The long struggle for childcare at Oxford
By Baroness Ruth Deech, former Principal of St Anne’s College, University of Oxford.
To be a woman don in a women’s college, with a full time nursery and a well stocked law library was, relatively speaking, very heaven. As a grateful mother, I wanted to enable others to share my good fortune.
The St Anne’s nursery was founded in the early 1960s by a group of fellows who all had small children around the same time, and put to use a disused Nissen hut in the grounds of the college — apparently it had been used as a baby clinic during the War. It took women dons to understand how vital childcare was to be able to continue one’s career; and even so, the fact that the nursery closed at 4.30pm or so, was often a problem because faculty and University meetings were often held at 5pm, despite protests.
I was often called by anxious young scientists in the University who found themselves pregnant but had contracts for only two years which they could not afford to interrupt. So I took up the cause of more nurseries with the University.
There were few ‘new men’ then. My baby was born in November 1974 and because I was a Fellow I was able to secure a place for her from the age of 6 weeks, largely because I wanted to get back to normal as soon as possible and also because I wanted to be unencumbered for the admissions interviews in December. Her clothes and nappies were sanitised to the nth degree, and then in she went to the nursery, where the much loved Blakey — Mrs Blake — was in charge, and had been in charge for many years. My baby joined in the ‘cigaretted’ atmosphere and the less than pristine conditions and thrived on them. It was a source of real annoyance and expense that the local authorities kept changing the nursery regulations and demanding more staff and space as the years went on, without any real evidence for this need. (For example, the St Anne’s nursery, having been rebuilt to the exact required specifications in about 1978, was told not long after, that, in fact, the kitchen was too close to the lavatories and could not be used for cooking.) Local authorities tended to view nursery users with suspicion and the red tape was generously wielded.
The fight to get more nurseries
I was often called by anxious young scientists in the University who found themselves pregnant but had contracts for only two years which they could not afford to interrupt. So I took up the cause of more nurseries with the University. All in all, as I was not the first to call for more childcare provision, the fight to get more nurseries lasted some 21 years. First I had my eye on the childcare facility in the graduate residence, Summertown House, which was used for only half a day as a sort of playschool. It seemed to me clear that it could and should provide space for full time care for working parents. This was resisted by the users; resistance to the idea of nurseries came also from other members of Hebdomadal Council, of which I was a member at the relevant time. ‘My wife stayed at home when the children were small’, said one of the councillors, and I saw that as a harbinger of doom. It was not until Vice-Chancellor Southwood embraced the idea of childcare that it happened, swiftly, and I was pleased to note that there were soon about three nurseries with a waiting list. There are now five University nurseries and five college ones and a University department to deal with them.
The arrival of no fewer than six Senior Common Room babies during the summer has resulted in the experiment of a day nursery for dons’ babies in the Nissen hut at 48 Woodstock Road.
— passage from St Anne’s annual college record, The Ship (1963)
The gender gap
Equal opportunity in the Law Faculty, however, was another matter. Throughout the seventies and eighties (and surely long before) there was a damaging imbalance in the distribution of associate professors and University posts between men’s and women’s colleges, a discrepancy that became even more unacceptable when the colleges went mixed. No doubt this went right back to the first women law students over a century ago and their lone, even shared, women tutors. As the 20th century saw more bright women candidates to read law, with far fewer places for them than for men, the women law tutors felt a duty to accept as many as they could. So a single law tutor in a (former) women’s college might well have been dealing with, say, eight students a year, while the same number in a men’s college would most likely have had three or more tutors to look after them. They would have the luxury of teaching fewer subjects and for fewer hours. The Law Board would not contemplate redistribution of posts in my time. It was all the more discriminatory because research was the only criterion for promotion (despite the cap-doffing to good teaching) and a single law tutor was much less likely to have the same time for research as a man, and more likely to have to teach a wider range of subjects. The Bodleian Law Library was closed for most of the weekend, and there was nothing on line in those times of course. Thus the women ended up with fewer publications, but often the devotion of their pupils, a good recompense. A particular sore point was the refusal of the Law Club (the faculty dining club) to accept women members until about 1980. I remember the faculty member who always refused to teach women from women’s colleges, as not good enough. And when I raised the funds to finance a second law fellow at college to teach commercial law — now a major subject — I remember the disdain shown by some of the faculty: ‘commercial’ law indeed, said a fellow at a four-fellow college.
I was sorry that so many women candidates preferred to apply to former men’s colleges rather than to former women’s college when we all went mixed, but now it seems to have evened out, and what I describe above is just a distant memory, preserved only by the very old!
Today, the University provides generous family leave benefits to employees, access to affordable and quality childcare for both staff and student parents via 450 FTE nursery places (a ratio of 1 per 32 members of staff), 332 in 5 specialist Universities nurseries, as well as reserved spaces in other community facilities. Our ratio of 1 nursery place per 30 members of University staff is significantly better than most other HEIs within the UK.
Read more about our campaign marking the centenary of women’s right to matriculate and to graduate at University Of Oxford: Women Making History, 100 years of Oxford degrees for women.
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