In Victorian England, women were believed to only need to be educated in “accomplishments” such as artistic talents (singing and dancing), and the languages, essentially anything that would allow them to earn a husband and become the “Angels of the House” (Hughes).
By the Victorian era, women’s frustration with the poor quality of the education available to them was starting to show more and more. In 1840, 60% of women were still illiterate, but by 1860, only 40% were. The industrial age meant that education increasingly offered men the opportunity to better themselves, and where educational opportunities were made available to men, they were quickly also sought by women. For instance, in 1823, theMechanics’ Institutein London was opened to provide educational lectures for working men that they could attend outside of their working hours; by 1830, these had been opened to women as well.
Supply began, slowly, to meet the demand for women’s education. Boarding schools had long been available to teach the boys whose parents could afford them, while girls were given a less academic education at other schools or at home; now, girls’ equivalents of those schools began opening, such as Cheltenham Ladies’ Collegein 1853, and Roedean School in 1885. In many cases such schools were founded by wealthy women who believed passionately that their fellows deserved an education. While such schools were usually reserved for those who could afford their fees, the 1880 Elementary Education Act made education compulsory for all children between the ages of five and ten with government funding available. Though this was often ignored by poorer parents who needed the income from child labour, it did mean that all girls were guaranteed an education in law, if not in fact.
The Victorian era had seen the establishment not only of schools open to women, but also of universities, and colleges within Oxford and Cambridge. Many of the universities founded in the Victorian era were co-educational from the start, and the red-brick universitiesof the early 20th century followed suit. The University of London was the first in the UK to award degrees to women, which it did in 1878. This progress moved alongside the campaign to give women the vote. Many women campaigned for both, while others, such as the writer Gertrude Bell, felt that education had to come first, so that when granted the vote, women would be well enough educated to use enfranchisement wisely.
Effigies of female scholars were burnt in the streets of Cambridge, and fireworks thrown in through their windows.In 1918, women in the UK were finally given the vote, if not quite on equal terms with men (that came in 1928). In 1920, Oxford became the second-to-last university in the UK to allow women to become full members and take degrees; previously, they had been allowed to study there, but not been given an equivalent award to men. Only in 1948 did Cambridge follow suit; when the idea had first been voted on in 1897, there had been a near-riot in the city, with male undergraduates burning effigies of female scholars, and throwing fireworks at the windows of women’s colleges. Even then, the university was allowed to limit the numbers of female students relative to men, and used that power to the full.
Oxford: Before 7 October 1920, women were not allowed to matriculate (ie be admitted to become members of the University) or to graduate. From the late 1870s, women had attended lectures, taken examinations, and had gained honours in those examinations. They were, however, unable to receive the degree to which, had they been men, their examinations would have entitled them.
The new University statute of 1920 which admitted women to full membership of the University, and which came into effect from October that year, enabled women who had previously taken, and gained honours in, University examinations to return to matriculate (ie go through the formal ceremony of admission to the University) and have the degree to which they were now entitled conferred on them (again, at a formal ceremony). Consequently, at the very first ceremony at which women were able to graduate more than forty women did so.
The first woman to gain honours in a University examination which was intended to be equivalent to that taken by men for a degree was Annie Mary Anne Henley Rogers. In 1877 she gained first class honours in Latin and Greek in the Second Examination for Honours in the recently instituted 'Examinations for Women'. In 1879 she followed this with first class honours in Ancient History. Annie Rogers matriculated and graduated on 26 October 1920.
Oxford had taken far longer to grant women degrees than almost any other university in Britain. Only Cambridge was slower: although Girton College had been founded in 1869, full degree status there had to wait until 1948. In 1920, the distinguished Cambridge classicist Jane Harrison bemoaned the fact that it was 'So like Oxford & so low to start after us & get in first!' In London, by contrast, the first degrees for women were granted in 1878. In nearby Reading, women formed a majority of students by [1920] the time Oxford finally, formally acknowledged women's membership of the University.
Oxford's tardiness seems all the more extraordinary when those heading the campaign for degrees made such a strong intellectual case, and worked so hard and carefully to reinforce it. Indeed, Dorothea Beale's initial intention that St Hilda's should be a place for serious study free from the expectation of taking exams came under fierce attack from the heads of the other women's colleges who saw that this (from some perspectives a more radical plan) would risk undermining their collective argument for degrees. And St Hilda's in fact came to follow the same pattern as the other women's colleges. So why did it take so long for degree status to be granted?
Part of the explanation lies in the fears engendered by women's presence in a previously all-male environment. In 1896, during a debate in Congregation on degrees for women, weekly satirical magazine Punch encapsulated the problem in a cartoon which showed the Greek goddess of wisdom trying to enter Oxford, but finding her way blocked by a college don. 'Very sorry, Miss Minerva', he explains, 'but perhaps you are not aware that this is a monastic establishment'.
At the same time, male undergraduates expressed anxiety about an 'invasion of the Amazons'. Academics similarly described their doubts about the imprudence of coeducation. 'It does not matter if boys will be boys', observed a fellow, 'so long as one can prevent girls being girls'. In 1914, just six years before degrees were finally granted, the head of one women's college felt compelled to write to her students warning them of 'a very tiresome complaint that the men examinees are disturbed by the way our students sit in their tight skirts and show their legs'.
Above all, men at Oxford opposed reform because of their reluctance to share power with women. Admitting women to degrees in Oxford carried with it membership of University committees and boards, including Convocation and Congregation – the ultimate institutional governing body. Graduates were entitled to elect two MPs to represent the University in parliament until 1950. Indeed, when the degree statute was put forward in 1920, its contingency was emphasised: it 'did not proceed on any principle of abstract equality', but now that the parliamentary franchise was 'settled', there seemed no good reason to resist the change. (In fact, the franchise itself remained substantively unequal: in 1918, while the suffrage had been opened up to all men over 21, only women over 30 who met a property qualification had been given the vote; not until 1928 were women's voting rights on the same basis as men's.)
In response to Cambridge's failure to follow suit in granting degrees to women in the 1920s – and indeed their assertion of themselves as a more masculine institution by formally limiting the number of female undergraduates (Annie Rogers was told that there was 'a Cambridge propaganda to get boys for themselves by representing Oxford as socialistic, weak in athletics and bewomaned') – a 'limitation statute' was passed in Oxford in 1927 to restrict the number of women students to no more than 840 (roughly a sixth of the University's undergraduate body). This quota (although raised to 970 in 1948) was not lifted until 1957.
Higher Education in the UK: The new University of London achieved one of the principal goals of the founders of UCL: it was the first university in England to award degrees without any religious test. The first degrees were conferred in 1839 to students from UCL and King's College London. But from 1840 it affiliated other colleges and schools, opening up the possibility of degrees for many students who would not previously have attended a university. Another big step came in 1858 when the system of affiliated colleges was abandoned and London degrees were opened to any man who passed the examination. From 1878, University of London degrees were opened to women - the first in the United Kingdom.
The first women's college was Bedford College in London, which opened in 1849. It was followed by Royal Holloway (with which it merged in the 1980s) and the London School of Medicine for Women in London and colleges in Oxford and Cambridge. After London opened its degrees to women in 1878, UCL opened its courses in Arts, Law and Science to women, although it took the First World War to open up the London medical schools. By the end of the 19th century, the onlyBritish universities not granting degrees to women were Oxford, Cambridge and Dublin.
The first of the civic university colleges was the Anglican Queen's College, Birmingham, built on the nucleus of the Birmingham Medical School, which gained its royal charter in 1843 but did not ultimately prove a success. This was followed in 1851 by Owens College, Manchester. Further university colleges followed in Newcastle (1871), notable for admitting womento its courses from the start, Aberystwyth (1872), Leeds (1874), Bristol (1876), Sheffield (1879), Mason College, Birmingham (1880), Dundee (1881), Liverpool (1881), Nottingham (1881), Cardiff (1883), and Bangor (1884). With the exceptions of Newcastle (associated with Durham) and Dundee (associated with St Andrews), all of the university colleges prepared their students for London degrees.
Effigies of female scholars were burnt in the streets of Cambridge, and fireworks thrown in through their windows.
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