College girls go wild: Jessica Swale on her new Globe play Blue Stockings

Jessica Swale has put the struggle of the first female students at Cambridge centre stage in her new play at the Globe. Their fight for education rights is just as pertinent today, she writes
Jessica Swale6 August 2013

Writing can be stressful, especially for a woman. Deliberating over plot points and choice of phrasing, I have to remind myself not to get stressed, in case my womb detaches itself from its natural position and starts winging its way towards my brain. It’s a common ailment among the weaker sex; we get hysterical, start fitting, and sometimes, if our uteruses reach our throats, we might suffocate and die.

Crazy talk? Perhaps. But it’s not that long ago that society believed hysteria was the disease of the wandering womb (hysteros is Greek for womb). Women were understood to be emotionally unstable and so fragile that over-exertion of the brain could cause serious health issues. And the prescription? Simple. First, get her pregnant, to return her womb to its natural position. And secondly, make sure she stays at home, and for goodness’ sake don’t let her go to university.

When I started researching the history of women’s education for my play, Blue Stockings [at the Globe from August 24], about the first girls to go to university (at Cambridge’s Girton College), I quickly found myself knee-deep in records of incidents which I had to read twice to believe.

If women were allowed into lectures (they had to buy tickets and were sometimes refused entry at the door), the men often took pleasure in kicking their chairs and pelting them with paper bullets. Ladies had to carry chamber pots, as universities refused to build toilet facilities for them. They even found themselves relegated to eat lunch surrounded by cadavers in the biology lab, banned from the dining room for fear that they might distract the men.

Why was there such opposition to the idea of women studying? The truth is, most of society disapproved. One of the most vocal opponents was psychiatrist Dr Maudsley (of Maudsley Hospital). “While it may be a pity for a woman that she is created woman,” he said, women who pursue an education “do so at a cost to their strength and health, which entails life-long suffering, and even incapacitates them for the adequate performance of the natural functions of their sex”.

Many believed that motherhood and study were incompatible. Not only did education weaken women physically, but such headstrong, unnatural women were hardly likely to be interested in family life.

And it wasn’t just the men who were worried. Queen Victoria staunchly advocated that the woman’s position was “in the home”. She deemed suffrage and the movements for the improvement of women “vain folly”, convinced that these wicked ideas would lead to the end of society as we knew it.

When Emily Davies, an often overlooked heroine of British history, opened the first women’s college at Hitchin in 1869 (later to become Girton College, Cambridge) it was in a farmhouse 20 miles outside Cambridge; an appropriately safe distance to ensure that neither sex distracted the other. She begged and borrowed furniture and relied on extraordinarily forward-thinking male lecturers to cycle the 40-mile round trip to teach the girls in their spare time.

The girls were labelled “unnatural”, “outcasts” and “lovers of women”, and nowhere more so than at Oxbridge, perhaps because of class. While male colleges were strictly the preserve of the privileged classes (for most of its history, Etonians were excused the entrance exams at Trinity), the women’s colleges, in contrast, drew their students from across society. From the daughters of aristocrats to country girls with few social graces, each girl was picked for her extraordinary merit. Despite a typical lady’s education consisting of polite “soft subjects” such piano playing and embroidery, these girls defied all expectations, often learning from brothers or revolutionary teachers, who encouraged them to take the rigorous entrance examination.

Yet slowly the wheels of change were turning. From London the rumblings of the suffragette movement were getting louder. A second Cambridge ladies’ college, Newnham, had joined the fray. And in 1890, a woman got the highest mathematics mark at Cambridge, earning her a comic feature in Punch magazine. In response, Gilbert and Sullivan wrote Princess Ida, a satirical operetta lampooning women’s colleges, in which a gleefully silly princess starts a women’s university on a tropical island and teaches the girls that men are all monsters, before they realise their errors and abandon their foolish scheme in favour of love and marriage.

Soon the first girls’ college had outgrown its farmhouse roots and taken up its new grander position in Girton. It’s still there today (though it’s now a mixed college), standing red-brick and proud, two miles north-west up the hill from Cambridge, a hill known to out-of-breath students and determined wooers as the “Girton Grind”.

Though the girls studied the same degree courses as the men and matched them grade for grade, when the gents donned their gowns for degree day the women were left with nothing but a tarnished reputation to show for their troubles. They were simply denied the right to graduate. In 1897, the girls of Girton rallied together to ask the university for the right to be formally recognised for their achievements. They made it their mission to convince the Senate to instigate a vote. Little did they know, though, just how far the opposition would go to stop them.

The day of the vote in May, Cambridge’s streets were flooded with aggrieved students. The opposition had paid for extra trains to bring graduates back to vote. Before long chaos ensued. Students pulled down railings and set fire to theatre hoardings. Then the crowd hoisted effigies of the women pioneers up on ropes; effigies dressed in negligées and blue stockings, the slurring symbol for an educated woman, before dousing them in oil and watching them burn.

When the effigies were just charred remains, they posted the tatters through the gates of the women’s colleges. And while I won’t spoil the ending of the play, it’s fair to say that the women of Girton and Newnham, who had given up their livelihoods and often the chance of marriage to be there, had no idea of the force of feeling against them.

I began researching the play just before Pakastani schoolgirl Malala Yousafzai was shot for standing up for her right to an education. We take this right for granted here. I for one was, until recently, blissfully unaware of the sacrifices my not-too-distant relations had made to win us that right. In Blue Stockings, the girls are asked the question: “If you had to choose between love and education, which would it be?” In 1896, the choice to study was pretty much a passport to spinsterhood. Yet despite this, the Girton girls persevered and laid the foundations for generations of women to come. Many sacrifices were made, not least by male lecturers who compromised their own careers to teach at ladies’ colleges.

It made me ask what I’d have given up for further education (I studied drama at Exeter). Recently a young friend was devastated when he realised that university was no longer a feasible option because of the fee increases. After so many years of fighting for equal access to education, how are we once again in a position where able, passionate students don’t have this access?

That’s not to suggest that everyone should attend but surely everyone should have the option. And, sure enough, as we rehearsed the 1897 protest at Rada last year, we stopped to watch thousands of students march along Gower Street below, holding banners identical to ours: Education For All. It was a disquieting moment; the issue at the heart of the play is as pertinent now as ever.

Cambridge wouldn’t allow women in for the first 800 years of its history. Imagine how different society might have been if those potentially brilliant thinkers had been allowed to learn. History might have been very different. Let’s not make the same mistake again.

Blue Stockings is at Shakespeare’s Globe, SE1 (020 7401 9919, shakespearesglobe.com) August 24-October 11

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