Bluestockings (18 page)

These bluestockings may (to a diminishing extent) have belonged to an academic elite, but socially, culturally, religiously, politically, sexually, even physically, university was open to all comers, provided they behaved themselves and pretended to be tolerably normal. An unsophisticated girl from suburbia or the provinces – like Gwendolen Freeman – was unlikely to have encountered before the lesbians or communists or atheists she would come across at college, and certainly not in an atmosphere of respect and high expectation. She could never have imagined making close friends with people of a different class, religion, or race.

As for meeting men: an undergraduate in the 1930s maintained that it was still perfectly possible in that late era to go through your university career without conversing with someone of the opposite sex. It would take some doing, though, and for those brave enough to take it, advice was available on how to cope with male attention:

Don’t run away. This rouses the spirit of the chase. Don’t faint. This rouses the protective impulse. Look him slowly up and down, smiling cynically. This will make him think he’s improperly dressed… However, if you feel you would like to talk: talk about yourself… If he tries to talk, don’t listen. Or change the subject. Either way you’ll stop him; he’ll give up…

If all else fails… follow the advice of all the sex appeal and beauty experts – and all the advertisements. This won’t leave you any time for meeting men.
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Not much of this was relevant to freshers anyway: most of them had neither the opportunity nor confidence to discover sex (if they ever discovered it) until their first year was behind them.

Even though rules and restrictions held women undergraduates in such a tight embrace, students were still paradoxically encouraged to use initiative on occasion, which could be daunting. Being uprooted from the strict routine of family or school life was disorientating. Daphne Hanschell had loved her convent during the 1920s. Bells rang to tell you when to do things, you clanked softly with enamel badges declaring your duties or your place in the school hierarchy, and friends were neatly divided into those on your side, those not. She remembers longing to ask her fellow freshers at university to be on her side on her first day. She was so lonely. Her tutor had told her to go to a lecture, but Daphne dared not ask for directions to the hall, and so missed it. She was supposed to do an essay based on books in the library, but no one explained how to locate them among the miles and miles of shelving, and she gave up.
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Vera Brittain once said that being a fresher felt like being in quarantine; to Daphne, and shy girls like her, it was more like solitary confinement.

Communication should have been better. Very few institutions took the time – right up until 1939 – to produce the sort of vade mecum its female students needed. They were endlessly being forbidden things, but nobody explained where to go, how the system worked, whom to ask for help. One bluestocking remembers waking at 4.00 a.m. each morning of her first fortnight and being physically sick with loneliness and apprehension. Another nearly died, she says, of homesickness, and sat for hours at a time in her room anxiously wondering what she should be doing. And despite what Vera Brittain said about the lack of jealousy and resentment, insecure freshers were quite capable of sniffing out victims in their midst, like Margery Morton at St Hilda’s.
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Margery was older than her peers, coming to university in 1914 following three years at the Royal College of Music as a harp scholar, and a year’s cramming at Oxford High School. She was ostracized as a sneak because she already knew the college bursar. She could not reciprocate tea parties because she had so little money and disliked the ubiquitous cigarettes (banning others from smoking in her bedroom). She declined to join Sunday bike rides, because she was church-bred and considered them frivolous. And she weighed twelve stone. ‘I found a shop which sold damaged chocolate – floor sweepings – very cheaply, and made good use of it.’ Her addiction to sugar was considered pathetic and disloyal, in an era of rationing and national sacrifice. Poor girl.

A little advice on budgeting would have been useful. Few students, before leaving home for university, had occasion to manage their own finances, apart from small amounts of pocket money spent or saved. Now they were suddenly responsible for all the sundries of life, and cutting their coats, as the saying goes, according to their cloth. Even though
main meals, accommodation, and tuition fees were covered by parents, and supplemented by scholarships and grants, there were still plenty of expenses left. Fragrant cakes in greaseproof paper were regularly sent in parcels from home, and occasionally new or mended clothes and books, and most students sent home their dirty washing, since the postal service was so swift and cheap. Local laundries proved unreliable and unfeasibly expensive.

When Kathleen Courtney went to college in 1897, she carefully itemized her monthly payments for her father’s approval. They totalled £1 11s 6d (about £100 at today’s rate), and included 7s for laundry (the costliest single item), 2s for the church collection plate, 2s 6d for stamps, 5s for gloves, 5s for books, 7s 6d for entertainment and club subscriptions, and 2s 6d for miscellaneous bits and bobs. She also paid £2 per term to hire a bicycle.
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Forty years later, Joan Morgan went to Liverpool to read zoology. Her accounts were rather more varied, including ‘tweezers for eyebrows and dissections’, a powder puff, chocolates, nail varnish, toffee, powdered shampoo, and acid drops.
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No matter how lavish their budgets, few women had any funds left at the end of term. Their first vacation was a welcome chance to replenish the coffers. Before the First World War, young women were not encouraged to withdraw money from a bank account without a responsible male in attendance (although post-office accounts were common), and students were constantly writing home requesting a pound note or two to be sent in the post.

The fresher’s first homecoming after being away for a term could be awkward. Family dynamics had altered, and expectations changed. There might be jealousy and resentment from siblings forced to make sacrifices, or suspicion from parents unsure what their daughters had become. But
usually everyone was eager to hear all about the adventure of university life, while being reassured that their pet bluestocking still loved home best of all. The trouble was, many did not. They preferred their student lives. With more time, as their courses progressed, families adjusted, but some remained fractured beyond repair. Rosemary Vickers had never been particularly happy at home.
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Her parents rowed; she considered her father to be deeply unhappy, and her mother a manipulative hypochondriac. As an only child, Rosemary felt trapped. She had hoped that by going to university (in 1935) she would not only refresh her own life, but give her parents a chance to come to terms with one another in her absence.

Her first term was the happiest period of her life. She made friends, who invited her to their houses in the holidays, and for the first time ever she felt warmly loved. It was only when she returned home at Christmas that she realized ‘the utter impossibility of these new friendships with my particular background’. How could she bring people home to these dreary, parochial people, still blindly bickering all the time? And if she was unable to reciprocate her friends’ invitations, she obviously could not accept them either. They would lose interest in her and think her rude. ‘Life is poisoned at the very root,’ she wrote miserably in her diary. ‘I’m being educated out of my real class in society and made unnaturally critical of my own parents.’

It took Rosemary a long time to reconcile her two different worlds.

7. Women’s Sphere

You know, Eileen, in spite of going to Manchester,
you’re really quite normal.
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Perhaps the most obvious sign of continuity between their old and new lives for every undergraduette – unless they lived at home – was the ringing of bells. At each college or hall of residence, bells measured out the routine with reassuring authority. At Langwith Hall, Manchester, they rang nine times daily during the 1930s: for waking at 7.15 a.m., prayers at 8.00, breakfast ten minutes later, the first lunch sitting at 1.00 p.m., the second at 1.45, tea at 4.00, dinner at 7.30, prayers at 8.10, and a ‘morality bell’ at lights-out. At Leeds there was also a dressing gong before dinner, and bulbs were twinkled on and off a few times at 10.30 p.m. to prepare for ‘quiet time’ at 11.00. Any noise after that meant trouble. Senior students were recruited to police the corridors, and report misdemeanours to the authorities. It was an invidious job no one enjoyed.

Domestic orderliness was encouraged not only to ensure the smooth running of a college community, but to lend an air of familiarity to a strange environment. There was a certain cosiness about everyone eating together three times a day, praying together in the chapel, helping each other with dressing, shopping, hair-washing, mending. Coping with the mundane helped settle this rarefied, academic life into a homely context. Be it Durham or Exeter, 1880 or 1930, a woman student’s timetable remained remarkably uniform. On weekdays it would be much as those Manchester bells dictated, with chapel and then work in the morning, exercise and/or more work in the afternoon, meetings of various sorts in the early evenings, and private study after cocoa at 9.00 p.m. (or a cocoa party, of course). There was more socializing and less work on Saturdays; long walks or cycle rides and two bouts of chapel instead of one on Sundays.

A rather grumpy monitor summons her fellow students out of bed at Manchester University in 1905.

Conformity was everything. It was achieved (when achieved at all) through a firm mixture of expectation and regulation. Apart from the usual laws about curfews and the making and
receiving of visits, litanies of house rules circumscribed students’ behaviour around the country. In Durham, for example, no ‘Dove’, or woman student, was allowed to take her elevenses in a café; at Royal Holloway College the borrowing of teaspoons from the kitchen was forbidden; at Manchester you were not allowed to do the washing-up in the bath; and no Girtonian was permitted eggs in her bedroom. Liverpool insisted hats and jackets be worn at lectures, while Somerville expected you to keep them on at tea. Nottingham was a little more pragmatic: ‘Endeavour to behave in the common rooms as you would in your home. Don’t wear “here-I-come” apparel. Don’t do a day’s work on Monday and then spend the rest of the week admiring it.’
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Stick to the rules, was the universal message, and you will avoid making a fool of yourself and your university.

There were always going to be rebels and mavericks, especially in academic institutions peopled by thinking women. If the college authorities could not quell them with activity, disapproval, or threats, they were expelled. But the majority of bluestockings accepted this mildly conventual existence with good grace. A measure of physical restriction was a small price to pay for intellectual freedom. Sensible students worked with what they were given. Using imposed structure as an outline, they coloured the picture with originality and flair.

Katie Dixon, at Newnham in the late 1870s, welcomed the college routine. Every morning, after breakfast, she would go to the sunny library and start work (but never before nine o’clock: a point of honour). If she felt stiff or bilious sitting down for too long, she would wander down to the lecture rooms to stand and read at the lectern – providing, of course, it was not in use. After lunch she played tennis or, in summer, went boating – all ‘white flannels and pink parasols’. Back to
Newnham for tea; then evensong at King’s at half-past five, dinner, and perhaps a little more work.

I remember many a winter evening with a roaring little fire, (that divine cakey coal, you could heave up with the poker) lying in one straight line in my wicker chair, lamp… behind me, 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.
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It sounds wonderfully relaxed. Sometimes it is easy to forget that cynicism has not always been in fashion: an indiscriminate sense of wellbeing washes over so many memories of college life. A student in the 1920s confessed to feeling almost stupidly content, the whole time: ‘I was very happy indeed at Girton, and so were most of us, but on looking back I do not quite know why. It seems to me now that we were not very enterprising and that life was not really so interesting as it might have been.’
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