professors’ wives, sisters or daughters, perhaps in middle age,desperate, like Florence Nightingale, to find a place for the ‘passion, intellect, and moral activity’ so inconveniently lodged in their breast. Others were girls in their late teens, who had finished with school but not with scholarship. They might hope to be teachers themselves, like the students of Queen’s or Bedford; maybe, like George Eliot’s heroines, they felt a moral – almost physical – compulsion to use their minds. Many, quite simply, had nothing else to do.
A cynical survey of the opportunities open to the educated woman in 1916, all of them useless, distasteful, or laughable.
Constance Maynard and Mary Paley were in this latter category. Once Constance had done with her governesses and notional schooling, she found herself incarcerated by home life, shut up like an eagle in a cage, unable to summon the energy or courage to break free. She felt external events were passing her by. ‘Out in the world, artisans received the franchise and the first Education Act foreshadowed changes even greater than those it enforced, and trade-unionism came into the open, and Gladstone succeeded Disraeli.’ 20 Meanwhile, Constance festered. By 1872, aged twenty-three, she had had enough.
Mary Paley, who knew what to do in a thunderstorm at night, felt the same sense of ennui vegetating at home while her fiancé was posted to India for three years. Somewhat bolder than Constance, she announced to her family, rather than requested, that she intended to ‘go in’ for the new examination available to women in England, the Cambridge ‘Higher Local’. It would, she said, be something harmless to occupy her mind.
At this point, it might be useful to draw a deep breath and try to explain the system of public exams at the time. For that we have to return to one of the Langham Place Ladies, Emily Davies (1830–1921). Influenced by the feminist philosophy of Barbara Bodichon and the dazzling effrontery of Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, who (unsuccessfully) demanded admission to London University as a medical student in 1862, Miss Davies and her sympathizers set out on a personal crusade. Itis said that she first articulated it while sitting with Garrett Anderson by the fireside one evening in 1860. They were chatting about hopes and ambitions. ‘Well, Elizabeth,’ declared Emily at the end of the evening, ‘it is clear what has to be done. I must devote myself to securing higher education while you open the medical profession for women. After these things are done, we must see about getting the vote.’ 21 Come 1918, Emily was indeed one of the first women to vote in England, at the age of eighty-eight – but that is another story.
Emily remembered being wildly jealous of her brother when he went to Cambridge. Jealousy fermented into anger, and she determined to offer the sisters of the next generation of undergraduates all the educational opportunities denied to her. Having failed in her petition to London to make the matriculation or entrance examination available to women in the early 1860s, she turned her attention to Cambridge. Logically, she reckoned that if girls took the same exams at school as boys did, then it would be harder to refuse their progress to the next stage of education. So in 1863, with the support of Miss Buss and other pioneering headmistresses (but not the more cautious Miss Beale), Emily managed to persuade the authorities that girls should at least be allowed to attempt the Cambridge ‘Junior Locals’, the precursor of today’s GCSEs, which had been available to boys of sixteen or so since 1858. The girls were required to sit them in seclusion, engage qualified people to mark them, and do without the results being published; it was also made clear that this was an experiment, likely to fail because girls would not be up to the task. Indeed, Emily was warned, the effort of taking them might well prove injurious to female
A cynical survey of the opportunities open to the educated woman in 1916, all of them useless, distasteful, or laughable.
Constance Maynard and Mary Paley were in this latter category. Once Constance had done with her governesses and notional schooling, she found herself incarcerated by home life, shut up like an eagle in a cage, unable to summon the energy or courage to break free. She felt external events were passing her by. ‘Out in the world, artisans received the franchise and the first Education Act foreshadowed changes even greater than those it enforced, and trade-unionism came into the open, and Gladstone succeeded Disraeli.’ 20 Meanwhile, Constance festered. By 1872, aged twenty-three, she had had enough.
Mary Paley, who knew what to do in a thunderstorm at night, felt the same sense of ennui vegetating at home while her fiancé was posted to India for three years. Somewhat bolder than Constance, she announced to her family, rather than requested, that she intended to ‘go in’ for the new examination available to women in England, the Cambridge ‘Higher Local’. It would, she said, be something harmless to occupy her mind.
At this point, it might be useful to draw a deep breath and try to explain the system of public exams at the time. For that we have to return to one of the Langham Place Ladies, Emily Davies (1830–1921). Influenced by the feminist philosophy of Barbara Bodichon and the dazzling effrontery of Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, who (unsuccessfully) demanded admission to London University as a medical student in 1862, Miss Davies and her sympathizers set out on a personal crusade. Itis said that she first articulated it while sitting with Garrett Anderson by the fireside one evening in 1860. They were chatting about hopes and ambitions. ‘Well, Elizabeth,’ declared Emily at the end of the evening, ‘it is clear what has to be done. I must devote myself to securing higher education while you open the medical profession for women. After these things are done, we must see about getting the vote.’ 21 Come 1918, Emily was indeed one of the first women to vote in England, at the age of eighty-eight – but that is another story.
Emily remembered being wildly jealous of her brother when he went to Cambridge. Jealousy fermented into anger, and she determined to offer the sisters of the next generation of undergraduates all the educational opportunities denied to her. Having failed in her petition to London to make the matriculation or entrance examination available to women in the early 1860s, she turned her attention to Cambridge. Logically, she reckoned that if girls took the same exams at school as boys did, then it would be harder to refuse their progress to the next stage of education. So in 1863, with the support of Miss Buss and other pioneering headmistresses (but not the more cautious Miss Beale), Emily managed to persuade the authorities that girls should at least be allowed to attempt the Cambridge ‘Junior Locals’, the precursor of today’s GCSEs, which had been available to boys of sixteen or so since 1858. The girls were required to sit them in seclusion, engage qualified people to mark them, and do without the results being published; it was also made clear that this was an experiment, likely to fail because girls would not be up to the task. Indeed, Emily was warned, the effort of taking them might well prove injurious to female
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