Bluestockings

The Remarkable Story of the First Women to Fight for an Education

By Jane Robinson

Viking Press Adult
Hardback : 06 Aug 2009 £20.00 Scroll down for Reviews and link to interview with author Jane Robinson on BBC Women's Hour, August 20 2009

Synopsis
In 1869, when five women enrolled at university for the first time in British history, the average female brain was thought to be 150 grams lighter than a man's. Doctors warned that if women studied too hard their wombs would wither and die. When the Cambridge Senate held a vote on whether women students should be allowed official membership of the university, there was a full-scale riot.

Despite the prejudice and the terrible sacrifices they faced, women from all backgrounds persevered and paved the way for the generations who have followed them since. By the 1920s, being an 'undergraduette' was considered quite the fashionable thing; by the 1930s, women were emerging from universities as anything from aviation engineers to professional academics.

Using the words of the women themselves, Bluestockings tells their inspiring story - a story of defiance and determination, of colourful eccentricity and at times heartbreaking loneliness, as well as of passionate friendships, midnight cocoa-parties and glorious self-discovery.
~~~~~~~~~
 London ~~ Sunday 6 September 2009

Bluestockings by Jane Robinson

A pioneering generation of women at university is celebrated in this fine book, writes Dinah Birch

Oxford undergraduates, 1938. Photograph: Getty Images

"Inferior to us God made you, and our inferiors to the end of time you will remain." Dean Burgon of Chichester Cathedral made this observation in a sermon to the academic women of Oxford in 1884. He would have been appalled to learn that British women have now overtaken men at all levels of educational achievement.

Education
by Jane Robinson
Viking, £20
Buy Bluestockings at the Observer bookshop HERE

It is estimated that in 2007-08 the initial participation rate in higher education was 49.2 per cent for females, 37.8 per cent for males. The consequences of this revolution are not yet clear, but its speed is astonishing. Jane Robinson's lively history of the first women to study for degrees records the obstacles they faced and their determination to overcome them. Girls can now take their opportunities for granted. It is good to be reminded of how recently they have been won, and with what difficulty.

Men's monopoly over university education was first challenged in Cambridge. A "College for Women", later Girton College, was founded in 1869, but it was not until 1948 that Cambridge granted full membership to women.

Other institutions had been quicker to change. In the late 19th century, complaints about the modern girl who "was no longer content to exert the sweet influence of her sex, but stakes her hopes upon power" abounded, but academics had much to gain from giving women a chance. As universities have continued to note, they make excellent students and often outshine their brothers.

Women's progress in education was made possible by earlier social reforms, as the state gradually assumed responsibility for providing both girls and boys with a free and compulsory secondary schooling. Given these new privileges, girls' demands for degrees became irresistible. After graduating, many women returned to schools as teachers, confirming their pupils' rising expectations. Slowly, other professions opened their doors and enterprising working women became less exceptional.

Jane Robinson draws on a wealth of interviews, journals, letters and memoirs, recalling what university had meant to pioneering women students. Some found the experience daunting or dull. Their fellow students were "dreadfully depressing"; work "spoiled the head". Well-meaning advice was not always helpful. Elizabeth Wordsworth, first principal of Lady Margaret Hall in Oxford, recommended keeping "something meaty" by the bed as a remedy for nocturnal low spirits – cold stock soup or a beef sandwich.

Though anxiety and despondency occasionally led to serious breakdown, most graduates remembered their student days with affection. For the first time, they had escaped domestic authority and were in charge of their own time. Institutional rules and regulations could be irksome, but the experience remained a liberation.

Female students came from diverse backgrounds: the daughters of gentlemen, tradesmen and occasionally labourers found themselves thrown together. This, too, was a new experience and some found it disconcerting. Vera Brittain was dismayed by the gaucheness of her fellow Oxford students: "It required all my ambition and all my touching belief that I was a natural democrat filled with an overwhelming love of humanity, to persuade me that I had never really felt the snobbish revulsion against rough and readiness which my specialised upbringing had made inevitable."

Female identity had long been defined by social class. "I find it bewildering deciding if I like people by myself," a student remarked. "I have been used to them labelled."

Tutors might be puzzlingly silent, gloomy or muddled, but their aberrations did not diminish the pleasure of self-determination. "I remember many a winter evening with a roaring little fire… a vast lexicon lying on my middle and a play of Aeschylus or what not in my hands. The silence, the being alone and knowing everyone else was at it in the same way seemed to give one a great push on," wrote one student. That fusion of independence and camaraderie was crucial. Bright young women could make their own way with confidence, because they were no longer isolated. They have been forging ahead ever since.

• Dinah Birch is professor of English at the University of Liverpool and co-editor of the new edition of the Oxford Companion to English Literature

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
 London ~~ Sunday, 30 August 2009
Viking £20

Bluestockings, By Jane Robinson

A charming, if limited, social history of British women's fight to get the education they deserved

Reviewed by Joy Lo Dico

Jane Robinson's story of women's first forays in formal education is entitled Bluestockings. The word still rings out as pejorative, but after reading this delicately written social history, any woman who has been through the education system should come out proud of their forebears' legacy.

There are some delightful – even tear- jerking – anecdotes in it, not least one about Trixie Pearson in the early pages of the book. Despite having to look after a family of seven during the Depression, her mother was determined that her daughter should get an education, and against all odds, Trixie gained a place at St Hilda's College, Oxford. When her family became destitute, and Trixie felt she ought to leave college to work and support them, grants were found, even invented, for her, some paid from the pockets of her own tutors. This is not the only instance cited of a tutor funding a female student, such was the desire to see young women given opportunities to educate themselves.

After the foundation of Queen's College and North London Collegiate schools in the mid-19th century and the hugely popular Lectures for Women tour, the desire of young women to learn was proven. This led, at the end of the 19th century, to the formation of the first women's college, Girton in Cambridge, and newer universities opening their doors to women.

There was, of course, opposition to these "bluestockings". Christian and Victorian values questioned whether a woman was physically capable of the strain of academia – one commentator suggesting that education could mean her "becoming sterile" – and the very purpose of educating a woman who would only go on to become a wife and mother.

When it looked as though women might be made full members of Cambridge University in 1897, and verbal arguments were not strong enough, male students took matters into their own hands. The ballot turned into a riot, with fireworks lobbed at the windows of Newnham College, effigies of its founder Miss Anne Jemima Clough being burned, and anyone suspected of being a bluestocking was pelted with citrus fruits and bags of flour. One student thanked the gentlemen students for keeping them entertained that evening.

But these are small instances in a larger picture. The story is remarkable because it is so unremarkable. Unlike the high rhetoric of the suffragist movement and the militancy of the suffragettes, the fight for women's education is not marked by confrontation. Rather it is a story of tenacity. "Never argue with your opponents," one lady tutor advises. "It only helps clear their minds."

Stopping at the Second World War and sticking largely within these shores, the book makes no claim to address more current issues in women's education, such as those countries in which there still isn't any. But, as a British social history, it does well in finding the incidental anecdotes, through historical records and letters, that create a picture of college life with its late-night cocoa parties and beds out in corridors for male visitors. There is a sense of the women's freedom from home, their desire to learn, and their alienation. Though at times it feels as though the scope of the book is too large, and the evidence presented a little thin and polite, altogether Bluestockings is a warm and often funny social history which should be an education to us all.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

August 20 2009


Audio with Jane Robinson author of Bluestockings: The Remarkable Story of the First Women to Fight for an Education

In 1869, when five women enrolled at university for the first time in British history, the average female brain was thought to be 150 grams lighter than a man's. Doctors warned that if a woman studied too hard, her womb would wither and die. Despite the prejudice and the terrible sacrifices that they faced, these women persevered with their studies, and paved the way for the generations of women who followed them. Jenni speaks to Jane Robinson about her new book 'Bluestockings', the story of the first women to fight for a tertiary education.

' by Jane Robinson is published by Viking on 27 August 2009 ISBN-10: 0670916846