LAURA SCHWARTZ is Career Development Fellow in History at St Hugh’s College, University of Oxford. Her research interests are gender and radicalism in modern Britain, and she is currently working on her second book, ‘Infidel Feminism: Secularism, Religion and Women’s Emancipation, England, 1830–1914’, to be published by Manchester University Press.
Gender, Education and Community at St Hugh’s, 1886–2011
To my sisters,
Bianca and Antonia
First published in Great Britain in 2011 by
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Copyright © Laura Schwartz 2011
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List of illustrations
A note on archive sources
Acknowledgements
Introduction
St Hugh’s College and the movement for women’s education
1 Founding impulses
Women, faith and knowledge, 1886–1914
The Anglican inheritance
Visions of women’s education
St Hugh’s and the feminists
2 ‘A women’s community’
Continuity and transformation, 1914–39
Everyday life in a women’s community
Changing times and new women
The professionalisation of St Hugh’s
Relations between women
‘The Row’
Towards another war
3 Different or equal?
Women in a men’s university, 1939–87
Women in a man’s world: mid-century backlash?
Co-residence, 1972–7
St Hugh’s goes mixed, 1977–87
4 Who cleans a room of one’s own?
Scouts, students and domestic labour, 1886–2011
The other women: servants, ‘ladies’ and feminists
St Hugh’s domestic staff, 1886 to the present day
Working lives
Part of the family?
From home to workplace: continuity and change since 1970
They did their job, we did ours
5 Whose education is it anyway?
Class, funding and protest, 1886–2011
Struggling to survive in a place of privilege, 1886–1945
Education for all? 1945–79
Caught in the crossfire, 1979–2011
Amongst women and between men
25 years of co-education
Select bibliography
Notes
Index
St Hugh’s first students and Principal, 1887 (frontispiece)
St Hugh’s daily timetable, Trinity Term 1924
Matriculation, c. 1912–14
Matriculation, c. 1917–18
St Hugh’s women participate in mixed-sex societies: St John’s Madrigal Society, 1947
A room of one’s own at St Hugh’s, c. 1928
St Hugh’s college servants, c. 1928
St Hugh’s students fight it out in ‘Battels Row’, 1972
The research for this book was undertaken while the St Hugh’s College Archive was being re-catalogued. All material has been recorded under the old cataloguing system. Material for which the new cataloguing system was already in place has a second reference in parenthesis.
This book, perhaps more than most, was a collective endeavour to which an entire community contributed. It benefited from many conversations over college lunches, from the support of my colleagues, and from staff in every department of St Hugh’s whose work made it possible for me to write its history. I hope that they will all recognise themselves somewhere in its pages.
Special thanks must go to Mary Clapinson for sharing her knowledge of the college with me; Amanda Ingram for her expertise in the archive; Rachel Rawlings for her support from the Development Office; and St Hugh’s historians George Garnett, Patrick Healy, Gregg McClymont, Senia Paseta and John Robertson. Senia and John were kind enough to endure early versions of the manuscript, while draft chapters were also read by Julia Bush, Lucy Delap, Carol Dyhouse, Brian Harrison, Janet Howarth, Alison Light and Pat Thane. Their insightful comments were greatly appreciated, whether or not they were followed, and any errors remain my own.
Past and present students of St Hugh’s were, of course, crucial to this project, particularly in guiding me towards unknown sources or under-explored corners of the college’s history. Especially helpful were Penelope Rundle, Ann Soutter and Hannah Boston; as well as the Senior Students who completed the questionnaire and sent me their reminiscences. All those who agreed to become the subjects of oral history deserve special thanks, not only for giving me their time and their stories, but also for reminding me that history is populated by real people and that writing it can be complicated, dangerous and wonderful.
St Hugh’s first students and Principal, 1887: Back row, left to right – Jessie Emmerson, Charlotte Jourdain, Wilhelmina de Lona Mitchell. Front row, left to right – Annie Moberly, Constance Ashburner, Grace Parsons. Wilhelmina de Lona Mitchell joined slightly after the four original students. (St Hugh’s College Archive)
St Hugh’s College and the movement for women’s education
AT FIRST GLANCE they are just another group of stiff and dully respectable Victorian ladies, dutifully posing to record the moment for institutional posterity. A closer look at this portrait of St Hugh’s first students and Principal is, however, slightly more unsettling. Charlotte Jourdain has evidently been asked to demurely lower her eyes, but is she, in fact, frowning? And what are we to make of Grace Parsons’s challenge to the camera as she stares directly back at us?
Whatever we might imagine to be the story behind this photograph, we are left in no doubt that it depicts a group of extremely serious young women. And rightly so, for, as pioneers of one of the first women’s colleges, they had a hard task ahead of them. Buttoned up they may have been, but they were also on the front line of women’s struggle to acquire knowledge and, with it, some kind of freedom. They were part of a wider movement for women’s education, driven by women’s rights advocates, university reformers and some sections of the Protestant churches, out of which St Hugh’s came to be founded in 1886.
It is hard for us today to fully grasp what an immensely important symbol the right to education (especially the right to attend university) was for women in the nineteenth century. How, for instance, are we to interpret the 1869 pamphlet written on the apparently prosaic subject of girls’ secondary schools, which suddenly ends with a call to:
Set free the women who sigh in the dark prison-houses, the captives of ignorance and folly. Cruel tyrants are these; slay them!1
And why were so many so violently opposed to the idea of four young women gathering together in a house in North Oxford with the intention of studying for a few exams?
Answers to some of these puzzles only emerge once we begin to understand the extent to which St Hugh’s was born into the grip of fierce debate on the very question of what it meant to be a woman. Calls for the improvement of female education arose out of a rapidly changing society, marked by recent industrialisation, the rise of a professional middle class, and the emergence of an organised women’s movement. During the first half of the nineteenth century, the position of women was transformed as the majority of the population moved from the countryside into the cities and as work (that is, productive waged labour) moved out of the household, where a wife would have helped her husband in his trade, into the factory or office, from which she was, in theory, excluded. Changing patterns of labour and production were accompanied by changing ideas about what constituted manhood and womanhood, and femininity came to be increasingly identified with the home, family, emotional life and morality.
The emergence of a ‘public’ sphere of work and politics and a ‘private’ domestic sphere was an uneven, partial, and continually contested process. As the women pictured above testify, the Victorian woman cannot be reduced to the cliché of the ‘Angel in the House’ concerned only with bearing children and creating a domestic haven for her husband to return to after a hard day’s work. Many, even middle-class, women continued to have to work to support themselves while others actively contributed to the world outside the home as writers, journalists, philanthropists, missionaries and church workers. Yet the ideological relegation of women to the domestic sphere did have important material implications – most particularly, for middle-class women, their exclusion from almost all paid professions and institutions of higher education.
From 1850 onwards, some women began to collectively organise against their exclusion from and lack of recognition within the public sphere, marking the beginning of a ‘first wave’ of British feminism. Education was one of the earliest and most enduring demands of the Victorian women’s movement, for it represented the first hurdle in their struggle to participate on an equal basis with men as economically and politically active citizens. Without adequate education, women would not be able to find financially and intellectually rewarding work, nor would they be able to make responsible and reasoned decisions about how their country ought to be governed. Feminist thinkers earlier in the century had directly equated women’s oppression with their enforced ignorance, and this theme was taken up by post-1850 activists such as Josephine Butler, who declared that, ‘[w]orse than bodily privations or pains … are these aches and pangs of ignorance’.2 The early feminist periodical the English Woman’s Journal (est. 1858) made education one of its central campaigning issues, decrying the extremely low standard of girls’ secondary schools and the almost complete lack of higher education for women. One of its editors, Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, lamented that female talent was going to waste when it could be engaged in useful work for the betterment of society. ‘We hear cries that the world is going wrong for want of women,’ she wrote, ‘that moral progress cannot be made without their help’, and yet how were women to carry out their moral mission if they remained barred from the universities and prevented from taking up meaningful professions?3
Feminist arguments were also strongly moralistic and highly critical of the enforced idleness of the idealised vision of the middle-class wife engaged in neither household labour (performed by servants) nor professional occupation.4 Such idleness robbed women not only of their independence, but also their dignity: ‘It is to the last degree indecent,’ protested Elizabeth Wolstenholme, member of the North of England Council for the Education of Women, ‘that women should be dependent upon marriage for a professional maintenance.’5 Yet demand for women’s education was not merely an abstract principle but also a question of pressing necessity, for it was becoming increasingly clear that many women were not able to rely upon a husband or father to support them financially. The 1851 census recorded 876,920 ‘surplus’ women, and in 1861 Josephine Butler estimated that at least two fifths of women were unmarried, and one quarter of married women were compelled to perform some labour to maintain themselves and their families.6 Without adequate training or employment, middle-class women were forced into low-paid positions of genteel drudgery, most commonly as teachers or governesses. Their lack of education was widely perceived to be an ‘evil’ not only for the women who entered these professions, but also for the children they were so ill-equipped to teach.7 As well as better training for teachers, feminists wanted women to be educated to enter a variety of professions – the more radical among them arguing that women could work as medical doctors, as managers of hospitals, workhouses, prisons and charitable institutions, and also go into farming or business.8
The women’s movement may have been the most vocal and forceful advocate of the need to improve female education, but the institutional developments that occurred during this period were driven by a variety of agendas. Many of the first professionally run girls’ schools were often led by women with connections to women’s rights networks, such as the North London Collegiate School, established in 1850 by Frances Buss, and Cheltenham Ladies’ College, established in 1854 and presided over by Dorothea Beale from 1858.9 Their high academic standards and ethos of public service marked an important shift away from the more ‘domestic’ model of privately run girls’ schools which had proliferated in the first half of the century.10 After 1870, however, the government also played an important role in establishing secondary schools for girls, reflecting a desire to rationalise and reform Britain’s education system generally.11 A more competitive and meritocratic form of education was also championed by some of the ‘leading lights of liberalism’ at Oxford and Cambridge, whose support for the founding of women’s colleges was only one element of their drive to modernise the ancient universities and ensure that they were not superseded by the more professionally-orientated colleges growing up in London, Manchester and other provincial towns.12 The Church of England also helped to establish a number of girls’ schools and women’s colleges during this period, for it was keen to retain some influence in an area of education in which non-denominationalism was rapidly gaining a foothold.13
The first higher education establishment for women was founded by Christian Socialists Frederick Denison Maurice and Charles Kingsley in London in 1848. Queen’s College was initially set up to provide training for governesses, though they soon found that many ‘ladies’ of a slightly higher social standing were also keen to attend their lecture series. This was followed by the Unitarian Elizabeth Jesser Reid’s Bedford College London in 1849, which, like Queen’s, was not residential but simply provided a base for lectures and classes often delivered by male academics from the University of London.14 Throughout the 1860s and 70s, Ladies’ Educational Associations were set up in most large English towns, attracting a mixture of prominent local residents and church members, wives and daughters of university men, women’s rights advocates, and other reform-minded members of the community. Along with helping to organise ‘lectures for ladies’, they also pushed for girls to be allowed to sit for Local Examinations and lobbied their nearby universities for access and facilities.15 Such associations played a key role in eventually persuading universities to open first their classes, and then their degrees, to women. The University of London was the first to do so in 1878 (admitting women to all degrees except medicine), and by 1897 the university at Manchester also accepted women students in all subjects bar medicine and engineering.
Yet the journey thus far had not been an easy one, and by the end of the nineteenth century women were still a long way from being fully accepted into the universities. Many continued to question the wisdom of educating women outside the home, and support for women’s right to higher education was still a minority position.16 Wholesale opposition remained both within and outside the universities. Women’s intellects, it was claimed, were insightful, sensitive and ill-suited to the rational, evidence-based judgements that academic scholarship required. It was also feared that women were not physiologically equipped to deal with the rigours of university education, which would threaten their capacity to bear children. And because their vocation in life was supposed to be different from men’s, it was seen as pointless and cruel to educate them beyond their sphere as wives and mothers. Those who did manage to acquire an education were abhorred as aberrations – unwomanly women for whom the acquisition of reason had destroyed their natural femininity.17 Resistance to women’s higher education was perhaps strongest at the formerly monastic universities of Oxford and Cambridge, where women were not admitted to degrees until 1920 and 1947 respectively.
The first women’s college to consciously model itself on the ancient universities was founded in 1869 by the English Woman’s Journal editor, Emily Davies. Davies’s Girton College was joined at Cambridge in 1871 by Newnham College, founded by Anne Jemima Clough and university reformer Henry Sidgwick, with the support of the North of England Council for the Higher Education of Women (est. 1867).18 The women’s colleges at Oxford were not established until slightly later, although the ground began to be prepared in 1867 when the Delegacy of Local Examinations asked Oxford University’s Hebdomadal Council for the power to examine girls as well as boys. In 1873, a future member of St Hugh’s Council, the seventeen-year-old Annie Rogers, came top in the ‘Senior Locals’, winning Exhibitions to Worcester and Balliol College which were quickly withdrawn once college officials discovered she was a girl. Two years later women began to be allowed to sit for University exams, corresponding to Oxford’s Responsions, Moderations and Final Schools.19
The women’s colleges at Oxford grew up in a somewhat haphazard fashion. Certainly they could not have been established except in a more general atmosphere of university reform, prompted by the Royal Commissions set up to investigate the ancient universities and the subsequent Acts of Parliament in 1854 and 1877. These ended the Church of England’s monopoly and finally permitted dons to marry. Yet women’s education was not a central concern of either the Commissioners or the reformers who championed them, and no systematic plan was laid down to extend Oxford’s privileges to women.20 It has been suggested that the lack of central planning may have made things easier, for, unlike suffrage campaigners, supporters of women’s education did not have to wait for an Act of Parliament or require the support of political parties. Instead, women’s education was pursued in a localised manner, looking to personal initiative and friendly individuals within already existing institutions. In theory, anyone who wished to establish a women’s college simply did so, and at Oxford they were set up without any official recognition from the University. The collegiate system, which allowed individual colleges a large degree of autonomy, was also a helpful precedent, especially the tradition of Private Halls whose main purpose was simply to provide accommodation. Anyone could set up a Private Hall, and the 1854 Oxford Act had especially encouraged their establishment as a speedy and convenient way of bringing about reform without having to confront the University head-on.21
In 1878 a committee was formed which included the Principal of Keble and future Bishop of Winchester, Edward Talbot; the university reformer Mark Pattison; the leading liberal thinker T. H. Green; the well-known preacher Dr Liddon of Christ Church; and the author and women’s educationalist Mary Ward. By 1879 the committee had divided into two camps: those who wished to open a non-denominational Hall went on to set up Somerville while those who believed that women needed to be educated on a definite Anglican basis founded Lady Margaret Hall (LMH). These colleges soon began to flourish under the governance of Councils made up of both men and women.22 St Hugh’s, by contrast, began as Elizabeth Wordsworth’s personal project after she received an unexpected windfall. Wordsworth (1840–1932), who was already Principal of LMH, used the money to rent a house in Norham Road where the first four students took up residence in 1886. This small venture was rather grandly named St Hugh’s Hall after St Hugh of Avalon, as a tribute to Wordsworth’s father who, like St Hugh, had been Bishop of Lincoln. Wordsworth may have been seeking to free herself from the bureaucracy of a college Council (with which she co-governed LMH) while also intending that St Hugh’s should only ever exist as a satellite to the older college.
Wordsworth retained complete authority over St Hugh’s until 1891, when a governing committee was first formed, consisting of Annie Moberly (1846–1937, St Hugh’s first Principal) and men and women otherwise unconnected to the college. Yet Wordsworth continued to see herself as the head of St Hugh’s, and in 1893–4 she attempted to amalgamate it with LMH, without even consulting St Hugh’s committee. LMH, however, rejected the offer and St Hugh’s went on to flourish as an independent institution thanks to the hard work of Annie Moberly, who, from the very beginning, asserted herself as the Principal of a third women’s hall rather than simply the ‘housekeeper’ that Wordsworth envisaged. In 1894–5 St Hugh’s acquired its first constitution, an important step which transferred the property of the Hall over to four Trustees, of which Wordsworth was one. A governing Council was formed which included St Hugh’s tutors Annie Rogers and Edith Wardale, and marked the first step towards the self-governance enjoyed at many, though not all, of the men’s colleges.23 Although the Principal had considerable authority in the day-to-day running of the college, the Council met monthly and made binding decisions on issues such as employment, fees and scholarships. St Hugh’s independent status was assured in 1897 when Clara Mordan visited the college and announced her intention of becoming its patron: she immediately pledged £1,000 for a scholarship with the promise of further support.
Eleanor Jourdain, whose sister Charlotte had been one of the college’s first four students, joined St Hugh’s as Vice-Principal in 1902. Student numbers had increased year on year, and by 1891 fifty students had ‘graduated’ from St Hugh’s, though the University still refused to grant them degrees.24 Wordsworth rented successive properties in Norham Road, Norham Gardens and Fyfield Road to cater for the expanding college, but having students spread out over a number of houses was far from ideal and in 1913 the Council purchased the leasehold of a site on St Margaret’s Road with the hope of constructing permanent college buildings. Plans threatened to stall with the outbreak of war in 1914, but the work continued thanks to Jourdain and Moberly’s perseverance and a timely legacy from Clara Mordan the following year. Headed by its new Principal Eleanor Jourdain (appointed 1915), St Hugh’s moved into Main Building in January 1916. The original plans were eventually completed in 1928, with the erection of the Mary Gray Allen wing, named after Clara Mordan’s companion, who bequeathed the rest of Mordan’s estate to the college. Moberly and Jourdain had correctly predicted that the war would increase the number of women applying to university. In 1916 they had 64 resident students, 81 in 1917, 107 in 1919, and in 1920 women were finally made members of Oxford University and permitted to read for degrees.25
By 1923 St Hugh’s had become the largest women’s college with 151 undergraduates. Yet its future survival was seriously threatened the following year by the constitutional crisis arising from ‘The Row’ between Eleanor Jourdain and history tutor Cecilia Ady. Ady’s unfair dismissal led to a walkout by the other tutors and a boycott of St Hugh’s by the rest of the University, amounting to a scandal that culminated in Jourdain’s sudden death from a heart attack in April 1924. St Hugh’s, however, was experienced in battling on in the face of adversity, and the college managed to survive this painful period under the guardianship of Principal Barbara Gwyer. Gwyer also held St Hugh’s together during the Second World War, when it was evacuated to Holywell Manor on St Cross Road while its buildings were used as a military hospital. Evelyn Procter took over in 1946, and in 1959 she became the first St Hugh’s Principal to be granted equal status with the male heads of colleges, when what had been previously known as the five women’s ‘societies’ were finally recognised as colleges. St Hugh’s continued to grow under the Principalship of Kathleen Kenyon in the 1960s when more and more female students competed for the very limited number of places available to women at Oxford. The unfair exclusion of female applicants from the vast majority of colleges was one of the arguments put forward in support of co-residency from 1972 onwards. St Hugh’s, however, only began to admit men in 1986, after a number of years’ soul-searching and serious discussion of the college’s founding mission and future identity.
The last history of St Hugh’s was published on the cusp of this definitive moment, and it both celebrated the achievement of one hundred years of women’s education and mourned the end of its life as a college exclusively for women.26 Men have now been at St Hugh’s for almost a quarter of a century, and both Principals since Rachel Trickett (1973–91) have been male (Derek Wood, 1991–2003; and Andrew Dilnot, 2003–). Its time as an all-female community is a more and more distant memory while, throughout Oxford, the notion of a single-sex college is fast becoming something of an anathema.27 Gender, whether we are discussing individual women, social relations between the sexes, or ideals of masculinity and femininity, nevertheless remains crucial to understanding the development of St Hugh’s. An analysis which pays attention to how women’s role has been continually redefined over the course of the period, and what meanings are given to the categories of ‘male’ and ‘female’ in an educational context, is therefore central to this book.
St Hugh’s institutional identity – how its members understood it and how others perceived it – was inextricably bound up with ideas about who women were, how they should behave, and what role the college ought to have in producing them. Supporters of women’s education varied in their willingness to challenge those who opposed women’s entry into the universities on the grounds that they were inherently different from men and therefore unsuited to a masculine form of education. Emily Davies argued that ‘there is between the sexes a deep and broad basis of likeness’ and she felt that only good would come of enabling women to take a greater part in the intellectual and public life of men. She preferred a method of training that sought to cultivate the ‘common human element’, rather than one that began by ‘dividing mankind into two great sections and forcing each into a mould’. Although Davies claimed not to question the existence of ‘distinctive manhood and womanhood’, she asserted that while women continued to be denied the opportunity to develop their intellectual powers, it was not possible to say what was ‘naturally’ feminine and what was merely the result of ‘convention’. At Girton, Davies insisted that her young women study the same curriculum as male students, sit for all the examinations, and complete the degree in the same time allowed to other undergraduates. Davies believed that if women did not strive to achieve the same standards as men, their qualifications would be disregarded.28 Those at Newnham, however, argued that it was pointless for women to ‘slavishly’ follow the outdated curriculum which so many reform-minded Cambridge dons were fighting to change. Newnham students were therefore permitted to follow a self-guided course of study, and instead of Greek and Latin for the degree examinations, they studied new subjects such as history and English literature.29
Newnham’s decision reflected a different approach to women’s education, which, while entirely compatible with strong support for women’s rights, emphasised the importance and value of distinctively ‘womanly’ characteristics. Newnham’s supporter Josephine Butler complained of certain (unnamed) advocates of women’s education who ‘speak of women as if it were a compliment to them, or in any way true, to say that they are like men’. The best kind of education would, in Butler’s view, actively encourage ‘every good quality, every virtue which we regard as feminine’ to ‘develop more freely’.30 This did not mean that Newnham wanted to feminise its curriculum, but more that, without Davies’s preoccupation with meeting male standards, Clough could open her doors to a much more diverse body of students who had not necessarily had the training to pass the entrance examinations required at Girton.31 The question of women following an identical curriculum to men was never as sharply posed in Oxford as in Cambridge. The original statute which permitted women to be examined for equivalent exams to men did not make Greek or Latin obligatory (many female students lacked their brothers’ classical training), though women were permitted to attend most lectures and classes alongside male undergraduates.32 St Hugh’s followed Newnham’s more flexible approach and did not require its students to sit for examinations until after the First World War, though many of them chose to do so long before it became compulsory. Elizabeth Wordsworth and Annie Moberly also promoted a vision of women’s education rooted in ideas of sexual difference and women’s distinctive contribution to doing God’s work in the world. Chapter 1 discusses this religious tradition that permeated St Hugh’s throughout its early years, particularly the High Anglican vision of women, faith and knowledge promoted by bishops’ daughters Wordsworth and Moberly. It looks at how these ideas related to both more explicitly feminist currents within the women’s movement and those sections of the Church of England hostile to women’s rights.33
Many of St Hugh’s Victorian values, especially the investment in its all-female identity, remained important into the interwar period, in spite of the significant changes that this era ushered in. Chapter 2 explores St Hugh’s as a ‘women’s community’, looking at how this shaped the college and the relationships that formed within it. The newly emerging professionalism of female academics and the changes to women’s role precipitated by the Great War all contributed to the tensions which led up to ‘The Row’ in 1924. St Hugh’s foundation was bound up with sexually specific attitudes to education and segregated social practices. Adapting to the post-1945 University, in which most of the formal barriers separating men and women had been removed, thus posed serious challenges. Chapter 3 looks at the ambivalent attitude of the postwar generation of dons to St Hugh’s older tradition of feminism, and at their struggle to compete as equals within a male-dominated university. Should women be treated exactly the same as men, or ought there to be fuller acknowledgement of the difficulties they faced on account of their sex? We encounter this question at every stage in the history of St Hugh’s, and it was returned to with renewed passion in the 1970s and 80s when Oxford colleges gradually began to go mixed.
History was frequently invoked in the co-residency debates, for this was also a period during which a new movement for women’s liberation inspired many historians to re-examine the development of the women’s colleges from an explicitly feminist perspective. The new histories questioned some of the more triumphalist versions of the struggle for women’s education, and pointed to the incipient inequalities that lingered on after women had received formal recognition.34 The supposed benefits of the cautious and assimilationist approach of the early women educationalists were also more closely scrutinised, leading one historian to conclude that the reformers ‘bought intellectual freedom at the price of political timidity, a frequent fear of change and a dislike of innovation … they might have gained more by daring more’.35 The question of whether the struggle for education ought to be read as part of a general narrative of women’s emancipation is addressed in Chapter 4, which looks at the history of St Hugh’s domestic workers. The movement for higher education was unquestioningly geared towards the interests of middle-class women, and the class tensions inherent within their vision of freedom clearly emerge when we turn our attention to those women who cooked, cleaned and cared for the rest of the college.36 Yet the story of class at St Hugh’s is not a straightforward one, for, despite being part of a highly elite institution, the college was always something of an outsider. All the women’s colleges were seen as rather déclassé compared to the ancient grandeur of the men’s colleges, while their limited endowments subjected them to relative poverty. St Hugh’s was, furthermore, known as the place for girls who couldn’t afford to go to Lady Margaret Hall. Chapter 5 explores the legacy of St Hugh’s commitment to lower fees, and situates it within a wider history of higher-education funding in the twentieth century. From the struggles of grammar school girls in the 1930s, to the student radicals of the 1970s, to the free education activists after 1998, asking ‘who’ education should be for also leads us to consider ‘what’ it is for. The final chapter returns us to some of the questions asked by the college’s founders: what kind of educational experience should St Hugh’s offer and to what ends should its students be educated?
Writing this new history of St Hugh’s posed the difficult question of how one tells a story which is at once your own yet also that of so many others – all of whom have experienced it in their own distinctive ways. This author is a member of the community of which she writes, an ‘insider historian’ with privileged access to sources which include not only the archive but also oral tradition, the physical environment, and the living memories of those around me. The danger, however, of such insider status is that it will lead to a ‘cosy’ anecdotal account, with too great a focus on past achievements.37 The pressure to write an optimistic history is especially present in the case of the women’s colleges, for there are good reasons why one might wish to portray women’s struggle for education as a story with a happy ending. We must, therefore, be even more wary of narratives of progress which obscure problematic aspects of an institution’s development. This history of St Hugh’s strives to go beyond an insider’s perspective, and position the college within the broader history of education, feminism and changing gender roles in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain. It seeks an unbiased assessment of St Hugh’s contribution to the provision of university education for women: how it managed new generations of students and negotiated changing social mores; how it responded to wider political upheavals; and how it secured its position within the higher education establishment.
Yet this ‘scholarly’ approach does not claim to be more ‘objective’, for I am acutely aware of the extent to which it is imprinted with my own experiences as a student and then a Fellow at St Hugh’s. Understanding subjectivity and memory have been crucial to writing this history. Not only have I had to examine my own assumptions about which aspects of college life warrant historical exploration, but I have also worked with the reminiscences of hundreds of others, all of which tell a different and sometimes contradictory story. Far from being safely locked away in the past, many of my historical subjects are very much part of the present, capable of answering back and providing alternative versions of events. Rather than avoid the institutional nature of St Hugh’s history, this book uses it as a framework for understanding the interrelationship between personal experiences and collective accounts. It asks how St Hugh’s developed its institutional identity, how this changed over time, how it both reproduced and resisted dominant social norms, and how it shaped the values and aspirations of its members. An institutional perspective allows us to go beyond looking simply at the relationship between women’s colleges and the male university, to highlight internal hierarchies and power dynamics within St Hugh’s. Rather than conceptualise the college as a staging post in the life of a single type of St Hugh’s member, this book approaches it as a place in which various groups of women (and later men) worked and interacted to create a unique community.
Women, faith and knowledge, 1886–1914
WHEN ELIZABETH WORDSWORTH founded St Hugh’s in 1886, the new Hall possessed two defining features. The first of these was that it was intended for students who could not afford the fees charged at Lady Margaret Hall, where Wordsworth was already Principal. This pledge was quickly found to be impractical and St Hugh’s soon did away with its more modest prices, though the early intention to provide for less wealthy students continued to shape St Hugh’s identity well into the twentieth century. The commitment to lower fees was, however, closely connected to a second feature which did remain at the heart of St Hugh’s constitution: that it should be an explicitly Church of England establishment. In fact, the main reason that Wordsworth proposed St Hugh’s ought to welcome students of lesser financial means was to provide for the daughters of impoverished Anglican clergymen who might otherwise be compelled to send them to non-sectarian places of education.1 St Hugh’s was intended to be not only a Christian college, but, most specifically, an institution infused with a form of High Church Anglicanism inspired by the Tractarianism that had swept through Oxford in the 1840s, 50s and 60s. Such religion also determined the social and intellectual milieu of both Elizabeth Wordsworth and Annie Moberly, and it was their shared heritage that prompted Wordsworth to employ Moberly as St Hugh’s first Principal.
The contribution of the Church of England to women’s education has been the subject of much historical debate, with the outspoken opposition of many leading clergy hard to reconcile with the fact that three out of four women’s colleges at Oxford were Anglican institutions. Mapping the intellectual and social networks of Wordsworth, Moberly and other key figures in the founding of St Hugh’s, and looking more closely at the kind of education they promoted, reveals a distinctive Church of England vision of women’s education which incorporated ideas propounded by both Anglican opponents and supporters of the women’s colleges. Historians have also argued over how to position the movement for women’s education in relation to the first wave of activism around women’s rights during this period, asking if figures such as Wordsworth and Moberly ought to be described as ‘feminist’. They have struggled to understand the paradox of a group of women who preached caution while facing down considerable opposition in their efforts to establish places of female learning. Oxford women, especially those around Lady Margaret Hall and St Hugh’s, were even more conservative than their Cambridge counterparts, and some of them opposed female suffrage. Their ambiguous position can better be understood, however, if it is framed in terms of a distinctive form of High Anglican feminism. Although St Hugh’s was considered to be one of the more conservative of the women’s colleges, by the early decades of the twentieth century it combined a continued commitment to Church values with an explicit, though sometimes contradictory, feminist identity.
The importance of religion to the establishment of St Hugh’s reflected the central place it occupied in the lives of its founders Elizabeth Wordsworth and Annie Moberly. For Moberly’s appointment as Principal of the new women’s college was based upon her Anglican credentials rather than her academic qualifications. Charlotte Anne Elizabeth (always known as Annie) was close to the well-known High Church novelist Charlotte Yonge, and a family friend of the leading Tractarian Churchman John Keble.2 Keble and Yonge preached a form of Anglo-Catholicism that remained loyal to the Church of England after many leading figures in the Oxford Movement, such as John Henry Newman, had gone over to Rome. The Anglo-Catholics upheld the Oxford Movement’s belief in ‘High Church principles’ (the Catholicity of the Church of England, the Apostolic Succession, the centrality of the Sacraments, the importance of prayer and the beauty of holiness), seeking to position themselves against both the liberal theologians and the ‘Protestantism’ of the Evangelicals.3 In defending the state monopoly of the Church of England and the privileges conferred on it over the Dissenting churches, the Tractarians emphasised the central role that the Church played in uniting the nation across the social classes. Far from promoting a complacent form of Anglicanism, however, the Oxford Movement had emerged at a crucial juncture in the history of the Church when each party sought in its own way to recreate a form of spirituality that would meet the needs of a rapidly changing society.
Annie Moberly later described the religious feeling with which she grew up as ‘the self-controlled vivacity of high spiritual existence …’ Theology was not a set of abstract principles or dry doctrines, but ‘a thrilling interest’ whereby one’s every movement, speech and thought was imbued with the sense of ‘unseen presences’.4 The religious teachings of her elders remained with Moberly all her life. Her father, George, was a more moderate Anglo-Catholic than Keble, and politically more liberal – though he voted for the Conservatives because of their position on Church questions. The fierce party rivalry that characterised the Church during the middle decades of the century compelled George to ally himself more definitely with the Tractarians, alliances which also impacted upon the women in his family. For George Moberly’s teaching of the catechism and Churchmanship at Winchester attracted the wrath of his Low Church opponents, and while he, as a result, was excluded from preaching anywhere in the diocese, his wife and daughters were barred from taking part in any parochial or district work that would normally have formed a central part of their duties.5 Annie Moberly’s fierce loyalty to her family and their religious principles never abated, and in 1911 she wrote Dulce Domum, which was not so much a biography of her father as a memorial to a lost world of cathedral cities, earnest theological discussion and a Christian morality that, while intensely spiritual, was never emotional or ostentatious.
Elizabeth Wordsworth’s family occupied a very similar social and intellectual milieu. Wordsworth had also been strongly influenced by Charlotte Yonge, whom she met in Oxford in 1870.6 Her brother John had succeeded George Moberly as Bishop of Salisbury, and it was here that Elizabeth first met Annie in 1885. Moberly went to stay with Wordsworth at Lady Margaret Hall during Lent the following year. Intending to visit for only a few days, she ended up remaining at the college for six weeks. Wordsworth must have reassured herself that Moberly was a woman from a world that she knew and trusted, for during the Easter vacation she invited Annie to become the first Principal of the not-yet-founded St Hugh’s. In the months leading up to the opening of the college in the autumn of that year, Annie went back and forth between Salisbury and Oxford. At LMH she also met Eleanor Jourdain, then one of Wordsworth’s students, and they soon struck up a friendship. Jourdain helped Moberly to prepare the residence in Norham Road, and together they measured walls and floors and discussed the furnishing and decoration of the new college. In the evenings, Eleanor Jourdain would sit in Moberly’s room ‘on the top floor at LMH, looking out on the trees of the Parks bathed in moonlight, and discuss Buddhism, which was much in vogue just then, the Jews, and much besides’.7
Annie Moberly was chosen by Wordsworth ‘as someone to whose care anxious Church of England parents would be happy to entrust their adventurous daughters’.8 That her academic record (or lack of it) had little bearing upon her appointment was nothing out of the ordinary, for the Oxford women’s colleges were at this time primarily residential establishments rather than academic institutions. Tutorials and lectures took place under the aegis of an external body, the Association for the Education of Women, to which separate tuition fees were paid. Moberly may have been respectable, but she was not wealthy. In fact, she was in many ways typical of the Victorian women’s movement’s main constituency: those from middle-class backgrounds whose families were nevertheless unable to financially support their daughters should they fail to find a husband. Though the Moberly family had enjoyed a large degree of social prestige and Episcopal grandeur while George Moberly was alive, after his death his widow and unmarried daughters found themselves banished from the Bishop’s Palace to a poky house in the town. For Annie, faced with the daunting question of how to earn a living, Wordsworth’s offer came at just the right moment.9
Grateful as she was for the opportunity to head up St Hugh’s, Moberly had to wrestle with a permanent sense that both the college and its Principal were overshadowed by their counterparts across the road at Lady Margaret Hall.10 Elizabeth Wordsworth was widely renowned as a charming and entertaining woman, a popular figure on the Oxford academic social scene. Annie Moberly was shy; and she was also aware that just as she lacked Wordsworth’s social confidence, St Hugh’s lacked the prestige of LMH. Helena Deneke, who came up in 1900 to study at St Hugh’s and stayed on as one of its first tutors, remembered well Miss Moberly’s sensitivity about the college’s supposedly inferior status:
Miss Wordsworth was sailing the crest of the wave while Miss Moberly felt she must struggle to swim. There had been no Bishop Talbot (then Warden of Keble) to invite her to be head of a budding college [Talbot had invited Wordsworth to take on LMH], no established Council of men and women to support her.11
Although, on the surface, relations between the two colleges were more than amicable, Deneke remembered Moberly sometimes muttering under her breath that Wordsworth had created St Hugh’s as ‘a rubbish heap’ for LMH. Such a suspicion might have been confirmed had Moberly seen the minutes of LMH Council, which rejected Wordsworth’s proposal that St Hugh’s be amalgamated into the larger college on the grounds that if this were to happen, ‘the tone and average standard would not be quite so select and high’.12 Furthermore, not only were the fees at St Hugh’s initially far lower than at LMH – £45 per annum compared with £75 – but Annie Moberly’s salary was a pitiful £40 compared with the £100 Wordsworth received.13
Rather than dwell upon her difficult situation, however, Moberly set her heart on seeing that ‘her student body emerge from the “rubbish heap” by virtue of moral and mental quality’.14 If Moberly could not depend upon well-known supporters or well-born students, she could look to her religious upbringing to provide her with the confidence necessary to undertake this task. A newspaper article advertising St Hugh’s in its early years thus proudly declared that:
The religious teaching is on the same lines as that at Lady Margaret Hall, and the name of Miss Moberly, the present Principal, is the more suggestive from the fact that she is avowedly in sympathy with the teaching of her father, who was thirty-one years the headmaster of Winchester.15
Joan Evans, another longstanding member of St Hugh’s College who arrived as a student in 1914, found such constant reminders of Moberly’s impressive family connections somewhat tiresome. ‘We were never allowed to forget,’ she recalled in her autobiography, that Moberly ‘was the daughter of a man who had been successively Head-master of Winchester and Bishop of Salisbury’. Even she had to admit, however, that Moberly’s upbringing had brought her into contact with a standard of scholarship that secured the credentials of the new Hall.16