dentistry, nursing, sanitary inspection and health visiting, the civil service, secretarial work, and acting – the levels she considered women capable of reaching within those professions were unprecedentedly high. Miss Morley knew her subject, being (in her own words) ‘the first woman to obtain the title of professor at a British University’ on her appointment to a chair in English at Reading in 1908. She was a trenchant champion of career women. Her professorial colleagues – all male, of course – found her terrifying:

She was likely to subject even the most casual of remarks about the weather to acid criticism. Her driving was memorable… and her driving was a direct expression of her character. She was provocative, disturbing, aggressive, intransigent; others kept their distance to avoid collision and damage.
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No doubt she found their cowardice gratifying.

After the passing of the Sex Disqualification Removal Act in 1919, hard on the heels of the Representation of the People Act, passed the previous year and giving women over thirty the vote, legal barriers to women’s progress in the workplace grew more permeable. Virginia Woolf, in
A Room of One’s Own
(1929), is keen to point this out to undergraduettes who blame their poor prospects on prejudice,
rather than lack of initiative. She reminds them that the cultural climate in England has changed dramatically, not just in the legal and political sense, but educationally (thanks to university access for women) and therefore economically. It is time, she says, to go out into the world:

[You] will agree that the excuse of lack of opportunity, training, encouragement, leisure, and money no longer holds good…

Thus, with some time on your hands and with some book-learning in your brains – you have had enough of the other kind, and are sent to college partly, I suspect, to be uneducated – surely you should embark on another stage of your very long, very laborious and highly obscure career.
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An interesting concept: did university
un
educate women? Certainly. It was Miss Davies, in the earliest days of Girton’s history, who said that the value of being at a women’s college lay in relinquishing the so-called accomplishments of a traditional female education, and learning sturdier disciplines instead. And a ‘highly obscure career’? Choose fiction, urges Woolf. Subsidize your writing how you will, but write. Write your way out of obscurity and into history.

Despite Woolf ’s esoteric agitating, teaching was still the most popular post-war career. Sixty-nine per cent of graduates from St Mary’s College in Durham chose it during the 1920s,
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and the availability of more university posts created a floating population of women academics who surfaced and dipped in the records of colleges around the country, following one another around in a sluggish whorl of promotion. But now, robustly supported by the British Federation of University Women (founded in 1910), and inspired by regular features in the
Journal of Careers
, unlikely ambitions did begin to appear feasible. An article in the
Incorporated Secretaries’ Journal
for 1927 encouraged women (like its author, who had a doctorate in economics) to aim high.
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No longer, she argued, was femininity regarded in the world of commerce and industry as an incurable disease; there were few corners of that world forbidden to enterprising women these days.

The
Journal of Careers
ran a series of pieces on new opportunities for women graduates; the January–June volume for 1928 – the year of the Equal Franchise Act – suggests metallurgy, chartered accountancy, advertising, publishing, film-making, financial consultancy, politics, journalism, and – puzzlingly – large-scale rabbit farming. Fewer marriages (after the ravages of the war) meant more potential career women, and among all the teachers, and an increasing number of welfare and social workers listed in college registers for the 1920s and 1930s, are some unorthodox occupations. Not only were bluestockings breaching the mainstream professions by becoming barristers, veterinary surgeons, insurance executives, and personal private secretaries; they were emerging – all around the world – as mining engineers, museum directors, industrial chemists, broadcasters, translators in the Foreign Office, et cetera.

One Foreign Office translator demonstrates a remarkable life lived without fanfare: she was a farmer’s daughter, born in 1905, who read modern languages at Durham, then worked with the League of Nations in Geneva before becoming a secretary at the International Labour Office, also in Geneva, from 1930 to 1936; from 1936 to 1939 she was appointed French translator and Literary Secretary to the Rt Hon. David Lloyd George MP, and when the war broke out she worked for the British and American governments as a translator (French, German, and Italian) in London, Paris, New York, Brussels, and Jamaica. Her name was Erica Lea.
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I wish I could have met her. I also rather wish I had met a
certain general’s daughter who studied maths at Westfield College, went on to win the
Croix de Guerre
for war work in France, and then, according to a terse college record, enjoyed ‘a rather unsatisfactory period in her career during which she was wanted by the police. By now [1936] she may have made good.’
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All these livelihoods were patently possible, but that did not mean that women graduating in the mid-1930s had any sense that society owed them a career. The Great Depression reinforced the pecking order, prioritizing married men. An
Evening News
journalist reported in 1936 that universities were every year turning out young women who had taken degrees ‘and mastered half the “ologies”’, but only the lucky few were ‘able to find openings suitable to their attainments’.
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Academia was breeding white elephants.

When Gwendolen Freeman tried for a job with a high-profile publishing house in 1929, hoping to become a journalist, she was warned by her interviewer that to have any hope of success, she must forget Cambridge altogether. ‘Blue stockings,’ he scoffed, ‘are not wanted here.’
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In 1937, Joan Lovegrove of St Hilda’s found her prospective employers in the Diplomatic Service depressingly preferred ‘County’ to ‘Brainy’ girls. Barbara Fletcher, who read social studies during the 1930s, found her degree useful in securing an interview, but not necessarily a job. Women were sooner considered over-qualified than men, even though they had exactly the same academic background.

Teaching, meanwhile, remained reliable. Hannah Cohen of Durham remembered how ridiculously easy it was for her to find a post. She was sitting in the college union waiting for the results of her finals one Friday in 1938 when the porter called her to the telephone. The headmaster of a local high school was on the line: he was looking for a Spanish
teacher and had already spoken to Hannah’s tutor, who had recommended her. Would she like the job, starting next Monday?

Hannah replied that she must ask her parents, and was shocked (but not affronted) to hear that the headmaster had already done this, and that they had agreed. ‘He finished the conversation by saying, “I will send the chauffeur to meet you to take you across the ferry to Tynemouth at 8.30 a.m. on Monday morning. Goodbye, Miss Cohen. I look forward to meeting you.”’
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As the Second World War loomed ever closer, the under-graduette enjoyed a new-found gravitas. It was clear that highly educated, well-organized women were going to be vital on the home front and in the services (particularly in administration and intelligence). And, as one mother put it as she encouraged her daughter to try for Somerville, an invading enemy might rob you of many things, but never your education.
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Thus, ironically, dawned the golden age of the bluestocking – a period of astonishing achievement, personal heroism, and – afterwards – infuriating public pigheadedness. Its story has yet to be told.

It should be no surprise that most of the individuals featured in this book went on to be teachers. But not all of them. To give a few examples: Constance Maynard of Girton became the first Mistress of Westfield College, after helping found St Leonard’s School in St Andrews. She died in 1935, aged eighty-six. The story of Bessie Callender, a pioneer of St Mary’s College, Durham, is rather sad. She also went into education, but ended her days in an old people’s home nearly blind, deaf, and tortured by arthritis, trying, after a busy life, ‘to bear the boredom of having nothing to do’.
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