Read Online Gertrude Bell by Georgina Howell - Free Book Online Page B

Miss Wordsworth was cautious. Woman, she said, was designed to be “Adam’s helpmate” and must develop the “minor graces.” Reluctantly, Gertrude submitted to being taught neat handwriting and “the ways of opening and shutting doors.” On the other hand, she bicycled everywhere and ventured into every circlethat would have her. She swam, she rowed, she played hockey, she acted, danced, and spoke in debates, but she still had to spend precious hours doing needlework. She quickly learnt to compare the extraordinary freedoms of her own upbringing with the modes of conduct of the larger world. “I am going to a teaparty of Mary’s today to meet some sort of relation of hers who is Headmaster of Wellington. She is so unhappy because Miss Wordsworth has pronounced that she had better entertain him in the drawing-room! It isn’t half the same thing giving a teaparty not in one’s own room . . .” Her room was rather bleak, but soon the bed and the floor were covered with the familiar clutter of books and papers. She asked Florence to tell the gardener to put a pot of snowdrops on the train for her.
    The presence of women spread dismay throughout the university. It would not admit women to full membership until 1919; Cambridge refused to do so even then. Most undergraduates of Gertrude’s day saw university as a series of male-only clubs providing a wealth of contacts for future careers in the army, in Parliament, in the Church or the Empire. Women were no part of this, any more than they participated in the leisure pursuits of drinking, gambling, racing—or womanizing. It was a male society run for males and the presence of women was deeply disconcerting, as embarrassing for them as if their mothers and sisters had joined them at university, preventing them from behaving as men behave without women around.
    It was the age when even piano legs were draped lest they should seem too provocative. At Oxford the idea that women were inferior was built into the teaching. Special applications had to be made for permission for women to attend lectures and to take certain exams. “The over-taxing of [women’s] brains,” wrote contemporary philosopher Herbert Spencer, would lead to “the deficiency of reproductive power.” “Inferior to us God made you, and our inferiors to the end of time you will remain,” Dean John Burgon had thundered from New College Chapel. When one tutor, a Mr. Bright, made the women in the room sit with their backs to him, Gertrude’s shoulders began to shake. The giggles quickly spread between the three women, and soon they were in a state of uncontrollable laughter. The problem, she wrote to Hugh, was Mr. Bright’s, not hers.
    She put in seven hours’ work a day, every day, but wrote home:
    The amount of work is hopeless. This last week for instance, I ought to have read the life of Richard III, another in two volumes of Henry VIII, the continuous history of Hallam and Green from Edward IV to Ed. VI, the third volume of Stubbs, 6 or 7 lectures of Mr. Lodge, to have looked up a few of Mr. Campion’s last term lectures, and some of Mr. Bright’s, and lastly to have written 6 essays for Mr. Hassall. Now I ask you, is that possible?
    And so Gertrude, wearing a loose black gown that swirled around her laced boots, rammed a tasselled mortar-board on her bundled-up hair and made her way in a crocodile with the rest of the LMH women across University Parks to Balliol College for their first history lecture. In the hall were two hundred men, already filling the benches. With amazing discourtesy they remained seated and refused to move up. Instead, the women were led up to the platform where they found chairs alongside the professor. At the end of his lecture, Mr. Lodge turned to the women beside him and asked with an insufferably patronizing air: “And I wonder what the young ladies made of that?” Green eyes