Women at the University of Oxford: Revolutionaries in a Male-Dominated World
“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write.”
These now legendary words were first spoken by Virginia Woolf in 1928, when she gave two lectures that were later that year published as the still-inspiring feminist pamphlet A Room of One’s Own. Woolf gave these lectures at two women’s colleges in Cambridge, Newnham and Girton, the former of which is still a women-only college to this day.
At Oxford, all colleges have been open to all genders since 2008, when St Hilda’s College started admitting men. This process has taken a long time, and there has been a gender segregation until far into the twentieth century. Oxford did not allow women to graduate with a degree until 1920. Woolf’s criticisms voiced at the Cambridge colleges in 1928 reflect the fact that Cambridge did not allow women to become full members of the university until 1948.
However, long before that, ambitious feminists had supplied money and rooms of one’s own for highly intelligent women who wanted to learn — often simply for learning’s sake, as it was considered extremely inappropriate for married women to work.
The first women’s college in Oxford, Lady Margaret Hall, was founded in 1878 by the Association for Promoting the Higher Education of Women. A year later, the same association founded Somerville College, and created an intriguing manifesto called the Society of Home-Students. It is this latter society that would eventually grow into my own college, St Anne’s.
The Ruth Deech Building (OUImages / Rob Judges).
The Society of Home-Students was founded in order to make studying in Oxford affordable to a much broader range of students. It was explicitly not a college: it facilitated tutorials and lectures, but not accommodation, supporting instead those women who for financial or practical reasons lived in private housing in Oxford. The Society owned no buildings until 1910. When ten years later women at the university began receiving degrees, the Society grew rapidly, and Mrs Amy Hartland found the location St Anne’s occupies today. In 1952, St Anne’s became a college after all, under the royal charter that was one of the first actions to be performed by the new Queen Elizabeth II.
The St Anne’s mascot was adopted in 1913. Much to the slight embarrassment of students today, this animal is not a lion, unicorn or bear like the mascot of many other colleges, but a beaver. As Ruth Butler, one of the first tutors of the Society, explained, this is because beavers are hard-working, communal animals, who during the day work together, but at night return home to their own little lodges — like the Home-Students of St Anne’s, who all went back home at night. (Incidentally, the lewd meaning of ‘beaver’ is registered by the Oxford English Dictionary as not having been coined until 1927.)
Meanwhile, St Anne’s had been home to an impressive range of female alumni, including Merze Tate, the first female African-American student at the University of Oxford, and Makereti (Maggie) Papakura, the first Maori ethnographer who had her work published. My own scholarship is named after a famous fellow of St Anne’s, Iris Murdoch, who was notorious among her own students for teaching while lying on the floor. It sounds almost ironical, but St Anne’s has since led the way in emancipation by becoming one of the first colleges to become co-educational — by admitting men.
The first men’s colleges had started admitting women in 1974, which means that until that very year, women at Oxford could only attend five out of 38 colleges. Following a debate which had already started in the late 1960s, St Anne’s started admitting male students in 1979. Urinals had to be hastily installed everywhere as the first mixed-gender year was admitted, and a third of that year was male. St Anne’s has had a roughly 50–50 gender balance in both its undergraduate and graduate student bodies ever after. This just shows how quickly both the College and the university as a whole radically changed: Dr Martin Speight, the first male fellow at St Anne’s, is still at St Anne’s to this day.
And is St Anne’s still radically feminist to this day? The college still takes pride in being welcoming to those who would not necessarily have considered applying to Oxford despite being academically very bright. Just as we saw in the cases of Merze Tate and Makereti Papakura in the 1920s, this means taking more into account than gender alone: St Anne’s outreach targets ethnic minorities, people from low-income backgrounds, and those who did not go to private schools. The feminist spirit of St Anne’s certainly still permeates the college, which can be felt every time a new student blinks at the fact that we say ‘alumna’ and asks why those who graduate from St Anne’s aren’t addressed with the male ‘alumnus’.
Written by: Kanta Dihal
DPhil in English Literature, St Anne’s College
http://mskanta.wordpress.com
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