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Authors: Jane Robinson
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champion. Funds were raised, prejudices whittled away (just enough), and students recruited so that by October 1873, when Benslow House was forsaken for Girton College proper, there were fifteen women on the roll.
Constance Maynard was among them, and felt, for the first time, that she had found her spiritual home. ‘ That’s what you’ve been waiting for!’ she told herself. At last.
3. Invading Academia
Gently, gently
Evidently We are safe so far,
After scaling
Fence-paling
Here, at last, we are! 1
Meanwhile, a couple of miles down the road from Girton at 74 Regent Street, Cambridge, Mary Paley and four other women were settling in to a very similar community to Constance Maynard’s. This little ‘garden of flowers’, as one of the kinder critics put it, blossomed into Newnham College, and was ‘planted’ in 1871 by Professor of Philosophy Henry Sidgwick (1838–1900). He was a gentle soul with a stammer and an impish sense of humour, and his dedication to the cause of university access for women was unstinting.
Sidgwick supported Emily Davies at Girton, but disagreed with aspects of her approach. With his wife, Eleanor, and a firebrand from the North of England Council for Promoting the Higher Education of Women, the Liverpudlian teacher Anne Jemima Clough (1820–92), Sidgwick planned ‘a place of academic excellence’ like Girton, to provide an edifying home-from-home for clever women attending Cambridge lectures.
Girtonians, once they were comfortably ensconced in their college, were expected to pass the dreaded ‘Little-Go’,a preliminary qualification usually taken during the first year of a degree course including compulsory elements – whatever one’s subject – of Latin, Greek, and divinity. For the majority of girls, lacking the standard classical education trotted out in boys’ schools, it was a tiresome hurdle and delayed engagement with the Tripos (honours degree) course they had chosen. But it was what undergraduates at Cambridge had always done; therefore, insisted Emily Davies, her girls must do it too. There must be no question of concession.
The Sidgwicks and Miss Clough were more circumspect at Newnham. They refused to prescribe the Little-Go, since it offered no intellectual advantages. The newly available Cambridge Higher was stringent enough, in their view, to test a student’s abilities. Newnham girls were to be allowed to work for the Tripos from the beginning. There was nothing to stop them; the college (actually a small rented house at this stage) was not yet affiliated to the university, nor subject to its regulations. It relied like Girton on the goodwill – or reluctant chivalry – of visiting lecturers and accommodating examiners.
To Miss Davies the fight for university access was all about equality, and Girton was a public statement of her demands. For the Sidgwicks and Miss Clough, at Newnham, it was the individual’s intellectual development that mattered, and appropriately, they chose a kinder, more secluded environment for their students.
In 1873, Girton moved to its startling new buildings, designed by the municipal architect Alfred Waterhouse to rear out of the Cambridgeshire cabbage fields with uncompromising trenchancy, like a dowager duchess at the WI. The grounds were, and are, lovely, but even now they hardly soften the maroon Gothic bulk of the college.
That same year, the more discreet Newnham relocated,too. Regent Street was too noisy, and the house’s inhabitants, whose rooms abutted the road, were being peered at. Miss Clough chose Merton Hall, an old and picturesque house in Northampton Street, principally because of its gardens. Mature trees screened her students from impertinent passers-by, and though the bedrooms were uncomfortable, with several girls having to share, and water slithered down the dining-room walls when it rained, the privacy and quiet were welcome. Professor Sidgwick paid the first year’s rent himself, and bought extra
Constance Maynard was among them, and felt, for the first time, that she had found her spiritual home. ‘ That’s what you’ve been waiting for!’ she told herself. At last.
3. Invading Academia
Gently, gently
Evidently We are safe so far,
After scaling
Fence-paling
Here, at last, we are! 1
Meanwhile, a couple of miles down the road from Girton at 74 Regent Street, Cambridge, Mary Paley and four other women were settling in to a very similar community to Constance Maynard’s. This little ‘garden of flowers’, as one of the kinder critics put it, blossomed into Newnham College, and was ‘planted’ in 1871 by Professor of Philosophy Henry Sidgwick (1838–1900). He was a gentle soul with a stammer and an impish sense of humour, and his dedication to the cause of university access for women was unstinting.
Sidgwick supported Emily Davies at Girton, but disagreed with aspects of her approach. With his wife, Eleanor, and a firebrand from the North of England Council for Promoting the Higher Education of Women, the Liverpudlian teacher Anne Jemima Clough (1820–92), Sidgwick planned ‘a place of academic excellence’ like Girton, to provide an edifying home-from-home for clever women attending Cambridge lectures.
Girtonians, once they were comfortably ensconced in their college, were expected to pass the dreaded ‘Little-Go’,a preliminary qualification usually taken during the first year of a degree course including compulsory elements – whatever one’s subject – of Latin, Greek, and divinity. For the majority of girls, lacking the standard classical education trotted out in boys’ schools, it was a tiresome hurdle and delayed engagement with the Tripos (honours degree) course they had chosen. But it was what undergraduates at Cambridge had always done; therefore, insisted Emily Davies, her girls must do it too. There must be no question of concession.
The Sidgwicks and Miss Clough were more circumspect at Newnham. They refused to prescribe the Little-Go, since it offered no intellectual advantages. The newly available Cambridge Higher was stringent enough, in their view, to test a student’s abilities. Newnham girls were to be allowed to work for the Tripos from the beginning. There was nothing to stop them; the college (actually a small rented house at this stage) was not yet affiliated to the university, nor subject to its regulations. It relied like Girton on the goodwill – or reluctant chivalry – of visiting lecturers and accommodating examiners.
To Miss Davies the fight for university access was all about equality, and Girton was a public statement of her demands. For the Sidgwicks and Miss Clough, at Newnham, it was the individual’s intellectual development that mattered, and appropriately, they chose a kinder, more secluded environment for their students.
In 1873, Girton moved to its startling new buildings, designed by the municipal architect Alfred Waterhouse to rear out of the Cambridgeshire cabbage fields with uncompromising trenchancy, like a dowager duchess at the WI. The grounds were, and are, lovely, but even now they hardly soften the maroon Gothic bulk of the college.
That same year, the more discreet Newnham relocated,too. Regent Street was too noisy, and the house’s inhabitants, whose rooms abutted the road, were being peered at. Miss Clough chose Merton Hall, an old and picturesque house in Northampton Street, principally because of its gardens. Mature trees screened her students from impertinent passers-by, and though the bedrooms were uncomfortable, with several girls having to share, and water slithered down the dining-room walls when it rained, the privacy and quiet were welcome. Professor Sidgwick paid the first year’s rent himself, and bought extra
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