Bluestockings (11 page)

On the day results were issued, to the coll. crept Clementine;

From the list her name was missing; thunder-stricken Clementine…

When she asked her professor why, he explained:

‘For I hear you’ve ne’er attempted in your life to merry be,

So the Senate have decided not to give you a degree!’

She departed from the college, left the University,

Soon she wearied of existence, and she laid her down to dee.
²³

Poor Clementine: the archetypal bluestocking swot.

One way to accommodate the pressures of university life was to retreat – or blossom – into eccentricity. Somerville College in Oxford seems to have had more than its fair share of the weird and wonderful. Portia Hobbs went everywhere with roses threaded into her hair and a flowing silk gown made from sample squares from the draper’s.
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Agneta Ruck had a white rat called Martin, which she took to lectures: ‘I think she was one of the first to exhibit an open neck… and obvious lack of corsets,’ remembered a wary contemporary.
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Martin obviously had free range of her clothes. Another ‘original’ girl cleared out all the furniture in her college room, and remodelled it. The walls were stripped bare, but for a portrait of Edward Carpenter (a radical socialist of rather beautiful aspect); she arranged a cluster of green balloons in one corner of the room and a bunch of dried honesty in the other. Two lonely daffodils sprouted from a tub, and cushions littered the floor, with a blowsy design of delphiniums on them exactly matching the queer cretonne frock she always wore. She festooned her bookcase with a wizened garland of rosehips, and the effect, all together, was ‘most sinister’.
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To preserve the decorum and reputation of these undergraduate pioneers, university authorities, as well as issuing them with chaperones, resorted to exhaustive lists of rules, regulating
everything
. They stated exactly whom one could
meet, in what circumstances, when, where, wearing what, and for how long. Most students, like Katie Dixon, at Newnham from 1879 to 1882, took them in good part, accepting them as a condition of their admittance to academia:

[College] was bound really in those days to be prim and respectable, the reason being that we needed the support, financial and moral, of the prim and respectable, a mistake in that way would have put us back a lot. We weren’t going to ‘give occasion’, a perfectly reasonable point of view, and I for one wasn’t going to do any mischief that way. But it makes me laugh rather to think of hedging in all those extraordinarily serious and hard-working young women, as they were, who would hardly have known how to kick over the traces, even if they had been given the chance…
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Feistier individuals were not so submissive. Sarah Mason, whose biscuits had been demolished by Miss Buss, did kick at the traces. She was constantly being hauled up before her college Mistress, or Principal, for minor misdemeanours such as refusing to wear a hat in public (‘“If any undergraduates saw you, they might think you villagers!”… at which I grinned, but maintained a rigorous silence’). When she and her friends were asked to make less noise in the corridors and their rooms, they pinned up sarcastic notices around college wanting to know: 1) at what pitch to raise their voices; 2) what precise thickness the soles of their shoes should be; and 3) how they could have fires that required no poking.

Worst of all, Sarah and her closest friend, Charlie (Charlotte), brazenly walked around Cambridge without a chaperone, and were witnessed one Sunday being escorted into King’s College Chapel by some ‘wicked’ male undergraduates. ‘I’m afraid our behaviour was not quite
comme il faut
throughout the service.’
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It is a credit to the college authorities that they managed Sarah’s rebellious behaviour without sending her down (expelling her). The resultant fuss would have been desperately damaging at this early stage in the history of women students, and there were plenty of greedy Jeremiahs both within and without the university system ready to pounce on mistakes. They hoped to prove the university experiment a joke – just as Gilbert and Sullivan tried to do in
Princess Ida
(1884):

They intend to send a wire

To the moon – to the moon;

And they’ll set the Thames on fire

Very soon – very soon;

Then they’ll learn to make silk purses

With their rigs – with their rigs,

From the ears of Lady Circe’s

Piggy-wigs – piggy-wigs.

And weasels at their slumbers

They trepan – they trepan;

To get sunbeams from cucumbers,

They’ve a plan – they’ve a plan;

They’ve a firmly rooted notion

They can cross the Polar Ocean,

And they’ll find Perpetual Motion,

If they can – if they can…

As for fashion they forswear it,

So they say – so they say,

And the circle they will square it

Some fine day – some fine day,

Then the little pigs they’re teaching

For to fly – for to fly,

And they’ll practise what they’re preaching

By and by – by and by,

Each newly joined aspirant

To the clan – to the clan,

Must repudiate the tyrant

Known as Man – known as Man.

They mock at him and flout him,

For they do not care about him,

And they’re ‘going to do without him’

If they can – if they can.

These are the phenomena

That ev’ry pretty domina

Is hoping at her Universitee we shall see.
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Sending women to university was a travesty of common sense, scoffed the critics, a wanton waste of time and money, which upset the natural order of things, and made monsters of England’s daughters. Women undergraduates should be content to go home and remain ‘the soft and milky rabble’ God designed.
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Then gentlemen scholars could reclaim their seats of learning, and all would be well again. ‘Woman was created as an helpmeet for man, not as his equal or rival,’ explained an article called ‘The Disadvantages of Higher Education’, from 1882, ‘and woman nowadays is apt to forget that fact.’ It advised the wise young lady to concentrate on life’s ‘little things’, such as soothing a baby or mending a shirt, since

Little things

On little wings

Bear little souls to heaven.
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4. Most Abhorred of All Types

A Cambridge professor who is in the habit of addressing his students most pointedly as ‘Gentlemen!’ proceeded to his lecture room on Ash Wednesday, to find only the ladies present. With head erect and eyes riveted on the opposite wall, he announced, ‘As there is nobody here, I shall not lecture today,’ and with stately dignity made his departure.
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Invisibility was the least of their problems. The ignorance, distrust, derision, and abuse the Establishment displayed (like a respectable-looking flasher) to women undergraduates throughout the period covered by this book were shocking. There is little wonder the vanguard was so anxious its students should keep their heads below the parapet, behave impeccably, work hard, and keep quiet. ‘Never argue with your opponents,’ advised one lady tutor, ‘it only helps to clear their minds.’
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Opposition came from all sides, but although vociferous, it never was very clear-minded. The medical fraternity shouted loudest, watching their backs for a similar invasion of ‘petticoat pioneers’; peevish academics and male undergraduates joined them, with commentators on the moral and cultural welfare of the country. All of them tried to weaken young women’s resolve to become scholars, and shame their friends and families into keeping them at home and out of trouble. From the 1890s onwards, there emerged in literature discussing the advisability of university education for women the sense of society having a moral choice. A suitable school, supported by a well-disciplined family
life, would produce young women of gentility and firm principle. Send them to university, and they would either mutate into bluestockings – creatures with deviant minds and corrupt femininity – or become nervous wrecks. One of the few women students brave enough publicly to dispute this wrote in the
Durham University Journal
of 1899 how hurtful that assumption was to ordinary, hard-working women students like her: ‘This was, indeed, the most unkindest cut of all – to assert that because a woman uses the brain which nature has bestowed upon her, even as a man does, she is therefore a blue-stocking – most abhorred of all types.’ She resented being thought to belong to a ‘shrieking sisterhood’ of freaks, dressed in ‘green spectacles and a classic frown’, just because she enjoyed scholarship. It was as though women could not cope with learning, as though assimilating too much knowledge choked their minds to poetry, romance, humour, and integrity. This was so unfair.
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The ‘shrieking sisterhood’ was a favourite term for the collective voice of Britain’s suffragette movement, with whom Emily Davies of Girton was so careful not to be identified, for all her support of its ambitions. People assumed the stridency of those agitating for ‘the vote’ to be shared by those working for wider university access for women; hence the gentler campaign suffered. This lone voice from Durham recognized that those quietly encouraging equal opportunities at university in terms of degrees, prizes, scholarships, and employment were hindered by what was in most cases spurious association with violent political activists. She also realized that some influential physicians considered it arguable whether nature
had
bestowed upon woman a brain worth using. One of the most prominent was Dr Henry Maudsley, after whom the Maudsley Psychiatric Hospital in London is named.

It is neither surprising nor wholly their fault that doctrinaire
medics considered women physiologically incapable of scholarship. There might be circumstantial evidence to the contrary, they admitted, but no proof, and proof – like reputation – was all. What could be proven was that women’s brains were on average five ounces (nearly 150 grams) lighter than men’s. And that menstruation sapped the body of life-blood. The inference was that a smaller brain meant a weaker one, and that loss of blood meant a periodic loss of vigour, bodily and mental. It was a woman’s duty as national child-bearer to take care of her body, keep it free from stress. Her mind must be pure, too: if a woman was clever she should not squander that cleverness, but hold it pristine in trust for her children, especially her sons.
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Use her brain too much and she would wear it out, compromising her physical and moral femininity. ‘When nature spends in one direction,’ warned Dr Maudsley, ‘she must economise in another.’

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 it 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… For it would be an ill thing, if it should so happen, that we got the advantages of a quantity of female intellectual work at the price of a puny, enfeebled, and sickly race.
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Another commentator was even more blunt, insisting that no woman ‘could follow a course of higher education without running some risk of becoming sterile’.
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Even Miss Buss was inclined to agree that protecting what were called one’s ‘muscles of motherhood’ was more important (in some cases) than academic striving. She was apt to give her pupils’ parents homely advice: ‘I hope your daughter wears woollen
combinations in winter. That is of more importance to her than passing matriculation.’
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