The Cambridge Women

Rita Tullberg (1996). Women at Cambridge. Cambridge University Press, pp. 230

The University of Cambridge has many firsts to its illustrious intellectual and political history, pioneering legacies and confronting entrenched practices over nine centuries of its existence. However, in the practice of gender inclusion in its educational fold, the university has been found rather wanting.  Cambridge was the last university in the British Isles to give women full membership and same degrees as men. Its relative position vis-à-vis London University or Oxford is inferior in this respect. Full membership was opened to women in Cambridge only as late as in 1948 (Oxford had given this right in 1919 to its women) and it was late 1960s when the first Cambridge college opened its gates to female students. This has been the historical circumstance despite the struggle to include women in higher education in Cambridge that began in mid- nineteenth century and the outstanding performance of its first female students. Philippa Fawcett was ranked above the first wrangler in mathematics tripos in late 1800s while Ellen McArthur equaled the history tripos wrangler. The tripos was and continues to be the honours bachelor degree in Cambridge and the wrangler list enumerates the relative performance of the examinees in a given year.

There have been a few remarkable books that have attempted to tell women’s history, appearance and participation in Cambridge University. Barbara Stephen’s Emily Davies and Girton College, Mary Agnes Hamilton’s Newnham: An Informal Biography and Edward Shils and Carmen Blacker’s (eds) work Cambridge Women: Twelve Portraits, remain indispensable in this line of scholarship. This book under review is an important successor in this lineage, drawing on exhaustive archival material from Girton and Newnham, the first two women’s colleges in Cambridge. Tullberg traces the cause of Cambridge women’s education with respect to the internal policies of governance, pedagogy and curriculum, the social underpinning provided by morality and religion, the economics of women’s employment and the political environment in which suffragette movement was taking place.

The battle of the sexes

Today, Cambridge is the only university in the UK to have women-only colleges- Newnham, Lucy Cavendish and Murray Edwards. Recently, Newnham college created history by changing their admission policy to openly admit individuals of transgender identity. These are small and significant strides, but the old battle for women’s admission was frayed with obstacles on different fronts. On the one hand was the question of examining body, curriculum and award of degree, and on the other, issues of membership and governing position of women and access to collegiate life and social experience that are integral to a Cambridge life. The university was at first only an examining body for its female pupils, who privately took tuitions and learned in an atmosphere of limited access to library, lectures, labs and funding. Even when women managed to cross this frontier and pass the examination, they were not awarded an equal degree as men because they were private individuals and not members of the university. Formal teaching position or independent research was denied to them and their education did not help their cause when it was time to marry. Since women’s role were strictly defined within the parameters of family and motherhood in Victorian times, educated women were spinsters (often not by choice), underemployed and financially insecure.

In this context, there were two distinct movements within Cambridge that supported women’s education. The first one was led by the inimitable Emily Davies who started the Girton college for women a few miles off Cambridge city centre. Davies was consistent in her religious position (she was a conservative) and expected women to conform to the roles or at least refrain from creating trouble. She was also willing to negotiate on the examination system of helping the girls appear for the previous examination (or the ‘Little Go’ as it is locally called). The Little Go is the pre-university exam to Cambridge where students are tested whether they were individually suited to be educated in the university. The third problem was the quality of pass degree as opposed to the tripos in the undergraduate level. This was a burning issue in late nineteenth century because there was a movement within the university to do away with the pass degree since its quality was sufficiently lower than the tripos. Davies would not publicly include this demand within her gender movement.

Her consistency in these positions, were to pit her against the formidable Henry Sidgewick, a Cambridge tutor and founder of the other women’s college, Newnham. Sidgewick was a liberal and believed in secular education for women, wanted to overcome the little go, as it was disadvantageous to women. Most importantly, he wanted the issues of pedagogy and curriculum reformation to be included in the gender campaign. While the women’s movement were exclusive and oppositional, prejudice against women’s intellectual ability and questions of endurance, employability, social roles and chivalry competed with the claims for equality and competition. Unfortunately, some of the intellectual giants of the time like Alfred Marshall (one of the founders of modern economics) was publicly opposed to women’s higher education because he believed that women were intellectually deficient. But, others like Rutherford (Nobel Laureate in chemistry and father of nuclear physics) was a belligerent supporter of women, especially in science.

Hope for the future

More than fifty years after Cambridge finally opened its door to women, this book remains relevant and important to carry on not only the gender debate but also the issues of decolonialization of the curriculum that Cambridge is intensely grappling with in the last few years. Historical battles mirror contemporary reality and the value of debate, participation, openness and inclusivity continues to be extremely important for Cambridge, if it were to continue its primacy in the field of education and culture, that it has done over the last millennium. As a Cambridge woman, I do hope, dear old Cambridge leans towards the disadvantaged prospective students so that it enlarges the universe in which it thrives. Their voices and perspectives matter and can only add on to the richness and depth of what it means to partake of this tradition. May the best of Cambridge spirit survive!