Higher Education and the Gendering of Space in England and Wales, 1869-1909 3031299868, 9783031299865

Table of contents :
Series Editors Preface
Acknowledgements
Contents
Chapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 2: The Campus Ideal
Religion and the Middle Class
Regional Pride and the ‘Local’ University
Early Foundations and the Desire to Build
The Urban/Rural Divide and the Idea of the Campus
Oxbridge Influence and Rebellion
Conclusion
Chapter 3: The Question of Residence
The Rise of the Non-residential University
Women Students and Residence
Living in Lodgings
Residence to Non-residence and Back Again
Conclusion
Chapter 4: Class, Commuting, and the City
The City and the Suburbs
Women in the City
Class and Respectability
Temporality
Conclusion
Chapter 5: Libraries, Laboratories, and Learning Spaces
Lecture Theatres and Classrooms
Teaching Provision
Laboratories
Libraries
Conclusion
Chapter 6: Sport, Soirées, and Social Spaces
Collegiate Life and Athletic Spaces
Women’s Health and Sporting Spaces
Socialisation and Dances
Common Rooms
Conclusion
Chapter 7: Unions, Guilds, and Extra-Curricular Spaces
Students’ Unions
Debating
Student Government
The Suffrage Question
Networks of Educated Women
Conclusion
Chapter 8: Conclusion
Primary Manuscript Sources
Bibliography
Primary Printed Sources
Secondary Sources
Index

Citation preview

GENDERS AND SEXUALITIES IN HISTORY

Higher Education and the Gendering of Space in England and Wales, 1869–1909 Georgia Oman

Genders and Sexualities in History Series Editors

Joanna Bourke Birkbeck College University of London London, UK Sean Brady Birkbeck College University of London London, UK Matthew Champion University of Melbourne Melbourne, Australia

Palgrave Macmillan’s series, Genders and Sexualities in History, accommodates and fosters new approaches to historical research in the fields of genders and sexualities. The series promotes world-class scholarship, which concentrates upon the interconnected themes of genders, sexualities, religions/religiosity, civil society, politics and war. Historical studies of gender and sexuality have, until recently, been more or less disconnected fields. In recent years, historical analyses of genders and sexualities have synthesised, creating new departures in historiography. The additional connectedness of genders and sexualities with questions of religion, religiosity, development of civil societies, politics and the contexts of war and conflict is reflective of the movements in scholarship away from narrow history of science and scientific thought, and history of legal processes approaches, that have dominated these paradigms until recently. The series brings together scholarship from Contemporary, Modern, Early Modern, Medieval, Classical and Non-Western History. The series provides a diachronic forum for scholarship that incorporates new approaches to genders and sexualities in history.

Georgia Oman

Higher Education and the Gendering of Space in England and Wales, 1869–1909

Georgia Oman Melbourne, Australia

ISSN 2730-9479     ISSN 2730-9487 (electronic) Genders and Sexualities in History ISBN 978-3-031-29986-5    ISBN 978-3-031-29987-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29987-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Series Editors Preface

In Higher Education and the Gendering of Space in England and Wales, 1869–1909, Georgia Oman challenges the idea that the gradual admittance of women into Higher Education in the UK took place in piecemeal, but uninterrupted fashion. Oman’s unique contribution is to explore the ‘march of progress’ through the lens of space and environment as much as gender. She argues that the creation of single-sex colleges and then coeducation on equal terms were fraught with tension, contradictions, and setbacks. The book is a sensitive, nuanced, and carefully argued book that explores the political and spatial politics of campuses, residential provisions, class, libraries and laboratories, unions, student’s social lives, sexuality, and extra-curricular spaces. As such, it contributes not only to knowledge of the past but also to understanding current questions about gender, education, social mobility, and equality. In common with all the volumes in the ‘Gender and Sexualities in History’ series, Higher Education and the Gendering of Space in England and Wales, 1869–1909 is a multifaceted and meticulously researched scholarly study. It is an innovative contribution to our understanding of gender and sexuality in the past. London, UK London, UK  Melbourne, VIC, Australia 

Joanna Bourke Sean Brady Matthew Champion

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Acknowledgements

I am extremely grateful to my MPhil and PhD supervisor, Ben Griffin, for his continued help and support over many years. I would also like to thank Gillian Sutherland and my two PhD examiners, Lucy Delap and William Whyte, for their generous advice and valuable insights. This study would not have been possible without the help of archivists at the universities of Bangor, Birmingham, Bristol, Cambridge, Liverpool, Manchester, Oxford, and Sheffield. I am also especially appreciative of the material support of the Cambridge Trust, Cambridge Australia Scholarships, Newnham College, and the Cambridge History Faculty. Thanks are also due to the convenors of the Genders and Sexualities in History Series and the staff at Palgrave Macmillan for making this book possible.

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Contents

1 Introduction  1 2 The Campus Ideal 19 3 The Question of Residence 51 4 Class, Commuting, and the City 87 5 Libraries, Laboratories, and Learning Spaces125 6 Sport, Soirées, and Social Spaces161 7 Unions, Guilds, and Extra-Curricular Spaces191 8 Conclusion223 Bibliography231 Index259

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

On 24 May 1909, King Edward VII affixed his signature to the charter of the University of Bristol. Having agreed to its formation in Privy Council the week before, through this act Bristol became the last of the so-called first wave of civic universities to receive its royal charter and become a fullfledged, degree-conferring institution.1 The University of Birmingham had led the way in 1900, followed by both the Victoria University of Manchester and University of Liverpool in 1903, with the universities of Leeds and Sheffield bringing up the rear in 1904 and 1905, respectively. At this point, at the end of the first decade of a new century, all these institutions possessed grand, imposing university buildings and enjoyed a level of financial security that had proved elusive in the early years of their foundation at the high water mark of the Victorian era. The civic colleges had become the civic universities, and their place in the fabric of higher education in England and Wales seemed assured. They had made it. A hundred years previously, only two universities had existed in England. Over the following century, newer institutions challenged the monopoly of Oxford and Cambridge—first in London, then later in the rapidly expanding and industrialising cities of the later Victorian period. Following the revolutionary example of the University of London, these secular, non-residential foundations looked more to the Scottish and German universities for inspiration, and in doing so helped to create a new idea of what it meant to be a ‘university.’ Explicit policies, such as © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Oman, Higher Education and the Gendering of Space in England and Wales, 1869–1909, Genders and Sexualities in History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29987-2_1

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coeducation and secularism, worked in tandem with more indirect trends, such as lower fees and an emphasis on scientific and technical subjects, to usher in women, non-Anglicans, and the working class as new categories of student. The resulting landscape of tertiary education in 1909 was almost unrecognisable from what had existed in 1809, bearing a much stronger resemblance to the modern university as we know it today. This is the story of how the modern British university evolved from an unlikely muddle of civic identity, urban development, and an unlikely third ingredient: women. In her memoirs, published in 1952, the novelist and biographer Winifred Peck remembered her time as a student reading Modern History at Lady Margaret Hall, one of the Oxford women’s colleges, in the early 1900s. Between the buildings of Lady Margaret Hall there was (and still is, presumably) a narrow passage bounded by high walls which led to the parks. In my dreams for years after I went down I was imprisoned in that passage, unable either to open the door in the wall at one end, to find myself looking across the lawns and flowerbeds to the Hall and the river, or to pass through the wicket gate at the other, and see across the stretches of level sward the towers and trees of the university itself.2

This recurring dream, which found Peck trapped in the college buildings gazing longingly at the university just beyond her reach, encapsulates the uncertain position of women students at the women’s colleges of Oxford and Cambridge at the turn of the twentieth century.3 They were at once a part of and separate from the larger institution to which they claimed to belong, observers rather than participants in the traditions of university life. Even more tellingly, Peck’s dream reveals how this outsider status was realised in geographic, as well as social, terms. From the respectable distance of Lady Margaret Hall, located in the staid suburbs of North Oxford, one had to cross lawns, flowerbeds, and even the River Cherwell to finally reach the ‘towers and trees’ of the university proper. The physical spaces of universities and colleges during this era were highly gendered, as this passage reveals, with both the causes and effects of this gendering casting an incredibly long shadow on the modern university as it continued to grow and develop. The term ‘modern university’ is often used to describe the English and Welsh university as it emerged in the early twentieth century, largely

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defined by the first wave of civic institutions. The modern university, in this case, is used in direct opposition to what are sometimes termed the ‘ancient universities’ of Oxford and Cambridge, which grew out of monastic foundations and retained a strong ecclesiastical focus for much of their history. It can be defined by a mixture of curriculum, administrative structure, funding, spatial organisation, and the composition of the student body. Stefan Collini describes the modern university as ‘essentially a nineteenth-­century creation,’ based on the template created by Wilhelm von Humbolt upon the establishment of the University of Berlin in 1810. At its core, he argues, it represented a shift in thinking from universities as ‘nurseries of future clerical or administrative functionaries’ towards centres of ‘the higher learning,’ defined by an emphasis on higher research.4 The second half of the nineteenth century is, with good cause, often held up as a time of significant advancement and progress for women in higher education, a time when they finally gained entry to the hallowed halls of learning which for so long had only welcomed men. While this is undeniably true—the first colleges for women were founded and the first degrees for women students were awarded during this period, after all—it is also true that admittance to higher education did not occur evenly, nor equally. Dates of foundation and access to degrees can be easily invoked as concrete examples of headway made and battles won, but fail to capture the quotidian experiences of the first wave of students who experienced the mixed-gender university. Where these nuances can be found is in the physical environments in which this education took place, which shaped the reality of everyday life for both men and women students during this period. Declaring women eligible for admittance to universities did not automatically usher in coeducation on equal terms, and the intersection of space and gender played an integral role in shaping the physical and social landscape of higher education in England and Wales. Some of these intersections were made highly visible and explicit, most notably through the building of single-sex colleges, but were also experienced on a more subliminal level, through the assumed behavioural norms and practices of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Winifred Peck may have written of her experience as a woman at the single-sex Lady Margaret Hall, but this book shares her aim to look beyond the high, enclosing walls of the women’s college to the distant university across the river. Histories of women in higher education have, with good reason, often focused on the pioneering all-female institutions

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who so proudly flew their banner for the cause, such as the women’s colleges of Oxford and Cambridge alongside Royal Holloway and Bedford College in London. While worthy of study, this emphasis can lead to the perception that women students during this period were as sheltered and isolated as the learned maidens of Tennyson’s narrative poem The Princess, itself published in 1847 as a response to the founding of Queen’s College London. These foundations were not remote outposts of feminine scholarship, however, but were members of larger institutions—the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, and London, respectively—of which men were also a part. This book aims to cross that gulf between the high walls of the women’s college and the mythologised spires of the masculine university. It will examine gender in higher education not through the lens of discrete single-­sex spaces, but by exploring how the emergence of coeducation was experienced within the context of a historically male higher education system. My interest lies not in the spaces of isolation, but in the points of connection: in understanding how men and women students negotiated the shared space of the university, and in turn how this created the model of the university as we know it today. Reminiscing about the lawns and flowerbeds of the Lady Margaret Hall of her youth, Peck’s memoir reveals yet another aspect of how the origins of university coeducation in England and Wales has been historicised and remembered: through the prism of Oxford and Cambridge. Fuelled by an abundance of memoirs and autobiographies from distinguished alumnae of Girton, Newnham, Somerville, and Lady Margaret Hall, Carol Dyhouse notes that this concentration of sources has left historians with ‘vivid and enduring images of women battling for access into sacred portals, and of authorities reluctant to extend privilege.’5 Less memorialised and preserved, and therefore a more shadowy presence in the historiography, are the women who attended the new ‘civic’ universities. The establishment of these foundations in provincial towns and cities across England and Wales during the second half of the nineteenth century completely upended the traditional educational hegemony of Oxford and Cambridge, providing an alternative option that both male and female students were quick to take advantage of. In the academic year 1900–1901, only thirty per cent of all full-time female students in England and Wales attended one of the all-women’s colleges at Oxford, Cambridge, Durham, or the University of London. The vast majority of the remaining seventy per cent attended a coeducational university or college.6

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One such establishment was Mason Science College in Birmingham, which threw open its doors in 1880. In that first year, thirty of the sixty-­ five students taking day classes were women, as were twelve of the eighty-­ three students attending evening lectures.7 At the Annual Meeting and Prize Giving held to mark the opening of the second session a year later, Professor of Chemistry William Augustus Tilden congratulated the college on its foresight in admitting women as ‘ordinary’ students. Not only had the ‘experiment’ shown that the work of the college ‘proceeds most smoothly and in the most gratifying manner,’ he said during his speech, but ‘the ladies themselves had shown that they were quite capable of holding their own in the ordinary competition for prizes against the ordinary male student.’8 The experiment, it seemed, had been a success. Women had been admitted on equal terms with men and acquitted themselves well academically. But using academic attainment as the sole benchmark by which to judge the success of coeducation elides a significant part of the student experience, and a woman student studying Chemistry under Professor Tilden who was ‘quite capable of holding [her] own’ would have had a very different experience from her male peers at Mason Science College than what was reflected on paper. As all the female students that year were local to Birmingham (and there was no hall of residence to accommodate them even if they were not), she would not have to venture far from home to attend her classes. She would arrive at the imposing neo-Gothic building on Edmund Street and, perhaps with some time to spare, make her way to the East Wing, where the women’s cloak room was located. She might then spend some time looking over her notes in the adjacent women’s reading room, free from the presence of men whose own reading and cloak rooms were located in the West Wing across the courtyard.9 When it came time for the Professor Tilden’s lecture, she would enter the Chemical Lecture Theatre. With tiered seating providing accommodation for 155 people, our student would enter through the women’s entrance and find her seat in the upper half of the lecture theatre, above, and behind the male students below, for whom a separate entrance was also provided.10 This was life at a supposedly coeducational institution. In 1895, when Durham University passed a supplemental charter allowing women students to receive degrees, it left Oxford and Cambridge as the only universities in Britain apparently unwilling to perform this perceived ‘final step’ in the march towards women’s educational equality. The

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University of London had led the way in awarding degrees to women in 1878, while all the universities that received their charters in the years following the Durham decision—most of them ‘civics’ which had been founded as university colleges in the second half of the nineteenth century—admitted women to degrees as soon as they were invested with the power to award degrees at all.11 This distinction gave rise to a dichotomy, widespread in much of the historiography of women’s higher education in Britain, in which the universities of Oxford and Cambridge are depicted as having been extremely resistant to the incoming feminine tide, while the more modern institutions which had admitted women students on equal terms from their foundation welcomed them with open arms, as epitomised by Julie Gilbert’s assertion that ‘women at the civic universities enjoyed a freedom unknown at the women’s colleges,’ with ‘little institutional attempt to segregate female students from their male counterparts.’12 As the example of Mason Science College shows, however, the reality was far less simplistic—and nor was it unique to Birmingham. Edith Lang entered Owens College in Manchester in the mid-1880s to study Classics, and in 1887 she received a first class degree from the Victoria University.13 Of her time at Owens, she later wrote that she and her fellow women students were ‘gazed at as if we were a new species,’ and ‘had no “rights,” but delightful privileges.’14 In 1910, fifteen years after being admitted to degrees, women at Durham still found themselves subject to rules that forbade them from entering cafés ‘in or near’ the town.15 At the University College of North Wales in Bangor, women students attending evening meetings of the choral and debating societies in 1891 needed to be escorted to and from the meeting by a parent or guardian, one of whom ‘must have undertaken to be present during the whole meeting.’16 It was not just Oxford and Cambridge where women students were held to a different standard than the men of their cohort. These two institutions continue to hold an outsize grip on the historiography of higher education in Britain in general, however, and the higher education of women in particular, with many of the major works in the field concerning themselves with the early women-only colleges of Oxford and Cambridge.17 While, in the beginning, these institutions had at best a tangential relationship to the universities with which they sought affiliation—the Oxford women’s colleges, for example, remained extramural and informal until 1910, while their Cambridge counterparts were recognised in 1881—they nevertheless did not exist in isolation.18 Women

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students shared lecture halls and laboratory demonstrations with male undergraduates, were taught by male professors, and negotiated the same city streets. The history of women’s higher education, even at supposedly single-sex institutions, is therefore in many ways the history of coeducation. The civic universities, on the other hand, continue to remain relatively underrepresented in the historiography, with a few notable exceptions.19 Almost universally, these institutions opened their doors to women students from their inception—indeed, as Dyhouse argues, the admission of fee-paying women students was a financial necessity for many fledgling institutions. Yet, despite this, there has been little scholarly attention paid to the first women to cross their thresholds.20 This is perhaps a corollary of the dearth of academic research centred around the civic universities more generally, with much of the existing literature on the subject comprised of commissioned institutional histories released in commemoration of jubilees and other anniversaries.21 The experiences of women within these works are commonly reduced to a chapter at best and a footnote at worst.22 Despite the fact that men and women were attending the same institutions from at least the 1870s, the term ‘coeducation’ also remains surprisingly absent from much scholarship on higher education in nineteenth-century Britain. L. Jill Lamberton prefers to employ the term ‘coordinate college’ when referring to the women’s colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, which she argues occupied a place somewhere between single-sex and coeducational as they were affiliated with larger institutions that admitted men.23 Christine D. Myers, in one of the rare usages of the term, argues that true coeducation can only occur when there is ‘a full mixing of male and female students in all aspects of study.’24 Gender separation could occur in accommodation and leisure time, she argues, so long as it was completely absent from the academic arena. Myers also emphasises the difference between institutions that were coeducational from the outset and those that made the decision to admit women later, contending that the struggles of integration inherent to previously all-male institutions were unique.25 The introduction of women students to the University of Oxford, for example, which had over 700 years of history as an all-male institution, would be implemented in a different way to the same process at Mason Science College. In the late nineteenth century, as men and women across the country negotiated the shared space of university campuses, the ways in which gender integration and isolation were enforced and experienced differed greatly depending

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upon the variant historical legacies and educational aims of individual institutions. It is also worth noting that the idea of ‘true’ coeducation, or total equality between men and women students, is not an entirely unproblematic concept given both the perceived need for designated women-only spaces and the desire of women to access such spaces. As Dyhouse notes, ‘[s]egregation as opposed to integration could guarantee a protected space, or what might almost be seen as a form of positive discrimination for women,’ a recognition that she argues has ‘historically buttressed, and to some extent continues to underlie, feminist support for single-sex women’s colleges.’26 Women, then, were a feature at both the old and new universities by the mid-nineteenth century, and in environments described as both single-sex and coeducational. The key to understanding how their experiences aligned and diverged, and how they came to shape the face of the modern university, is space. Physical space is crucial to understanding how both men and women experienced coeducation in the British universities of the late nineteenth century. In 1909, the chancellor of the University of Oxford, Lord Curzon, wrote in his Principles and Methods of University Reform that a university education did not take place ‘merely in the lecture room or examination hall, but in the quadrangle, the college garden, the debating society, the playing field, and on the river.’27 All of these spaces beyond the remit of academic provision were negotiated, contested, and gendered in their own way, shaping how male and female students interacted with both their physical environment and each other. Even if an institution claimed to open its doors ‘to all persons anxious to obtain instruction within its walls, without any distinction of sex,’ as University College Bristol did in 1882, the complex social and cultural expectations that shaped nineteenth-century ideals of masculinity and femininity ensured that men and women would not experience university life in exactly the same way.28 Space—both how it was arranged and designed, as well as who had control over movement and access—formed a key part of this. In 1911, for example, the new Guild of Students building was unveiled at the University of Liverpool. Designed by Charles Herbert Reilly, the imposing edifice boasted an amalgam of different architectural styles, including a baroque wing for male students and a separate regency entrance for the women.29 Women students at Owens College in Manchester were prohibited from entering the library, having to fill out a voucher and send a maid to collect any books.30 In Cambridge,

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members of the women’s colleges were not allowed to boat on the river without a chaperon, while the University of Bristol maintained separate men’s and women’s sports fields in different areas of the city.31 Educational equality on paper, as women students achieved the same official status as their male counterparts, was therefore often belied in practice by the physical space of institutions themselves, and how movement was controlled and regulated within their boundaries. Beginning in the mid-1990s, the so-called spatial turn in the study of history has seen the significance of space, place, and time as modes of historical analysis become more prominent. This is not to say there had not been stirrings before. As early as the 1920s and 1930s, the Chicago School of sociology pioneered the belief that social life could not be understood abstracted from its geographic context in its ground-breaking studies of urban life in Chicago.32 In France, the Annales school of the first half of the twentieth century similarly emphasised the leading role played by geographic forces in their long durée vision of the past, while the 1960s saw philosophers such as Henri Lefebvre and Michel Foucault turn their minds to the question of space. In Foucault’s Of Other Spaces, first translated into English in 1986, he declared that while history was the ‘obsession’ of the nineteenth century, ‘the present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space.’33 Lefebvre’s The Production of Space (which despite being published in French in 1974 did not appear in English translation until 1991) declared that space was a social product, and as such could be decoded or ‘read.’34 The history of education has also been influenced by the spatial turn in more recent years, with a 2010 special issue of The History of Education devoted to the topic.35 As David Livingstone wrote in his own contribution to that issue, ‘knowledge, it turns out, is a geographical phenomenon. It is acquired in specific sites, it circulates from location to location, it transforms and is transformed by the world.’36 As fields such as the history of education succumb to the so-called spatial turn, however, it is necessary to delineate exactly what this means. Leif Jerram has bemoaned the vagueness with which the vocabulary of space and place has been adopted by historians, arguing that terms such as ‘space,’ ‘place,’ ‘spatiality,’ and ‘location’ have become confused and are often conflated.37 Yi-Fu Tuan gives perhaps one of the simplest definitions of space, contending that ‘what begins as undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value.’38

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Integral to the idea of space is time. Gillian Sutherland has drawn attention to the temporality of place particularly as it concerns women, arguing that women in the late nineteenth century had to know ‘where one could and could not go—and at what times.’39 The meaning of place does not remain static, but is conditional on factors such as time and its use. As Jerram notes, ‘a sports hall that is used for Pentecostal meetings on a Sunday afternoon may shift from being a “male space” to a “sacred space,” but the space may well be the same.’40 The concept of time as a method of regulation also remains a valid one, presenting particularly interesting resonances when applied to the middle and upper classes, rather than the working classes with whom the ‘social control’ historians of the 1960s and 1970s were largely concerned. It was not just those who worked in a factory who saw their behaviour shaped by the ascendance of clock-time in the nineteenth century, with Nigel Thrift arguing it was this period which saw the development of the ‘rigid social timetabling and fixed social calendar’ that determined meal-times, work-times, dressing-times, and visiting-­ times to exacting standards.41 Giordano Nanni has also argued that middle-class British identities in the nineteenth century were to a certain extent defined by their attitudes towards time, as ‘obedience to the clock, a strict respect for the Sabbath ritual and the principles of time-thrift came to be correlated with dominant ideas of morality, foresight and discipline.’42 This rigid conception of time and punctuality was used within the space of the university as a method of regulation for the largely middle and upper-class students, both male and female, whose attendance was constantly recorded throughout the day, from compulsory meal-times to chapel services and lectures. ‘On Sundays we are marked at all three meals,’ wrote one Newnham student to her sister in 1885. ‘I suppose that if I was absent at two an enquiry would be made, if at the third I was still absent a telegram would be despatched to you to ask if I had run away!’43 This book sits at the nexus of several divergent strands of historical study—historical geography, gender history, and the history of education—as well as covering a period of great change. These final decades of the nineteenth century saw not only women begin to enter higher education in larger numbers, but the founding of the first wave of civic universities. That these two events did not occur in isolation, but were in fact closely interrelated, is the central argument of this book. The earlier part of the century had seen the establishment of several institutions to challenge the educational hegemony of Oxford and Cambridge, such as the

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London University (now University College London) in 1826, King’s College London in 1829, and Durham University in 1832. However, apart from the relatively early foundation of Owens College in 1851, it was the years after 1870 that saw the proliferation of new colleges across the country which would come to be collectively termed the ‘first wave’ of civic universities: Yorkshire College of Science, Leeds, in 1874; Mason Science College, Birmingham, in 1875; University College Bristol in 1876; Firth College, Sheffield, in 1879; and University College Liverpool in 1881. Across the border, the University College of North Wales was founded in Bangor in 1884. At the same time, women were entering tertiary universities and colleges in greater (although still by no means significant) numbers. While discussions surrounding the higher education of women had been taking place in journals and periodicals for decades prior—Queen’s and Bedford Colleges for women had been founded in London as early as 1848 and 1849, respectively—the final third of the nineteenth century saw this movement reach a critical mass. Girton College was founded in 1869 as Britain’s first residential institution for the higher education of women, with the establishment of Newnham College at Cambridge and Somerville College and Lady Margaret Hall at Oxford all following within ten years. By the early twentieth century, the position of women students had become entrenched and the first wave of civic colleges had all received their royal charters to become full-fledged universities: Bangor in 1893, as a constituent college of the federal University of Wales; the University of Birmingham in 1900; the University of Liverpool in 1903; the Victoria University of Manchester and University of Leeds in 1904; the University of Sheffield in 1905; and the University of Bristol in 1909. This book is about the social, institutional, and political changes that took place to allow this ascension to university status to happen on a mass scale. This is not just a story of space as it applies to the discrete boundaries of the university campus, but one concerned with the changing shape of nineteenth-­ century cities and the desires of an expanding middle class to assert their dominance in both a moral sense, through the educational betterment of their citizenry, and a physical one, through urban regeneration and grand building works. This book explores the emergence of the modern university as seen through the lens of gender and space in higher education in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with a particular emphasis on the institutions of Bangor, Birmingham, Bristol, Liverpool, Manchester, and

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Sheffield. Chapter 2 explores the idea of the campus as the ultimate expression of the university as a spatial entity. It examines how the civic universities designed their physical spaces as both a rejection and emulation of the Oxbridge ideal, and how they acted as tangible symbols of middle-class power and influence in growing regional centres. Chapter 3 looks at the question of residence, and how the development of the non-residential institution in the nineteenth century revolutionised the idea of what it meant to be a university, as well as opening the door to the admission of women students. Chapter 4 locates the physical space of the university within the broader context of the larger cities and towns in which they existed and explores the gendered nature of how men and women students moved through the wider urban environment, particularly through the process of commuting. The fifth chapter details how men and women students used and occupied the traditional learning spaces of the university—such as lecture theatres, classrooms, libraries, and laboratories—and whether the principles of coeducation in the most basic sense of equal access to academic study were achieved in practice. Chapter 6 is concerned with social and leisure spaces, from athletic fields to dances and other informal meeting spaces, which filled the time between lectures and formed an equally important part of the university experience. The final chapter looks at how the extra-­ curricular spaces of student representative councils, guilds, and debating societies occupied a distinctive space between the academic and social worlds, and as such provide a unique lens through which to view interactions between male and female students and the extent to which coeducational principles were applied according to different institutions. In examining how gender and space intersected within the context of higher education, and particularly the ways in which the latter was used to control and regulate the former, it is important to acknowledge that this was not always a top-down story of enforcement from above. The experiences of students were shaped not only by the policies of university authorities (such as vice-chancellors, masters, and fellows at Oxford and Cambridge and principals, professors, and members of University Senate at the civics) but also wider social trends and the behaviour of students themselves. Using a purely top-down approach through the lens of official rules and regulations imposed from above fails to take into account how students themselves engaged with these boundaries, and whether they accepted, rejected, or otherwise interacted with them. Myers notes that students themselves ‘wished to have a certain amount of gender separation

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in their academic and social lives,’ while Dyhouse stresses that is difficult for the observer to interpret the meaning of patterns of gender segregation during this period.44 While it may have been the consequence of ‘male exclusiveness,’ she also argues that it can be seen as ‘an index of feminist awareness or self-­ consciousness among the women.’45 It is not the case that men and women students yearned to study and socialise together in all aspects of their education but were cruelly denied by the powers that be. Similarly, support for coeducation could also come from non-ideological motivations, with Sarah V. Barnes suggesting that, for cash-strapped fledgling institutions, ‘support for co-education was less a matter of philosophy than financial expediency,’ with separate provision for women students simply impossible from the educational resources available.46 Financial barriers and questions of access played a significant and recurring role in the development of higher education in the nineteenth century, as they continue to do today. This book will explore these complicated dualities. New institutions across England and Wales accepted women students both as part of a mission to extend access to higher education, but also to widen the catchment of fee-paying students. Official rules and regulations governing mixed-­ gender interaction between students may have been enforced from above by university authorities, but decisions on how—and with whom—to socialise also came from the students themselves. Men and women students occupied the physical space of the university campus in different ways, but the reasons behind these behaviours were not as clearly drawn as merely expressing exclusionary beliefs. The appearance of women as a new category of student was not purely the result of pioneering founders driven by strong ideological beliefs establishing women-only colleges but is part of a wider story about the changing nature of an education system in flux. The introduction of coeducation to English and Welsh universities in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was only one of the most obvious markers of the changes that transformed the state of higher education during this period, resulting in the modern university as we recognise it today.

Notes 1. J. M. M. Hermans & M. Nelissen (eds.), Charters of Foundation and Early Documents of the Universities of the Coimbra Group, 2nd rev. ed. (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2005), p. 32.

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2. W. Peck, A Little Learning or A Victorian Childhood (London: Faber & Faber, 1952), p. 153. 3. The word ‘college’ is used for ease of reference here, although the five Oxford women’s ‘colleges’ (Lady Margaret Hall, Somerville, St Hugh’s, St Hilda’s, and St Anne’s) were in fact technically extra-mural ‘women’s societies,’ which were not granted full collegiate status until 1959. 4. S. Collini, What Are Universities For? (London: Penguin, 2012), pp. 32–3. 5. C.  Dyhouse, No Distinction of Sex? Women in British universities 1870– 1939 (London: UCL Press, 1995), p. 8. 6. J. Howarth & M. Curthoys, ‘The Political Economy of Women’s Higher Education in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Britain’, Historical Research 60:142 (1987), pp. 210–11. 7. ‘The Mason Science College’, Birmingham Daily Post, 24 February 1881, p. 4. 8. ‘The Mason Science College’, Birmingham Daily Post, 4 October 1881, p. 5. 9. ‘Lockers for Books, &c.’, The Mason Science College, Birmingham Calendar for the session 1880–1881, UB/MC/H/1/1, University of Birmingham, p. 23; ‘Descriptions of the College Buildings’, The Mason Science College, Birmingham Calendar for the session 1880–1881, UB/ MC/H/1/1, University of Birmingham, p. 132. 10. ‘Descriptions of the College Buildings’, p. 133. 11. Oxford and Cambridge would not admit women to degrees until 1921 and 1948, respectively. 12. J.  Gilbert, ‘Women Students and Student Life at England’s Civil Universities before the First World War’, History of Education 23:4 (1994), pp. 408–9. 13. The federal university which acted as an examining and degree-­conferring body for the university colleges of Manchester, Leeds, and Liverpool. 14. E. Lang, ‘The Beginnings of the Women’s Department’, The Owens College Jubilee, Being a Special Issue of the Owens College Union Magazine to commemorate the recently accomplished Jubilee of the College (Manchester: Sherratt & Hughes, 1901), pp. 56, 58. 15. M. Hird, Doves & Dons: A History of St Mary’s College Durham (Durham: St Mary’s College, 1982). 16. ‘Rules for students’, University College of North Wales, Calendar for the year 1890–1 (Manchester: J. E. Cornish, 1890), p. 38. 17. V. Brittain, The Women of Oxford: A Fragment of History (London: George G. Harrap & Co., 1960); J. Howarth, ‘“In Oxford but… not of Oxford”: The Women’s Colleges’, in M.  G. Brock and M.  Curthoys (eds.), The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 7 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 237–307; G. Sutherland, ‘“Nasty forward minxes”: Cambridge

1 INTRODUCTION 

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and the Higher Education of Women’, in S. J. Ormrod (ed.), Cambridge Contributions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 88–102; R. McWilliams-Tullberg, Women at Cambridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). See also J.  Burstyn, Victorian Education and the Ideal of Womanhood (London: Croom Helm, 1980); E. S. Eschbach, The Higher Education of Women in England and America, 1865–1920 (New York: Garland, 1993); J.  McDermid, ‘Women and Education’, in J.  Purvis (ed.), Women’s History: Britain, 1850–1945 (London & New  York: Routledge, 1995), pp.  107–30; J.  Robinson, Bluestockings: The Remarkable Story of the First Women to Fight for an Education (London: Penguin, 2010). 18. Howarth, ‘In Oxford but… not of Oxford’, p. 250. 19. W. Whyte, Redbrick: A Social and Architectural History of Britain’s Civic Universities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Dyhouse, No Distinction of Sex?. 20. Owens College, Manchester (founded in 1851 and later to become the University of Manchester) was officially a men’s college for nearly twenty years, before removing all legal barriers to women’s admission in 1870. Despite this development, however, the first women were not admitted to classes until 1883. On the admission of women to the civic universities, see Dyhouse, No Distinction of Sex?, p. 8. 21. See E.  Ives, D.  Drummond & L.  Schwartz, The First Civic University: Birmingham 1880–1980: An Introductory History (Birmingham: The University of Birmingham Press, 2000); J. G. Macqueen & S. W. Taylor (eds.), University & Community: Essays to mark the Centenary of the ­founding of University College, Bristol (Bristol: University of Bristol, 1978); T.  Kelly, For Advancement of Learning: The University of Liverpool 1881–1981 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1981); P. H. J. H. Gosden & A. J. Taylor (eds.), Studies in the History of a University 1874–1974: To commemorate the centenary of the University of Leeds (Leeds: E. J. Arnold, 1975); H.  B. Charlton, Portrait of a University, 1851–1951: To Commemorate the Centenary of Manchester University (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1951); H.  Mathers, Steel City Scholars: A Centenary History of the University of Sheffield (London: James & James, 2005). 22. Dyhouse, No Distinction of Sex?; S. J. Aiston, ‘“A woman’s place”: Male representations of university women in the student press of the University of Liverpool, 1944–1979’, Women’s History Review 15:1 (2006), pp. 3–34. 23. L.  J. Lamberton, ‘“A Revelation and a Delight”: Nineteenth-Century Cambridge Women, Academic Collaboration, and the Cultural Work of Extracurricular Writing’, College Composition and Communication 65:4 (2014), p. 569.

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24. C. D. Myers, University Coeducation in the Victorian Era: Inclusion in the United States and the United Kingdom (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 4. 25. Myers, University Coeducation in the Victorian Era, p. 4. 26. Dyhouse, No Distinction of Sex?, p. 7. 27. G.  N. Curzon, Marquess, Principles and Methods of University Reform: being a letter addressed to the University of Oxford (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909), p. 90. 28. ‘University College, Tyndall’s Park’, Bristol Mercury and Daily Post, 27 June 1882, p. 3. 29. Whyte, Redbrick, p. 145. 30. Lang, ‘The Beginnings of the Women’s Department’, pp. 56–8. 31. C. Crowther (Kenyon, 1896) in A. Phillips (ed.), A Newnham Anthology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 38; ‘Women Students’ Games Club’, University College, Bristol, Calendars for the Session 1891–92, Calendars: University College, Bristol and University of Bristol, DM1191, University of Bristol, p. 271. 32. A.  Abbott, ‘Of Time and Space: The Contemporary Relevance of the Chicago School’, Social Forces 75:4 (1997), p. 1152. 33. M.  Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, trans. J.  Miskowiec, Diacritics 16:1 (1986), p. 22. 34. While remaining influential, in more recent years this dictum has come under review from figures such as William Whyte, who argues that ‘the process of designing, building, and interpreting architecture should be likened, not to reading, but to a series of translations.’ W. Whyte, ‘How Do Buildings Mean? Some Issues of Interpretation in the History of Architecture’, History & Theory 45:2 (2006), p.  154; H.  Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. D. Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), pp.  26, 17. On ‘reading’ space as a text, see also C.  Rose, ‘Human Geography as Text Interpretation’, in A.  Buttimer & D.  Seamon (eds.), The Human Experience of Space and Place (London: Croom Helm, 1980), pp. 123–34. 35. C. Burke, P. Cunningham & I. Grosvenor, ‘Putting Education in its Place: Space, Place, and Materialities in the History of Education’, History of Education 39:6 (2010), pp. 677–80. 36. D.  Livingstone, ‘Keeping knowledge in site’, History of Education 39:6 (2010), p. 784. See also D. A. Finnegan, ‘The Spatial Turn: Geographical Approaches in the History of Science’, Journal of the History of Biology 41:2 (2008), pp. 369–88; D. Turnbull, ‘Travelling Knowledge: Narratives, assemblage and encounters’, in M. N. Bourguet, C. Licoppe & H. O. Sibum (eds.), Instruments, Travel and Science: Itineraries of Precision from the

1 INTRODUCTION 

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Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 273–94. 37. L. Jerram, ‘Space: A Useless Category for Historical Analysis?’, History & Theory 52:3 (2013), pp. 400–1. 38. Y. -F. Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), p. 6. 39. G.  Sutherland, In Search of the New Woman: Middle-Class Women and Work in Britain 1870–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), p.  77 [my emphasis]. See also E.  Munson, ‘Walking on the Periphery: Gender and the discourse of modernization’, Journal of Social History 36:1 (2002), pp. 63–75; D. E. Nord, Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation, and the City (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995). Doreen Massey also briefly touches on this idea of women’s restricted mobility in ‘A Global Sense of Place’, in T. Barnes and D. Gregory (eds.), Reading Human Geography: The Poetics and Politics of Inquiry (London: Arnold, 1997), p. 316. 40. L. Jerram, ‘Space: A Useless Category for Historical Analysis?’, History & Theory 52:3 (2013), p. 404. See also G. Dohrn-van Rossum, History of the Hour: Clocks and Modern Temporal Orders (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1996); D. S. Landes, Revolution in Time: Clocks and the making of the modern world, 2nd ed. (London: Viking, 2000), p. xxiii. See also A. F. Aveni, Empires of Time: Calendars, Clocks, and Cultures (London: I. B. Tauris & Co., 1990); R. Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985); D.  Gross, ‘Temporality and the Modern State’, Theory and Society 14:1 (1985), pp.  53–82; L.  Hunt, Measuring Time, Making History (Budapest & New  York: Central European University Press, 2008); P.  Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, trans. K. McLaughlin & D. Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). 41. N. Thrift, ‘The Making of a Capitalist Time Consciousness’, in J. Hassard, (ed.), The Sociology of Time (London: Macmillan, 1990), p. 112. 42. G. Nanni, The Colonisation of Time: Ritual, Routine and Resistance in the British Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012), p. 8. 43. V. Glendinning, A Suppressed Cry: Life and Death of a Quaker Daughter (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), p. 66. 44. Myers, University Coeducation, p.  187; Dyhouse, No Distinction of Sex?, p. 7. 45. Dyhouse, No Distinction of Sex?, p. 7. 46. S. V. Barnes, ‘Crossing the invisible line: Establishing co-education at the University of Manchester and Northwestern University’, History of Education 23:1 (1994), p. 37.

CHAPTER 2

The Campus Ideal

On 23 February 1875 was Sir Josiah Mason’s eightieth birthday. Born during the reign of King George III and the son of a carpet weaver, Mason began working at eight years old, selling cakes in the streets of Kidderminster, Worcestershire.1 After turns as a shoemaker, letter-writer, carpenter, blacksmith, and house-painter, in 1816 he moved to Birmingham seeking better prospects.2 He found work with an uncle who managed a jewellery and toymaking business, but after a falling out he moved into the manufacturing of split-rings for holding keys. In the 1820s he expanded into the production of steel pen nibs, through which he made his fortune. He soon became the largest producer in the world, amassing a personal fortune estimated in the region of half a million pounds.3 Knighted in 1872, he spent the bulk of his wealth on philanthropic projects, founding alms houses, schools, and an orphanage before turning his attention to scientific education towards the end of his life. Mason celebrated his eightieth birthday by laying the foundation stone of what would become Mason Science College, the precursor institution to the University of Birmingham. The new college building, an imposing Gothic confection designed by Jethro Anstice Cossins, was officially opened five years later, in 1880.4 The great and the good of Birmingham turned out in full force for the unveiling, which took place at the Town Hall.5 The formal proceedings were presided over by Thomas Henry Huxley, the famed biologist and anthropologist, with ‘all parts of the hall © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Oman, Higher Education and the Gendering of Space in England and Wales, 1869–1909, Genders and Sexualities in History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29987-2_2

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being filled’ by attending local dignitaries and notables.6 Located in the centre of Birmingham on a site extending from Edmund Street to Great Charles Street, the college calendar for the inaugural session 1880–1881 declared that Cossins had produced ‘the finest edifice in Birmingham,’ a building ‘of a somewhat French character’ of which the town ‘has every reason to be proud.’7 Within thirty years, however, the finest edifice in Birmingham had become obsolete. In 1897, Joseph Chamberlain became President of the Court of Governors of Mason College and embarked on a dogged campaign to transform this small, scientific college into a distinguished university for the entire West Midlands.8 The receipt of a royal charter in 1900 achieved this aim in principle, as it led to the official foundation of the University of Birmingham. It would be another nine years before the expansive building plan for a new campus out at Edgbaston would finally be complete and the old Mason College site could be formally abandoned. For Chamberlain, Cossins’ Victorian Gothic fantasy in the centre of the city did not match his ambitious vision. For that to be achieved, he argued in 1900, large space is required, and we shall have to go into the country. I do not mean at a distance which may not be easily reached by the tramways and the other usual means of communication, but we shall have to go to the country where land is sufficiently cheap to enable us to buy an estate. I should say anything from ten to fifty acres, upon which all the buildings ultimately required to complete this great institution can be erected.9

His prayers were answered later that year, when Augustus Gough-­ Calthorpe, 6th Baron Calthorpe, offered the university just over twenty-­ seven acres of land, valued at £20,000, on the site of his Edgbaston estate, later including a further twenty acres to be used as recreation grounds.10 The architects Aston Webb and Edward Ingress Bell were selected to design the new buildings based on their recent success with the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth.11 As with the laying of Sir Josiah Mason’s foundation stone over thirty years before, the official opening of the new University of Birmingham buildings at Edgbaston on 7 July 1909 coincided with a birthday. This time, it was that of Joseph Chamberlain, who would turn seventy-three the following day. Incapacitated by a stroke some three years before, however, the man himself was unable to attend the unveiling, which was presided over by no less than King Edward VII.12

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For both Chamberlain and Mason, the provision of education for the people of Birmingham had been their life’s work. However, while Chamberlain’s achievements remain visible in the sprawling campus of the modern University of Birmingham, crowned by the hundred-metre tall memorial clock tower that bears his name, little physical trace of Josiah Mason’s legacy remains. Cossins’ building fell prey to the twentieth-­ century backlash against all things Victorian: referred to by the writer Paul Cadbury in 1952 as ‘a neo-gothic monstrosity,’ it was demolished in 1964.13 The marble statue of Mason that once stood opposite the college that bore his name was also destroyed. The University of Birmingham coat of arms remains the only remaining link to Mason, whose crest of a double-­ headed lion and a mermaid holding a mirror and comb was adopted by the college that bore his name, then—like the college itself— absorbed into the university. This transformation over a period of approximately thirty years from a local, city-centre college founded by a single philanthropic benefactor to what Andy Foster argues was ‘the first formally planned British University campus,’ set in an expansive suburban site, is emblematic of the rise of the modern university in Britain.14 The roughly contemporaneous founding during the second half of the nineteenth century of what would come to be termed the new civic universities in industrial cities and towns across England and Wales was not part of a centralised plan to bring tertiary education to regional centres, but was rather deeply local in nature. The establishment of such institutions was the expression of an emergent, striving middle class for whom education was just one aspect of a wider project of cultural, moral, and aesthetic improvement that changed the face of the Victorian city.15 As industrialisation and urbanisation increased the economic importance of the middle classes, expanding their role as political and social leaders at a local level, the towns and cities in which these forces were most strongly felt provided, according to Alan J. Kidd, ‘the “theatre” for the expression and consolidation of middle class power.’16 Local self-made men, such as Josiah Mason in Birmingham, poured money into educational institutions that bore their name, with similar schemes leading to the foundation of Owens College in Manchester (named for textile merchant John Owens) and Firth College in Sheffield (endowed by steel manufacturer Mark Firth). Mirroring the transformation of Mason College into the University of Birmingham, by 1905 these comparable institutions

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had received their own charters and been renamed the Victoria University of Manchester and University of Sheffield, respectively. The civic universities as they were established in the second half of the nineteenth century were not intended as provincial imitations of Oxford and Cambridge. Rather, they were institutions deeply rooted in their locality and finely attuned to the educational needs of the local population. Their shift towards a more homogeneous model of a modern university of the type we recognise today—from Mason, Owens, and Firth colleges to the universities of Birmingham, Manchester, and Sheffield— was one that occurred over time. The phenomenon was epitomised by the numerous royal charters bestowed in the years immediately preceding the First World War which turned various local colleges into degree-­conferring universities. This process was entwined to the emergence of women as a new category of student, a development which not only emerged alongside but was intricately bound up in the founding of the civic universities. The small size, local nature, and relative informality of the provincial colleges as they emerged was the expression of a larger movement of reform, one that supported the extension of higher education to all and, in doing so, created an environment in which men and women students could learn alongside each other in a relatively equal manner. It was as these colleges began to grow in size and take on the trappings of a university that differences in students’ gender began to become more entrenched. This occurred in both a social sense, through the provision of distinct clubs, societies, and halls of residence, and a physical one, through the design and building of purpose-built campuses whose planning accommodated the separation of men and women, as opposed to the ad hoc rented premises in which these colleges had been founded. The concept of the campus rose to prominence during this period, with founders, architects, and planners all seeking to design buildings and spaces that would best express the aims and aspirations of the new university. This development was made physically manifest in the move from city-centre sites to spacious, suburban campuses, a trend that reflected contemporary preoccupations with the urban/rural divide. This process cannot be understood in isolation from gender, as the civic universities were uniformly (with the exception of Owens College) founded as explicitly coeducational institutions, with women accepted on equal terms to men.17 Instead, various social, cultural, and economic forces combined in the second half of the nineteenth century to create a new type of higher

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education institution, one in which women were accepted as students. Over time this space then became gendered, with an awareness of a female student population shaping where these institutions were located, as well as how they were designed and used. The university campus was a space loaded with meaning, an expression of wider debates and currents swirling around the world of higher education in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-­century England and Wales.

Religion and the Middle Class At the turn of the nineteenth century, there were only two universities in England: Oxford and Cambridge. Over the course of the next hundred years, both institutions underwent transformative change as a succession of reforming Acts of Parliament from the 1850s onwards sought (with varying degrees of success) to transform their closed-off clerical natures. These early reforms did not go far enough to keep pace with the dizzying speed of societal change beyond their walls, however, with the result that Oxford and Cambridge did not progress, but rather fell behind, becoming increasingly frozen in time.18 The world around them was changing, as industrialisation and urbanisation transformed the demographic make-up of the country. As the nineteenth century progressed, the class composition of those seeking a university education began to shift. Men like Josiah Mason built enormous fortunes through manufacturing and trade, and yet had a son of his wanted to receive a gentleman’s education at one of the ancient universities he would have been unable to graduate. For Mason was, like a not insignificant proportion of the British public during this period, a religious Nonconformist.19 He was not alone in this respect, as the religious census of 1851 revealed that total Nonconformist church attendance hewed closely to that of Anglicans, and in fact outnumbered members of the Church of England in the larger manufacturing areas.20 In Wales, the four main Nonconformist denominations (Baptists, Calvinistic Methodists, Congregationalists, and Wesleyan Methodists) constituted nearly twenty-two per cent of the adult population in 1851, and had grown to nearly thirty-two per cent by the end of the 1850s.21 In contrast to this burgeoning movement, Oxford and Cambridge during this period remained steadfastly Anglican. A Bill enabling dissenters to graduate had been thrown out by the Lords in 1834, and although the 1856 Cambridge University Act reversed this decision, not until the

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Universities Tests Act of 1871 would religious tests be abolished at all levels, allowing Roman Catholics, Nonconformists, and non-Christians to obtain lay offices such as fellowships.22 The removal of these institutional obstacles did not bring about immediate transformation, however, with narratives about the declining Anglican and clerical nature of Oxford and Cambridge during this period needing to be contextualised as relative to what had been a very high starting point. Behavioural impediments were also of as much importance as structural ones, with impetus to change stifled as much by the belief that dissenters were not of the class who sent their sons to Oxford and Cambridge as it was by formal prohibitions.23 The first challenge to the Church of England monopoly on higher education came with the foundation of the London University in 1826, which was established as an entirely secular institution open to any student regardless of their religion (or lack thereof).24 This did not serve to open the floodgates on religious freedom in higher education, however, as King’s College London was founded in 1829 as an established church alternative to the London University in direct response to the theological controversy surrounding the ‘godless institution of Gower Street.’ Durham University, when founded in 1832, also remained out of reach to Nonconformists and non-Christians as an explicitly Anglican establishment. As the nineteenth century marched on, therefore, there remained a gap in the provision of university education to Nonconformists. This gap began to be redressed with the founding of Owens College, Manchester, in 1851, and was replicated by the ensuing establishment of similar institutions in cities such as Bristol, Birmingham, Liverpool, Leeds, and Sheffield, which were rapidly growing in size. While the rising bourgeoisie were by no means uniformly Nonconformist, those who were played an outsize role in establishing new colleges and universities during this period. 25 Whether this stemmed from a purely altruistic desire to fund cultural and educational initiatives or from a competitive urge to challenge the older universities from which they had been barred is more difficult to say.26 University College Bristol was generously supported by several Nonconformist families, including the Quaker Frys and Congregationalist Willses, while Mark Firth of Firth College, Sheffield, was a member of the Methodist New Connexion.27 Both Josiah Mason and Joseph Chamberlain at Birmingham were Unitarian, a denomination which was also prominent in the early years of University College Liverpool and had a strong history of reform in both the areas of education and women’s rights.28 This in

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turn led to a widening of opportunities for Unitarian women, who were largely educated to a much better standard than was the norm.29 Bedford College, the second college for women established in England, was founded by a Unitarian, Elizabeth Reid, and had strong Unitarian backing.30 It is too simplistic to equate the emergence of the new civic colleges and universities exclusively with Nonconformist philanthropy, despite its obvious prominence. Indeed, the University College of North Wales ruffled feathers among Nonconformist supporters of university education in Wales due to its foundation in the Anglican cathedral town of Bangor.31 Despite these associations, Bangor proclaimed its secularity clearly in its foundation charter, as did other similar institutions. ‘No Student, professor, Teacher or other Officer or person connected with the College shall be required to make any declaration as to his or her religious opinions, or to submit to any tests whatsoever thereof,’ declared the Charter of Incorporation of University College Sheffield.32 ‘Our work will be carried on unfettered on the part of student or professor by any religious test, nor will any religious or theological endowment form part of the scheme,’ echoed the calendar of University College Liverpool.33 The establishment of these higher education institutions reflected not only the religious affiliations of the rising middle class, but also the desire of prosperous, self-made men—for men they all were with the exception of Mary Ann Baxter, a textile heiress who co-founded University College Dundee in 1883 with an £120,000 donation—to give back to their communities.34 Endowing educational institutions was not only seen as a selfless, philanthropic act—an investment in future generations through widening access to education—but also provided an opportunity to erect a tangible, substantive monument which could be admired on an aesthetic level as much as a charitable one.35 The support of private pockets was also a necessity, as while a government grant of £4,000 had been promised to the two new Welsh colleges in 1883, English colleges went without such financial support until 1889. The Scottish, Welsh, and Irish colleges were distributed government funds on the basis that this support helped to sustain their ‘national cultural functions.’36 From the late 1880s a coalition of several English civic colleges, including Bristol, Sheffield, and the Victoria University, lobbied the Treasury for similar financial support with the argument that the ‘national character of a university could be expressed, at least in part, at a local level.’37 Parliament—somewhat reluctantly—agreed, and sanctioned

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an annual grant of £15,000 to be shared among the University Colleges of England.38 While helpful, this sum was nowhere near large enough to meet the expenses of these institutions, and a loophole in the Act meant that the funds would only be allocated on the condition that the sum be matched by local fundraising efforts, meaning that funding continued to come largely from private, local pockets.39 Owens College, which had been founded in Manchester in 1851 from the funeral bequest of John Owens, attracted the funds of yet more successful businessmen as it grew and expanded over the decades, as detailed in an article from the Owens College Union Magazine in November 1897. As everyone knows, Mr. Christie, not satisfied with giving us the beautiful Library Building, which is rapidly approaching completion, has further presented to the College a portion of the residue of the Whitworth estate, amounting to something like £50,000. Moreover, two anonymous donors have given £10,000 for the new building and £5,000 towards the endowment of a new physical laboratory; while, finally, Mr. Edward Holt has given £1,500 to defray the cost of the recently erected gymnasium. We fear our democratic College is in grave danger of becoming a bloated aristocrat.40

Further south, to this day the Wills family name not only adorns the eponymous Memorial Building of the University of Bristol, whose Gothic spire so dominates the city skyline, but also the H.  H. Wills Physics Laboratory and Wills Hall of Residence, while their money also helped to erect the athletic ground pavilion, Students’ Union building, and Manor Hall of Residence.41 Cementing the Wills name in architecture to ensure it lasted for posterity was as much of a concern for Henry and George Wills as was ensuring the educational opportunities of the next generation, it seems. After all, they did give their architect, George Oatley, instructions that the memorial building bearing the family name should last for 400 years.42

Regional Pride and the ‘Local’ University As well as ensuring the family name lived on, the establishment of some sort of technical, medical, or university college was seen as a point of pride for many rapidly industrialising and increasingly affluent urban centres. In 1865, the Executive Committee for the Owens College Extension declared that the College ‘supplies a foundation on which may be raised such an

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institution as Manchester, and the wealthy community of which Manchester is the centre, ought to possess.’43 In later years, the city of Manchester would continue to look back on the comparatively early foundation of Owens (over twenty years before their nearest rivals) as evidence of their status as one of the leading cities in Britain. On the occasion of the College’s Jubilee in 1901, the vice-chancellor of the Victoria University of Manchester, Alfred Hopkinson, wrote that ‘Manchester has the honour of having been the first of the great centres of industry and commerce to become the home of a university capable of adapting itself to the new conditions of modern life.’44 He also drew attention to what was still then, fifty years after the foundation of the College, its predominantly local focus, describing the city of Manchester, the county of Lancaster, and the borough of Salford as ‘the districts from which the College draws most of its students.’45 As Simon Gunn notes, cities in the later nineteenth century developed as regional as well as industrial capitals, as ‘[b]oundary changes, suburbanisation and unregulated growth all meant that it became increasingly difficult to define what the city was.’46 One anonymous contributor to the Manchester Guardian in 1930 drew attention to how the term ‘civic university,’ which had become widely used when describing this first wave of regional institutions, was intended and bestowed ‘in no narrowing or parochial sense,’ but rather reflected how these institutions ‘draw a large part of their direct support from their respective cities, and they aim to express their gratitude by making themselves an organic member of the city life.’47 ‘The provincial universities sprang from the soil,’ wrote Abraham Flexner in his 1930 study of American, English and German universities, ‘they obtain part of their support by heeding local needs.’48 They also often served their cities in a very real way, not just as figureheads or points of pride, by making museums, libraries, and lectures available to the general public.49 As David Jones argues, colleges were in this way perceived as both ‘expressions and agencies’ of a provincial culture striving for self-assertion.50 When the University College of North Wales opened in Bangor, it joined fellow colleges in Aberystwyth and Cardiff in the provision of higher education to the people of Wales, an area which, had historically lagged behind England, Scotland, and Ireland in the provision of higher education.51 There had been no institutions of higher learning in Wales until the founding of the University College in Aberystwyth in 1872, and it was not until the release of the Aberdare Report in 1881 as the result of

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a Departmental Committee to enquire into the condition of higher and intermediate education in Wales that the prospect of future colleges began to take shape.52 The fanfare which greeted the official opening of the new University College of North Wales on 18 October 1884 demonstrates the extent to which a new college was seen as a boon for the local community as a whole. The Mayor of Bangor issued a proclamation for businesses to close for the day, lending a ‘general holiday’ atmosphere to the proceedings, according to the North Wales Chronicle. The High Street was decorated ‘with great taste,’ flags were waved from almost every window, and a ‘triumphal arch’ spanned the street approaching the new College. Following the official opening of the College at Penrhyn Hall, a 7000-person-strong procession marched through town made up of local dignitaries and members of the new College. Joining them were members of the coast guard, clergy, fire brigade, and tradesmen of all kinds, including over 3000 quarrymen from the Penrhyn and Dinorwic mines, many of whom had helped to pay for the College via subscription. This outpouring of local support suggests a general feeling in Bangor, articulated by the Chronicle, that ‘the North Wales University College would prove to be a boon and a blessing to the Cymry.’53 At Birmingham, the establishment of a college or university was particularly conceived of in relation to its location within the West Midlands and the necessity of providing an intellectual and cultural resource that would both serve and reflect this wider area. In 1887, the Birmingham Philosophical Society held a special evening debate on the question of establishing a university in the city. William Tilden, Professor of Chemistry at Mason College, argued that, The geographical position of Birmingham… as well as the variety of manufactures carried on in the town and surrounding district in which application is made… seem to justify the discussion at least of the proposition that Birmingham should be the seat of a University.54

Even Mason College, small as it was and with no pretensions to university status, saw itself as a college of the West Midlands rather than simply of the city Birmingham, with the façade of the main building featuring carvings of the arms of Birmingham, Warwickshire, and Worcestershire.55 The Trust Deed of the college, written in 1873, declared Mason’s intention to provide systematic education and instruction to the people of ‘the

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Midlands District, and particularly the Boroughs of Birmingham and Kidderminster.’56 In 1898, an article by R. H. Pickard on ‘The Proposed University’ in the Mason University College Magazine articulated the strong relationship between city and university that defined this and similar institutions. The first needs that our new University should strive to satisfy are (if I may so express it) local not national ones. It should be primarily for local needs. Its main aim should be to instruct its students so that they are better fitted to attack the problems met with in the characteristic life of the district, and the Birmingham district contains such a vast population; it has so many and such varied interests, that should the University set itself to cope with the needs of the district it must of necessity attain to a world-wide reputation. And it is such a University, not necessarily a Birmingham or Midland University, but a University for Birmingham and the Midlands that I hope to see founded.57

By all accounts, his vision succeeded. By 1947, a history of the University of Birmingham declared that it ‘exists for Birmingham and the Midlands… It calls the people not only of Birmingham, but the whole of the populous region of the West Midlands.’58 The point at which it became more normalised for students to go to a university that was not local to them, and for universities to feel that they were in a national competition for applicants, was at that time still a distant prospect. What defined the civic institutions in a spatial sense is what Helen Mathers describes as ‘their symbiotic relationship with the urban area which created them.’59 While Oxford and Cambridge could—and continue to—be described as ‘university towns,’ Birmingham, Manchester, and Liverpool were cities and towns which also happened to contain universities, but were not defined by them. They were often explicitly founded solely for the use and benefit of people of their own local area, as epitomised by the proclamation of University College Sheffield that its aim ‘is to provide for the people of Sheffield and the district the means of higher literary and scientific education.’60 It was hoped that by improving the educational standards of their own people, they would encourage further innovation, investment, and prosperity in their local area. Educationalists of the period drew a link between the English civic foundations and the medieval universities of the independent Italian city states, with Michael Sanderson arguing that the latter ‘appealed to the Victorian civic pride of

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the large Northern and Midland cities,’ who saw themselves as similarly dedicated to the development and advancement of their own region.61 As more and more universities were established across both England and Wales, a sense of regional rivalry and a desire to not fall behind also came into play. These anxieties can be glimpsed in the first calendar for University College Liverpool, which declared, The feeling had for some time been gaining ground that Liverpool ought not to be behind Manchester, Sheffield, Leeds, Nottingham, and Bristol in a movement of such importance as providing for the higher education of youths after leaving school.62

Of course, the establishment of a university college was not an easily achievable task for any city, regardless of the wealth and prosperity of its citizens, and no matter how desperately they craved an impressive edifice to demonstrate their prosperity and influence. Building, and particularly the large-scale construction required for a public institution, was costly and time consuming, especially when such projects were effectively based on speculation. The paradox facing many would-be founders was one of space and money: a university needed paying students to survive, but students needed a physical building to attend—one could not exist without the other. The result was that aspiration and grand planning often failed to materialise straight away, and smaller designs were settled for instead in the hopes that future student fees and public donations would enable their expansion.

Early Foundations and the Desire to Build The first home of the University College of North Wales was a former hotel, the Penrhyn Arms, leased for £200 a year and skilfully adapted and renovated so that early students studied in a library that had once been a kitchen scullery and lounged in a smoking room that had once been a stable.63 In this way, Bangor reflected the make-do-and-mend ethos of the first wave of civic universities, which almost uniformly began life in modest rented premises before embarking on more ambitious building programs once funds became available. Two of the College’s first professors, Andrew Gray (Physics) and James Johnston Dobbie (Chemistry) assisted the architect, Richard Davies, in designing the addition of lecture rooms and

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laboratories to the main building, which the College boasted were ‘adapted for the highest scientific work of a University.’64 ‘[T]the solidest architectural facts are fictional to a degree,’ argues Robert Harbison. ‘Like much art, buildings often have a virtual or imaginary component.’65 The building plans of the early university colleges of England and Wales, as they began to be drawn up in the 1870s and 1880s, were full to the brim with such wishful thinking. An 1871 feature on Owens College in the Building News is almost entirely speculative, featuring the phrases, ‘the scheme includes,’ ‘it is intended,’ and, ‘the three other sides will not be enclosed at present, but when the entire scheme is carried out.’66 In fact, the building as a whole was designed with the future in mind, as noted by the correspondent: As the full development of the scheme is reserved for the future, some ingenuity has had to be exercised to make temporary provision for wants which will be more adequately met when the whole of the buildings contemplated shall have been erected.67

At University College Bristol the architect Charles Francis Hansom (brother of Joseph Hansom, inventor of the eponymous cab) also factored budgetary constraints into his design, while still allowing for the possibility of expansion in future, when presenting his plans in 1879. The proposed Buildings would occupy the back part of the site (coloured brown), the front (coloured yellow) being reserved for future Extension of the College. In this way the adoption of a very simple style of architecture for the first portions of the buildings would suffice, leaving the more costly portions to be added, as occasion requires.68

Twenty years later, in 1899, a benefaction of £1000 pounds from an anonymous donor allowed the Council to add the third side of what had originally been envisaged as an imposing collegiate quadrangle. The idea of having a quadrangle possessed of only two sides came in for some humorous comment in the Bristol student magazine, with a 1900 issue of the Magnet featuring the satirical ditty, ‘A Song of the College.’ Sing of the College that stands on a hill, Making a four-sided figure Part of the figure your fancy must fill, Two of its sides are awanting until

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Someone sows gold that will blossom in bricks, Shovels, and workmen, and mortar that sticks, Making the building grow bigger.69

Of course, the constantly evolving designs and piecemeal approach to building of the civic universities was not unique among educational architecture, nor even architecture more generally. Alfred Waterhouse was the starchitect of his time, whose buildings included not just civic universities and Oxbridge colleges but also prominent public buildings such as the Manchester Town Hall and the Natural History Museum in London. In their biography of Waterhouse, Colin Cunningham and Prudence Waterhouse contend that only a tiny minority of his buildings were conceived and designed completely before being built, and that more often ‘designing and building were organically related,’ with new ideas and modifications being gradually worked out.’70 After all, could the work of building a university ever truly be finished? As one town clerk wrote in a report to the Liverpool City Council as part of an inspection into the University’s expansion, ‘[t]here is no finality in higher education; there is no university which might not fruitfully extend its operations if its resources were increased.’71 Paradoxically, university buildings needed to be constructed to accommodate fee-paying students, but the money gained from student fees was required in order to build. Alongside such practical considerations, however, the tendency of cash-strapped institutions to build first and ask difficult financial questions later was often rooted in the desire to make a statement of intention and permanence. In an 1865 report of the Owens College Extension Committee, the united opinion of the professors was for the College to ‘procure a large and imposing range of buildings’ on the basis that ‘all would benefit from the prestige attending a stately and ornamental pile.’72 The use of the word ‘imposing’ is significant here, as it hints at the idea of ‘affective architecture’ which evolved in the middle decades of the nineteenth century and is categorised by William Whyte as ‘architecture that shaped the emotions by touching the senses.’73 University buildings were meant to make students feel a certain way, in this case imbuing them with a sense of awe and gravitas. This was not limited to existing students, either, with buildings acting as an advertisement to new students as much as they provided accommodation for existing ones. The Surrey site of Royal Holloway College, for example, was perched on top of a large hill near the London and South Western Railway so that the

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building could be seen from passing trains.74 Extensions and expansions also telegraphed growing success and financial solvency. In this way, the civic universities were similar to the women’s colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, who occupied a precarious position outside the formal boundaries of their respective universities. For them, too, the construction of college buildings served to strengthen their case and solidify their position, making their presence felt in a way that had not been possible when early women students merely rented a series of private homes in town as a base from which to attend their lectures. During official discussions within the Cambridge Arts School prior to the 1881 vote on whether women should be allowed to sit for honours degrees, Benjamin Hall Kennedy, Regius Professor of Greek and a member of the University Council, pointed to the physical presence of the women’s colleges as evidence of their claim to inclusion within the university. ‘[W]e know that two Colleges for women students have been founded, built and constituted at Cambridge, and that they rank among our architectural ornaments,’ he said. ‘They are before our eyes; they are facts.’75

The Urban/Rural Divide and the Idea of the Campus The universities and colleges of the nineteenth century did not simply exist within the cities and towns in which they were located, but were in many ways actively formed and shaped by them. If this dialogue between the city and institution can be understood as happening on a geographical scale, then zooming in to the architectural level reveals yet another site of significance: the campus. The word ‘campus’ itself is somewhat anachronistic when applied to the universities of England and Wales in the nineteenth century, as it was more closely associated with institutions across the Atlantic during this time. The Latin meaning of campus is simply ‘a field,’ with the word first used in its modern sense to describe the grounds of a college (most likely Princeton) in the late eighteenth century.76 American college planners broke with the European tradition of locating universities within large cities and moved towards the idea of each college as an autonomous community, located in nature and removed from the corrupting forces of the metropolis.77 The word ‘campus,’ therefore, described the landscaped greenery already distinctive of American colleges.78 The new English and Welsh civic universities were, in contrast, distinctly urban (or suburban) in flavour at the point of foundation. The term

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campus as it refers to the site of a university as a discrete spatial entity encompasses both the traditional and modern sense of the word: the first referring to the land on which college and university buildings are located, and the second referring to a collection of buildings belonging to an academic institution, whether or not they are location in a single site. The University of Birmingham as we know it today, for example, conforms to the more traditional usage, situated on a single, comprehensively planned site in Edgbaston. The modern University of Bristol, in contrast, remains a relatively city-centre institution, with university buildings scattered around the city rather than located on a central site. Both, however, can be described as campuses. Indeed, the duality of the word itself encompasses some of the anxieties that surrounded the establishment of the civic universities, especially as they outgrew their often humble and slapdash beginnings and began to grapple with questions of location, permanence, and the built environment. The urban/rural antagonism that shaped the design of American colleges was not absent from the English and Welsh context, with public debate grappling over which setting provided the most conducive setting for serious academic study. A 1930 article in the Manchester Guardian harkened back to this earlier debate, when it announced that, the day has long gone by when it could be doubted if a great industrial centre like Manchester were the suitable or best place for a university. Such doubters forgot the active life of Florence, where Galileo lived and Leonardo and Michelangelo. Where the pulse of life is highest, in the great congregations of men, and men’s energies in manufacture and trade are at their highest strain there also the other energies have their likeliest play.79

The conundrum of whether an urban or rural site was the best location for a university was further complicated in the later nineteenth century by post-industrialisation romanticising of the countryside as pure and idyllic, while the cities full of dark satanic mills were unsanitary and immoral.80 The Victorian expansion of higher education not only through the foundation of the urban civic universities, but also the reviving fortunes of Oxford and Cambridge, took place within a larger ongoing cultural debate about the merits of the city and the country, and whether cities could even provide the kind of environment that could be trusted to mould the characters of tomorrow’s leaders.81

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At the same time, England’s cities were seeing a flowering of the middle classes, as local élites with a robust sense of civic pride saw universities, like museums or art galleries, as an assertion of the cultural maturity of their city.82 The Reverend W. Lawrence Schroeder, writing on the occasion of the Owens College Jubilee in 1901, stated that, ‘[e]very city should be proud to minister to the welfare of its best intellectual life… The citizens, as a body, should share in the honour of maintaining the College through efficiency, supplying both men and money as occasion demanded.’83 In a physical sense, the civic universities were also quite literally ‘of the city’ in that they utilised local building materials and methods. The Mason Science College building was constructed of deep-red Kingswinford brick from the West Midlands, for example, while the designs for the University College of North Wales at Bangor stuck resolutely to two famously Welsh materials: stone and slate.84 Indeed, the idea of the university being not of the city—conforming instead to the rural/monastic model epitomised by the American colleges, and to a lesser extent the universities of Oxford and Cambridge—was the exception, rather than the norm. Universities, from their earliest origins in medieval Europe, were urban, professional schools, providing training in law, medicine, and theology.85 ‘Professional education was at home in cities,’ points out Sheldon Rothblatt, ‘since cities were homes for professions.’86 This debate over the superiority of the city or the country when it came to education had a significant influence over the spatial organisation and design of institutions in the second half of the nineteenth century, particularly as civic foundations which had largely started out life in rented city-­ centre premises grappled with the question of expansion. This inevitably led to the dilemma of whether to stay in the centre or move out to a ‘green field site’ (a campus in the true sense of the word) in the burgeoning suburbs. The evolution of city-centre Mason College into the expansive University of Birmingham, sprawling over the suburb of Edgbaston, provides a clear example of this wider trend.87 In 1899, a student at what was by then termed Mason University College wrote to the College magazine about his dissatisfaction with the current site. Translate the College from the smoky, shut-up centre of the city to a place not less than two miles from New Street, raise a noble pile on a plot of ground with plenty of room for expansion without going nearer heaven than many of us care to, (why not emulate the Elementary Schools?) have the athletic field close to the College, and let us have air and breathing

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space. I hope some day this dream will become a necessity; the longer we wait the more difficult the task.88

That very year, three members of an advisory committee had in fact travelled to America to make ‘a careful examination of the colleges and universities of the United States and Canada.’89 The report of the advisory committee, which was published in the Birmingham Daily Post, recommended ‘the acquisition of an ample site on which buildings could be erected on a suitable scale.’90 The gift of just over twenty-seven acres of land at Bournbrook from Lord Calthorpe (later expanded) provided just the ample site required, in one of the most desirable suburbs of Birmingham. As well as being located in a supposedly ‘healthful’ location, at an elevation of between 300 to 600 feet and in the opposite direction of the prevailing winds that carried ‘noxious vapours’ from Birmingham, Edgbaston was also well integrated into the city’s suburban railway and tram network.91 The motivations of the Calthorpes in handing over such large parcels of land were not entirely selfless, however. Indeed, they had been attracted to the proposal in the hope that an adjacent university might drive demand for housing.92 The initial designs of Webb and Bell called for a series of ten buildings (or ‘blocks’) arranged in a semi-circle, with the size of each block ‘about equal to that of the Birmingham Town-hall.’93 The central clock tower, which Chamberlain wanted visible from miles away as a means of drawing attention to the university, was similarly gargantuan.94 Completed in 1908 and reaching approximately 325 feet in height, it was topped by a spire and fitted with a clock face over seventeen feet in diameter, while the belfry contained five bells weighing five tonnes each.95 To this day, ‘Old Joe’ remains the tallest free-standing clock tower in the world, and until 1965 was the tallest structure in Birmingham.96 As Eric Ives, Diane Drummond, and Leonard Schwartz note, the University of Birmingham ‘has carried through a building program comparable to that of a medium-sized town.’97 The University of Birmingham achieved the campus ideal in all senses of the word, and on a grand scale. As such, it is emblematic of changes that were taking place at provincial higher education institutions all over the country, as local colleges that had been established by independent, civic-­ minded founders were transformed into chartered, degree-conferring universities with national investment and an expanded student base. This general homogenisation across the higher education sector, as

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idiosyncratic, localised colleges moved towards a more standardised idea of the ‘modern university,’ was also reflected spatially in the shift from the employment of largely local architects at the college level (such as Cossins at Mason College, Hansom at Bristol, and T.  J. Flockton at Sheffield) towards nationally renowned architects known for grand public buildings, such as Webb and Bell at Birmingham and the omnipresent Waterhouse at Liverpool, Manchester, and Leeds. That the civic universities would in future be grouped together under the term ‘redbrick’ demonstrates how much their very physical fabric came to be seen to be seen as one and the same. The transition that took place at the civic universities as their funds and student numbers grew—from small, rented premises to expansive, purpose-­built campuses—also allowed them to assert their own vision of what a modern university would look like, rather than working within the boundaries of an existing building that had been designed for another purpose. Sophie Forgan provides a concise description of some of their less than salubrious origins, with ‘Leeds in converted shops, a dancing academy, gymnasium and the former bankruptcy courts; Liverpool in a lunatic asylum; and Durham-Newcastle in the attics and cellars of the Coal Chambers.’98 Occupying premises such as these, which had been built for purposes other than education, required considerable compromise and adaption on the part of early colleges. As funds permitted, however, the construction of new buildings provided them with a blank slate. Building a new campus from the ground up allowed the founders of such institutions to express their ideas about education and pedagogy in a tangible way, and in many cases this included ideas about coeducation and the different educational requirements of men and women. The intersection of gender with architecture is an area which holds particular resonance for university buildings, not just in terms of for whom they were built, but also in the sense that architectural styles themselves were believed to embody either masculine or feminine qualities. The Victorians ‘sexualised’ buildings by according them masculine and feminine characteristics in a branch of aesthetic doctrine known as ‘associationism,’ while the Queen Anne style of architecture—which was notably used for several women’s colleges at both Oxford and Cambridge—carried strong connotations of both femininity and domesticity.99 Architecture can also record history in a way that archives and human memory often cannot. At the University College of North Wales, architecture provides lingering evidence of how relations between men and women students

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were strictly supervised along spatial lines. In June 1906, long-held plans to build a purpose-built campus from scratch were finally put into motion, as four architects submitted designs in a competitive process to replace the old coaching house, which had become increasingly cramped and unsuitable as the college grew in size.100 The winner was Henry T. Hare, whose designs clearly demonstrated an intent to regulate mixed-gender interaction between students. The plans for the lower ground floor clearly labelled a ‘men’s entrance’ and ‘women’s entrance,’ and in fact the entire floor was divided into two gendered halves: the men’s side with its own cloakroom, common room, lavatory, and committee room, matched on the women’s side by their own respective cloakroom, common room, lavatory, and ‘office of the Lady Superintendent.’ Both sides provided entrances via separate corridors into the central Old Students’ Common Room, but there was no other point of entry between the two halves.101 Above, the first and second floors contained eighteen class rooms, which a university publication on the occasion of the foundation stone being laid boasted were ‘capable of accommodating over 1,000 students at one time, and [are] approached from separate entrances for men and women.’102 In the science building, the first-floor plans showed separate men’s and women’s dining rooms.103 Spaces where men and women students were divided on the basis of gender included practically all those apart from the lecture or class room, and even these contained separate entrances. Men and women entered the building via separate doorways, hung their coats in separate cloakrooms, whiled away time between lectures in separate common rooms, and ate in separate dining rooms. In this way, the spatial reality of buildings belied the coeducational ideal expounded by the civic universities.

Oxbridge Influence and Rebellion As the civic universities emerged as a new ‘type’ of university, united by their shared origins and growing in both size and student numbers, their engagement with the Oxford and Cambridge model of a university, and how much they adhered to or rejected it, emerged as a topic of discussion that has persevered to this day, with little hope of resolution in sight. The evergreen question is whether the civic universities self-consciously distanced themselves from institutions they saw as elitist and exclusionary, whose fees and religious tests had in many ways spurred their own foundation, or if they sought to emulate and model themselves on the only

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examples of English universities they had to follow. For, in the minds of most people in England, university education was synonymous with Oxford and Cambridge. Sarah V.  Barnes uses the term ‘academic drift’ to refer to ‘a process whereby newer and/or second-rank institutions copy the curriculum and academic style of elite institutions.’104 England’s civic universities, according to her, ‘appear to have been particularly guilty of this tendency,’ despite the efforts of their original leaders to provide an alternative to the ancient universities more closely aligned with the institutions of Scotland and Germany.105 Roy Lowe argues the same, contending that the first decade of the twentieth century saw the civic universities try to redress the ‘curricular imbalance’ of their largely technical, science-based origins, and as such moved towards the ‘defining institutions’ of Oxford and Cambridge.106 While the character of the civic universities definitely changed in the first decade of the twentieth century, it is not so simple as to say they became more like Oxford and Cambridge. Rather, all universities were undergoing change during this period, including Oxford and Cambridge. It was not that the two ancient universities remained static and unwavering while the civic universities reshaped themselves in their image, but that all were responding to ideas of what it meant to be a modern university. While it is true that the modern university was often viewed in comparison with Oxford and Cambridge, this is a story of change over time.107 Owens College had been founded in 1851, at a time when Oxford and Cambridge still imposed religious tests, had no women’s colleges, and only offered a syllabus of mathematics and classics, with no modern studies of the arts and sciences. In this context, it is understandable that the civic universities were both framed, and understood themselves as, modern. As Whyte argues, they provided ‘a very different sort of education, to a very different type of student, in a very different kind of environment.’108 Ramsay Muir, who first entered University College Liverpool as a student in 1889, wrote in his memoirs that ‘even as a student I realised that I was involved in no less an enterprise than the building of a new type of university.’109 However, by the eve of the First World War, at which point the first wave of civic universities had all received their royal charters to become full degree-conferring institutions, the situation had changed. The civic universities were no longer small, largely science-focused colleges in cramped city-centre premises, propped up by the funds of private benefactors and endless public subscriptions. Instead, they now occupied spacious suburban sites with planned, purpose-built campuses, teaching a balanced

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curriculum of arts and sciences. At the same time, Oxford and Cambridge accepted a much wider range of students (including women and non-­ Anglicans) and taught them a more diverse range of subjects. Both types of institution could arguably lay claim to being modern universities. To be a modern university, however, still required some engagement with the past. One had to fulfil the requirements of what constituted a university in order to then modernise it; to know the rules before one could break them. It was this conundrum, the need to engage with the past in order to distance oneself from it, that defined the design of both the new civic universities and the women’s colleges of Oxford and Cambridge during this period. For these new institutions, invoking the signifiers and tropes of collegiate architecture signalled to the world what type of building they were—a university—and in doing so sought to invest themselves with the associations of gravitas, dignity, and authority that type of building conveyed. It was in adhering to these basic forms, while at the same time diverging from the exact blueprint of an Oxbridge college, that the civic institutions announced their own modernity and difference. At the University College of North Wales in Bangor, for example, the architect Henry T. Hare studded an imposing collegiate façade in a style he termed ‘late renaissance’ (described by some commentators as ‘Jacobethan’) with seven statues of prominent Welsh figures.110 Here was conformity to the conventions of university architecture, but with a definite Welsh flavour. At a 1903 discussion on ‘The Planning of Collegiate Buildings’ organised by the Royal Institute of British Architects, the architect William Douglas Caröe was enthusiastic about the opportunities afforded to architects by the ‘universities which were growing in their great towns.’111 Nevertheless, he advised sticking the model of the older universities in their design, aiming for ‘a continuation of that admirable dignity of architecture which the ancient buildings had left them.’112 Aston Webb, architect of the University of Birmingham, disagreed, arguing that, ‘it was absolutely essential to depart from that type which they all admired in the older cities.’113 What is common in both these viewpoints, however, is the enduring dialogue with the architectural vernacular of the ancient universities, with which any new buildings would always be compared. Whether architects were hoping to imitate or differentiate, the spectre of Oxbridge was inescapable.114

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Many institutions were all too aware of their shiny newness and lack of traditions.115 This was certainly true at Owens College, where the following article appeared in the Owens College Union Magazine in 1897. Our College is situated in a great manufacturing town; it is the College of the busy; and it is useless and undesirable to try to closely imitate the Colleges of Oxford and Cambridge. They have, undeniably, very great advantages over us in their beauty and in their centuries of splendid tradition.116

At Sheffield, emulation of the Oxbridge style was taken extremely seriously. T. J. Flockton’s design for the original Firth College building ‘in the Renaissance manner’ was directly inspired by Clare College, Cambridge, with the Flockton-designed entrance on West Street nearly an exact replica of the older college’s gatehouse.117 Of course, the very idea of a homogeneous ‘Oxbridge’ collegiate style is illusory. These were institutions that, by the nineteenth century, had been in existence for approximately seven centuries, and had undergone significant change during that time. Moreover, both universities were comprised of multiple independent colleges that had been founded in different periods, with each one making their own decisions about how and what to build. The buildings of Oxford and Cambridge were constantly shifting, with old ones demolished, new ones built, and constant additions and remodelling adding extra layers over time. Pembroke College, Oxford, for example, was founded in 1624 when it subsumed a fourteenth-century medieval academic hall. The seventeenth-century renaissance classical façade incorporated the fourteenth-century entrance way (which, in the eighteenth century, underwent further alterations to add an extra storey and a bay window), while the early nineteenth century saw the exterior of the Old Quad resurfaced in Gothic style, followed by the addition of a neo-medieval hall a few decades later.118 This is, of course, true of all universities to a certain extent. ‘The university as a place… is not complete,’ argues Timothy Cresswell. ‘Places are never established. They only operate through constant and reiterative practice. Universities… are both produced and producing.’119 However, the medieval, monastic footprint upon which the first colleges had been built had remained more or less the model for an Oxbridge college over time, and the civic universities played with this model in innovative ways.120 At the University of Sheffield, for example, architect E. M. Gibbs adapted

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the quadrangle model to his own needs. While other civic universities may have left their quadrangles unfinished due to lack of funds, Gibbs deliberately left out one side ‘because only three were needed.’121 While the monastic/collegiate quadrangle served, as Paul Turner describes it, ‘the housing of a community of unmarried men and boys, with spaces for sleeping, eating, instruction, and religious services,’ Gibbs’ quadrangle contained sides for arts and pure science, one for the medical school, and one for administrative and ceremonial requirements, and was organised around corridors rather than staircases.122 It is significant that the residential function was absent from Gibbs’ design, with this being perhaps the largest point of difference between the ancient and civic universities. Recalling Aston Webb’s earlier argument that the design of the new universities needed to depart from the old, he went on to justify his position on the basis that, To begin with, a large number of the modern universities were not residential at all, and that swept away at once a great deal of that quiet domestic work which added so much to the value of the semi-public buildings interspersed amongst them.123

The physical spaces of universities carry weight and meaning, and this impacts the experiences and responses of the students who inhabit their walls and traverse their campuses. Moreover, this weight and meaning carries different kinds of connotations for different kinds of students, and particularly during this period for women students. In her memoirs, Hilda D. Oakeley spoke of the wonder of attending Oxford as a student in the 1890s. ‘To be in the University of Oxford,’ she marvelled, ‘not merely as a visitor to a superior world, of so many men past and present who had helped towards the greatness of England.’124 This, then, was affective architecture at work, and serves as an example of the types of feelings the civic universities hoped to engender as they began to draw up plans for a new era of higher education in England and Wales, one in which not only the men of Oxford helped towards the greatness of the nation.

Conclusion Universities have always maintained an unusual dual identity as both symbolic and physical spaces. On the one hand, to ‘go to university’ refers not only to the physical act of going to and from the campus each day, but

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speaks of an individual’s education more generally. They exist as both the literal embodiment of knowledge production and distribution—housing libraries and lecture halls—as well as functioning as an emblematic symbol of the same. The university campus, therefore, is a space particularly loaded with meaning, as both an idea and a site. In the second half of the nineteenth century, new foundations across England and Wales consciously wrestled with this duality as they attempted to establish institutions that embodied changing ideas about what a university could and should be. These philosophies were reflected in the physical fabric of the buildings themselves, which looked towards a different architectural blueprint than the Oxbridge model which had held sway for so long. This phenomenon was also profoundly local, rather than national. Impetus to found the civic universities came from individual cities themselves, rather than the central government, and was deeply tied up with the growing prosperity of the rising middle classes in industrial centres such as Manchester, Birmingham, and Liverpool. Keen to display the newfound prominence of their localities, as well as to give back to their community through further education, the founders of the civic universities created institutions that were indelibly shaped by the districts from which they had grown. From the selection of local architects to working in local materials, such as quarried Welsh slate at Bangor and West Midlands brick at Birmingham, these foundations were deeply rooted in their locality. This began to change over the course of the period, as the nascent colleges of the various provincial cities moved towards a more homogenised idea of what made a modern university. This homogeneity was manifested in both a physical sense, through shared architectural styles (the ubiquitous ‘redbrick,’ for example), but also in terms of curricula, religious tolerance, and the admission of women students. By the outbreak of the First World War, by which time the first wave of university colleges had received their royal charter and become degree-conferring institutions, this overwhelmingly local nature had abated somewhat, both in terms of the origins of students and the particular idiosyncrasies of specific establishments—from Mason, Owens, and Firth colleges, for example, towards the universities of Birmingham, Manchester, and Sheffield, respectively. This move towards a more standardised idea of the modern university was reflected spatially in the closure of the urban, city-centre sites in which these institutions had found life and their relocation to larger suburban sites, where purpose-built campuses were designed and erected.

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This move towards a more uniform model of the modern civic university had lingering ramifications for the men and women who attended these coeducational institutions as students. In their early years, small student numbers and the need to make these projects financially viable meant that admitting women provided a welcome bump to revenue streams, while their small size and non-residential nature meant that authorities were absolved of the supervisory function of the Oxford and Cambridge colleges. The construction of purpose-built campuses also meant that, rather than adjusting to the requirements of existing buildings, designated spaces for men and women could be codified, designed, and built from the ground up. It is through these physical environments, as much as the written word, that the intersection of gender and higher education can be read.

Notes 1. J.  T. Bunce, Josiah Mason: A Biography (London: Privately printed, 1890), pp. 2, 4. 2. Bunce, Josiah Mason, pp. 9–10. 3. G. C. Boase, revised by E. Hopkins, ‘Mason, Sir Josiah’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 3 October 2013. 4. ‘Descriptions of the College Buildings’, The Mason Science College, Birmingham Calendar for the session 1880–1881, UB/MC/H/1/1, University of Birmingham, p. 128. 5. Birmingham would be granted city status nine years later, in 1889. 6. ‘The Opening Ceremony and Inaugural Address’, The Mason Science College, Birmingham Calendar for the session 1880–1881, UB/ MC/H/1/1, University of Birmingham, p. 60. 7. ‘The Opening Ceremony and Inaugural Address’, p. 60; ‘Descriptions of the College Buildings’, p. 128. 8. ‘The King: Birmingham University’, Times, 17 May 1909, p. 11. 9. ‘Mason University College’, Birmingham Daily Post, 19 January 1900, p. 8. 10. ‘The University of Birmingham: Gift of a Site by Lord Calthorpe’, Birmingham Daily Post, 18 July 1900, p. 4; ‘The King’, p. 11. 11. E.  Ives, D.  Drummond, & L.  Schwartz, The First Civic University: Birmingham 1880–1980: An Introductory History (Birmingham: The University of Birmingham Press, 2000), p. 116. 12. M. Cheesewright, Mirror to a Mermaid (Birmingham: The University of Birmingham, 1975), p. 61. 13. The Birmingham Central Library stood on the site until it too was demolished in 2016.

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14. A. Foster, Birmingham (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2005), p. 242. 15. S.  Gunn & R.  Bell, Middle Classes: Their Rise and Sprawl (London: Cassell, 2003), p. 36. 16. A.  J. Kidd, ‘The Middle Class in Nineteenth-Century Manchester’, in A.  J. Kidd & K.  W. Roberts (eds.), City, Class and Culture: Studies of social policy and cultural production in Victorian Manchester (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), pp. 4–5. 17. Owens College was founded in 1851 as an explicitly all-male institution, but an 1870 Act of Parliament removed the gendered language from its charter. 18. S.  Rothblatt, The Revolution of the Dons: Cambridge and Society in Victorian England (London: Faber & Faber, 1968), p. 18. 19. While he never officially joined the Methodist church, Mason attended a Wesleyan chapel and taught at its Sunday school. M.  R. Watts, The Dissenters: The Crisis and Conscience of Nonconformity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2015), p. 199. 20. S. Mitchell (ed.), Victorian Britain: An Encyclopedia (Chicago & London: St. James Press, 1988), p. 547; K. D. M. Snell & P. S. Ell, Rival Jerusalems: The Geography of Victorian Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 80; J. Cox, ‘Worlds of Victorian religion’ in M. Hewitt (ed.), The Victorian World (London & New  York: Routledge, 2012), p. 437. 21. Watts, The Dissenters, p. 87. 22. G. M. Young, Victorian England: Portrait of an Age, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960), p.  102; J.  Kirby, Historians and the Church of England: Religion and Historical Scholarship, 1870–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 59. 23. Kirby, Historians and the Church of England, p.  60; Young, Victorian England, p. 102. 24. N. Harte & J. North, The World of University College London, 1828–1978 (London: The College, 1978), p. 31. 25. R. D. Anderson, Universities and Elites in Britain since 1800 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), p. 13. 26. S.  Wittingham, Sir George Oatley: Architect of Bristol (Bristol: Redcliffe Press, 2001), p. 27. 27. Wittingham, Sir George Oatley, pp. 26–7; H. Mathers, Steel City Scholars: A Centenary History of the University of Sheffield (London: James & James, 2005), p. 6. 28. R.  Watts, Gender, Power and the Unitarians in England, 1760–1860 (London & New York: Longman). 29. Watts, Gender, Power and the Unitarians in England, p. 8.

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30. Interestingly, the founder of the first college for women, F. D. Maurice, was an ex-Unitarian. Watts, Gender, Power and the Unitarians in England, pp. 156–7. 31. D. Roberts, Bangor University, 1884–2009 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009), p. 5. 32. ‘Charter of Incorporation’, University College of Sheffield, Calendar for the Session 1897–8 (Sheffield: Independent Press, 1898), p. 28. 33. ‘Preface’, University College Liverpool, Calendar for the Session 1882–1883 (Liverpool: Adam Holden, 1882), p. xi. 34. S.  Hamilton, ‘Women and the Scottish Universities c. 1869–1939: A Social History’ (University of Edinburgh, unpublished doctoral thesis, 1987), p. 125. 35. T.  Hunt, Building Jerusalem: The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City (London: Phoenix, 2005), p. 53. 36. K. Vernon, Universities and the State in England, 1850–1939 (London & New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 117. 37. Vernon, Universities and the State in England, pp. 115–17. 38. Roberts, Bangor University, pp.  2–3; ‘University College’, University College of Sheffield, Calendar for the Session 1897–8 (Sheffield: Independent Press, 1898), p. 19. 39. ‘University College’, University College of Sheffield, p. 19. 40. ‘College Notes’, Owens College Union Magazine 5:38 (1897), p. 1. 41. Wittingham, Sir George Oatley, p. 27. 42. D.  Carleton, A University for Bristol: An informal history in texts and pictures (Bristol: University of Bristol Press, 1984), p. 127. 43. Report (February 1865), Records Relating to the College Extension, 1865–1877, GB 133 OCA/7/2/1, University of Manchester. 44. A. Hopkinson, ‘The University and the City’, The Owens College Jubilee, Being a Special Issue of the Owens College Union Magazine to commemorate the recently accomplished Jubilee of the College (Manchester: Sherratt & Hughes, 1901), p. 1. 45. Hopkinson, ‘The University and the City’, p. 2. 46. S.  Gunn, The Public Culture of the Victorian Middle Class: Ritual and Authority and the English Industrial City, 1840–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 11–12. 47. ‘The University’, Manchester Guardian, 23 May 1930, p. 12. 48. A. Flexner, Universities: American, English, German (New York: Oxford University Press, 1930), p. 255. 49. D.  R. Jones, The Origins of Civic Universities: Manchester, Leeds, and Liverpool (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 3. 50. Jones, The Origins of Civic Universities, p. 3. 51. Roberts, Bangor University, 2.

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52. The Committee was established by Gladstone and chaired by Lord Aberdare. 53. ‘Opening of the North Wales University College’, North Wales Chronicle and Advertiser for the Principality, 25 October 1884, p. 3. 54. W.  A. Tilden, ‘Some Considerations on the Constitution of a Popular University’, Proceedings of the Birmingham Philosophical Society 6:1 (1887), p. 2. 55. E.  W. Vincent & P.  Hinton, The University of Birmingham: Its History and Significance (Birmingham: Cornish, 1947), p. 64. 56. Special Meeting of the Trustees at Norwood House, 16 December 1873, Minute book of the Board of Trustees (1872–1897), UB/MC/A/1, University of Birmingham, p. 66. 57. R.  H. Pickard, ‘The Proposed University’, Mason University College Magazine 17:1 (1898), p. 20. 58. Vincent & Hinton, The University of Birmingham, p. 2. 59. Mathers, Steel City Scholars, p. 1. 60. ‘University College’, University College of Sheffield, p. 2 [my emphasis]. 61. M. Sanderson, ‘The English Civic Universities and the “Industrial Spirit”, 1870–1914’, Historical Research 61:144 (1988), pp.  95–6; T.  Hunt, Building Jerusalem, pp. 208–9. 62. ‘Preface’, University College Liverpool, p. v. 63. Roberts, Bangor University, p. 27. 64. ‘Preface’, University College of North Wales Calendar for the year 1886–7 (Manchester: J. E. Cornish, 1886), p. viii. 65. R. Harbison, The Built, the Unbuilt, and the Unbuildable: In Pursuit of Architectural Meaning (London: Thames & Hudson, 1991), p. 7. 66. ‘Owen’s College, Manchester’, Building News, 4 February 1871, p. 85. 67. ‘Owen’s College, Manchester’, Building News, p. 85. 68. University College, Bristol: Description of Design by Chas. F. Hansom, F.R.I.B.A., Architect, Clifton, 1 February 1879, DM506/17/1, University of Bristol, p. 2. 69. J. F. M., ‘A Song of the College’, Magnet 2:3 (1900), p. 94. 70. C.  Cunningham & P.  Waterhouse, Alfred Waterhouse 1830–1905: Biography of a Practice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 3. 71. Pickmere, Town Clerk, Liverpool, Report to the City Council by the Inspectors appointed by H.M. Treasury, March, 1907 (Liverpool: C. Tinling & Co., 1907), S2664/(a)/17, University of Liverpool, p. 3. 72. Report (February 1865), Records Relating to the College Extension, p. 5. 73. W. Whyte, Unlocking the Church: The Lost Secrets of Victorian Sacred Space (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), p. 69.

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74. M.  B. Vickery, Buildings for Bluestockings: The Architecture and Social History of Women’s Colleges in Late Victorian England (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999), p. 130. 75. ‘Discussions in the Arts School’, Cambridge University Reporter, 15 February 1881, p. 368. 76. P.  V. Turner, Campus: An American Planning Tradition (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1984), p. 4. 77. Turner, Campus, p. 4. 78. Turner, Campus, p. 4. 79. ‘The University’, Manchester Guardian, p. 12 80. G. Rose, Feminism and Geography (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993), p. 95. 81. S. Rothblatt, ‘London: A Metropolitan University?’, in T. Bender (ed.), The University and the City: From Medieval Origins to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 141. 82. Anderson, Universities and Elites in Britain since 1800, p. 37. 83. Rev. W.  L. Schroeder, ‘The Ideal College’, The Owens College Jubilee, Being a Special Issue of the Owens College Union Magazine to commemorate the recently accomplished Jubilee of the College (Manchester: Sherratt & Hughes, 1901), p. 7. 84. ‘Descriptions of the College Buildings’, p.  128; J.  G. Williams, The University College of North Wales: Foundations 1884–1927 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1985), p. 273. 85. P. Hall, ‘The University and the City’, GeoJournal 41:4 (1997), p. 301. 86. S.  Rothblatt, The Modern University and Its Discontents: The fate of Newman’s legacies in Britain and America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 74. 87. Ives, Drummond, and Schwarz argue that the suburban site of the University of Birmingham, gifted by the Calthorpe family, offered ‘the opportunity to create, for the first time in England, a university campus… In strict terms, therefore, the Birmingham campus was the first in Britain.’ The First Civic University, p. 112. 88. B. V. S., ‘A Causerie on Social Life at Mason’s’, Mason University College Magazine 17:3 (1899), p. 72. 89. ‘University of Birmingham: Report of the Advisory Committee’, Birmingham Daily Post, 24 April 1900, p. 5. 90. ‘University of Birmingham: Report of the Advisory Committee’, p. 5. 91. D.  Cannadine, Lords and Landlords: the Aristocracy and the Towns 1774–1967 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1980), pp. 91, 95. 92. Cannadine, Lords and Landlords, p. 196. 93. ‘The Midlands: The Birmingham University’, Times, 30 December 1908, p. 15. 94. Vincent & Hinton, The University of Birmingham, p. 81.

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95. ‘The Midlands: The Birmingham University’, Times, p. 15. 96. ‘Five most famous clock towers from around the world’, Economic Times, 10 February 2016. 97. Ives, Drummond, & Schwartz, The First Civic University, p. xi. 98. S.  Forgan, ‘The Architecture of Science and the Idea of a University’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 20:4 (1989), p. 411. 99. G. L. Hersey, High Victorian Gothic: A Study in Associationism (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1972), p. 60. 100. ‘University College of North Wales, Bangor: Foundation Stone Laid by King Edward VII, July 9, 1907’, University College of North Wales: Records 1905–1925, Bangor University, p. 4. 101. ‘University College of North Wales, Bangor: Foundation Stone’, p. 13. 102. ‘University College of North Wales, Bangor: Foundation Stone’, p. 15. 103. ‘University College of North Wales, Bangor: Foundation Stone’, p. 14. 104. S.  V. Barnes, ‘England’s Civic Universities and the Triumph of the Oxbridge Ideal’, History of Education Quarterly 36:3 (1996), p. 271. 105. Barnes, ‘England’s Civic Universities and the Triumph of the Oxbridge Ideal’, p. 271. 106. R. Lowe, ‘Structural change in English higher education, 1870–1920’, in D.  K. Müller, F.  K. Ringer & B.  Simon (eds.), The Rise of the Modern Educational System: Structural change and social reproduction 1870–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 172. 107. W. Whyte, Redbrick: A Social and Architectural History of Britain’s Civic Universities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 132. 108. Whyte, Redbrick, p. 134. 109. R. Muir, An Autobiography and some Essays (London: Lund Humphries & Co., 1943), p. 22. 110. Roberts, Bangor University, p. 28. 111. B.  Champneys, ‘The Planning of Collegiate Buildings’, Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects, 10:8 (1903), p. 211. 112. Champneys, ‘The Planning of Collegiate Buildings’, p. 211. 113. Champneys, ‘The Planning of Collegiate Buildings’, p. 211. 114. Forgan, ‘The Architecture of Science’, p. 408. 115. Forgan, ‘The Architecture of Science’, p. 430. 116. ‘College Notes’, Owens College Union Magazine, p. 2. 117. A. Chapman, The Story of a Modern University: A History of the University of Sheffield (Sheffield: For the University of Sheffield by Oxford University Press, 1955), p. 18; Mathers, Steel City Scholars, p. 8; I. D. Rotherham, Sheffield in 50 Buildings (Stroud: Amberley Publishing, 2018). 118. G.  Tyack, Oxford: An Architectural Guide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 209–10.

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119. T.  Cresswell, Place: A Short Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 37–8. 120. Turner, Campus, p. 10. 121. Mathers, Steel City Scholars, p. 46. 122. Turner, Campus, p. 46. 123. Champneys, ‘The Planning of Collegiate Buildings’, p. 211. 124. H.  D. Oakeley, My Adventures in Education (London: Williams & Norgate, 1939), p. 52.

CHAPTER 3

The Question of Residence

In 1897, a meeting was held at University College Liverpool. Established in 1881, the College imposed ‘no condition of residence’ upon its students and had done so since its foundation over 15 years before.1 This state of affairs was set to change, however, as a committee formed to investigate ‘college needs’ had produced a report that outlined several proposed modifications to the way the institution was run. One of the most significant was the suggestion that, [p]rovision should be made for students whose homes are not within easily accessible distance of the College. Halls of Residence at other Colleges contribute to the well-being and advance of the Colleges to which they are affiliated. With some initial endowment, such a Hall of Residence could be satisfactorily started, and might be entirely self-supporting, whilst members of the staff might be glad to take up an official position in connection with such a hostel.2

Just two years later, this plan had been put into action. A house had been taken at 163 Edge Lane, ‘conveniently situated in a healthy neighbourhood, about ten minutes’ walk from the College’.3 University Hall, as it was known, featured several study bedrooms, a large common room, and dining room, as well as its own garden and tennis lawn.4 Overseen by a committee and presided over by a Resident Warden, the purpose of the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Oman, Higher Education and the Gendering of Space in England and Wales, 1869–1909, Genders and Sexualities in History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29987-2_3

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Hall was to provide accommodation for women students who did not live within easy reach of the College. The life of a women student was already not an easy one, noted a 1900 report on the Hall, and ‘their task is rendered still more difficult if, as is often the case, their homes are at a distance and time has to be spent in travelling to and from their work’.5 The same report also drew attention (with some pride) to the distances a number of women were travelling in order to attend the College, and their obligation to provide some form of accommodation in return. It is satisfactory to note that the Students at present in residence come from various parts of England, and that the Hall is not entirely dependent on Lancashire for support. It is felt, with confidence, that when the existence of the Hall becomes more widely known, women will be attracted to work at University College who might otherwise have been compelled to go elsewhere.6

The Committee on College Needs clearly saw the provision of a hall of residence as a strong incentive in attracting potential women students— and, perhaps more importantly, their families—away from similar colleges which did not offer residential accommodation. The report noted with interest that no less than five halls of residence for women had been founded at different university centres in the previous year.7 ‘There is a growing conviction’, they declared, ‘that Halls of Residence are absolutely necessary for the development of women’s education’.8 The emphasis on women’s education is significant. While the turn of the twentieth century might have seen a flurry of residential halls for women being founded at civic colleges and universities across the country, the same provision did not extend to men. Although University Hall was established in 1899 for the benefit of women students at Liverpool, there was no equivalent hostel for men until 1923.9 At the University College of North Wales in Bangor, a women’s residence was founded in 1886, while the first men’s hall followed in 1913.10 At the University of Birmingham, it was 1904 for women and 1920 for men.11 For university authorities, it appears that the arrangement of residential accommodation for women students was a much more pressing concern than for their male counterparts. In its recommendations, the committee report extolled the unique benefits afforded to women by residential life, declaring, ‘[t]he distractions of home life prove often an insuperable barrier to women studying

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for degrees or preparing seriously for professional work’.12 However, it also hinted at an underlying anxiety: one preoccupied with the safeguarding of female reputations. ‘[T]he reasons against women students living in lodgings’, the report curtly noted, ‘are so obvious that they need not be stated’.13 Colleges and halls of residence for women students in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century were invested with both of these spatial meanings. On the one hand, they were encoded as a refuge and ‘room of one’s own’ from which to escape the distractions of domesticity. On the other, they were sites of surveillance and regulation, where women’s health and reputation could be overseen and safeguarded in a way that was impossible in private lodgings. In 1868, an article in the very first issue of the Owens College Magazine, the periodical of Owens College Manchester, declared, ‘our College is not, like the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, a resident one’.14 While this would become a shared feature of the new civic universities that were founded, like Owens, in the second half of the nineteenth century, at the time it represented a radical shift in the idea of what a university was, or could, be. Gillian Sutherland describes as ‘revolutionary’ the decision made by the London University, when it was founded in 1826, to not require residence of its students.15 Before this time, the only two universities in England, Oxford and Cambridge, were built upon the idea that learning could not be separated from the context in which this learning took place. To attend a university meant to belong to a college, to live in that college during term time, and to be taught in that college. The question of residence, therefore, plays a central role in the development of the university in nineteenth-century Britain. While to think of the term university might conjure up images of lecture halls, libraries, and laboratories, residential spaces formed an equally significant part of the physical world of the campus. So too did their absence. The non-residential nature of the new civic institutions challenged the collegiate model of education defined by Oxbridge and Cambridge, providing an alternative understanding of what a university education could mean, and what it should look like. At the same time, this radical departure on the part of the civics was almost immediately challenged by the realities of student life. Not everyone lived within commutable distance of the campus—where should they be housed? Did colleges have a responsibility to accommodate them? These questions became even more pressing as the localised civic colleges grew into regional university centres, attracting students from beyond their immediate vicinity. As a

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result, they began to edge closer to the residential model they had so deliberately set themselves up to oppose, leading to a further renegotiation of what the idea of residence meant in a modern university. Changing ideas about the residential nature of universities emerged alongside the arrival of women as a new category of student in the second half of the nineteenth century, and these two phenomena were not unrelated. As Sutherland argues, the lack of a residence requirement at the London University created a situation in which it was much easier to argue for the admission of women to degrees, as they could partake of their studies while continuing to live a respectable, supervised life in their family home.16 At the same time, the establishment of women-only colleges at Oxford and Cambridge began to reshape notions of the traditionally all-­ male college system based on monastic religious establishments. The residential spaces of colleges and universities—or explicit lack thereof—were shaped by understandings of gender, as it related to both male and female students. From the very conception of collegiate life as an integral part of upper-class male character formation, to understandings of the domestic role of women and their place in the home, residential spaces at British colleges and universities in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries were steeped in assumptions about men and women that shaped their design, use, and the experiences of the students who inhabited them.

The Rise of the Non-residential University For centuries, the idea of a university in England had been shaped by the ‘liberal ideal’, for which the socialising experience of residence was thought indispensable to the moral side of education.17 The perceived value of this type of education was epitomised in John Henry Newman’s The Idea of a University, published in the 1850s as a response to the foundation of the London and Manchester colleges which had emerged as alternatives to the Oxbridge system. [I]f I had to choose between a so-called University, which dispensed with residence and tutorial superintendence, and gave its degrees to any person who passed an examination in a wide range of subjects, and a University which had no professors or examinations at all, but merely brought a number of young men together for three or four years, and then sent them away… I have no hesitation in giving the preference to that University which did nothing[.]18

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As Sheldon Rothblatt notes, the English idea of a university was created by people like Newman, who were ‘associated with literary and philosophical traditions of learning, trained in classical languages, aesthetic in disposition and nurtured within the structure of an Established Church’.19 The very idea of a ‘liberal education’, in the sense of the Ancient Greek context from which it emerged, was to produce well-rounded citizens.20 The development of character was as, if not more, important than the acquisition of knowledge, and the residential college was idealised as the space in which this transformation took place. As overseers of this process, the colleges themselves were invested with the institutional status of in loco parentis. Latin for ‘in the place of a parent’, in a university context this meant that the colleges assumed a duty of care for their students during term time. The limits of this care were not so easily demarcated, however, with the result that this responsibility extended beyond purely academic attainments to what Philip Howell describes as the Victorian Vice-Chancellor’s duty to safeguard the ‘health, reputation and prospects’ of the young men nominally in his charge.21 The ‘ambiguous ethos of the Oxbridge college as a surrogate family and household’, he argues, reinforced the notion that students needed to be protected and sheltered.22 For male students, this parental regulation and supervision was undertaken by proctors, annually elected ‘peace officers’ whose job it was to ‘attend to the discipline and behaviour of all persons in statu pupillari, and to search houses of ill fame’.23 They were assisted in their efforts for ‘the preservation of public morals’ by pro-proctors, also known as ‘bulldogs’, who policed the streets enforcing regulations regarding academic dress, curfews, and lodgings.24 In pre-1820s England, therefore, the idea of a non-residential university was a contradiction in terms. While students at universities across the border in Scotland lived in lodgings or at home by this time, with the last vestiges of residential accommodation and common tables having disappeared by the first decades of the nineteenth century, the opposite was true in Oxford and Cambridge.25 An education at one of these institutions required membership to one of their constituent residential colleges, where Tutors and Fellows could—and did—exercise close moral and religious supervision. As the century progressed and new universities began to be founded, however, the monolithic stranglehold of Oxbridge over the model of an English university began to be challenged. While Durham University (established in 1832 and incorporated by Royal Charter in 1837), followed Oxford and Cambridge in requiring its

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students to belong to residential constituent colleges, University College London (founded as London University in 1826, and issued its charter in 1836) was explicitly non-residential. Thomas Campbell, one of the earliest members of the plan to found a London university and himself a product of the non-residential Scottish system, imagined an ideal catchment area of two miles in either direction. This, he argued, would encompass the residential neighbourhoods of the ‘middling classes’ who would most likely form the majority of students, and enable them to commute daily from their homes.26 The civic universities followed the London model when they were founded later in the century, and often explicitly enshrined their non-­ residential nature in their charters. At the University College of North Wales in Bangor, the charter made clear that ‘[n]o student of the College shall reside within the College buildings’.27 At Birmingham, reports on plans for new buildings in 1880 made clear that they would ‘not provide accommodation for residence’.28 While these considerations were on the one hand financial—residential college life was expensive, and most likely beyond the means of the majority of students they hoped to attract—there were other factors at play. J.  E. Crawford Munro, Professor of Law at Owens College, wrote to the Owens College Magazine in 1883 of his fears for the social life of the College should a residential system be introduced. Speaking of the ‘disadvantage’ of colleges, he wrote ‘[i]t must always be remembered that one result of their establishment will be the splitting up of the students into different bodies as distinct in every respect as the men of the different colleges in Oxford or Cambridge’.29 This framing of the collegiate system as not only prohibitively expensive, but also socially undesirable, challenged the dominant liberal educational philosophy of the time in which residential life was viewed as universally beneficial. Instead of encouraging the development of a well-rounded character, according to Munro, college life would foster division and elitism. It is significant to note, however, that both these perspectives on college life were specifically concerned with male students. During the 1897 controversy over the vote to admit women to degrees at Cambridge, several undergraduate publications took it upon themselves to elucidate the value of residential life for men, as distinct from women. ‘Cambridge exists not for mere erudition’, asserted the Granta, ‘but for the education of the male youth of England—education of body, mind, feelings; and its object is to make a man a finished gentleman’.30 This elucidation of the benefits of college life for male students was only being written, however, because

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the defences of the exclusively homosocial university had been breached. It was the threatening of the traditional all-male collegiate way of life through the entry of women students into higher education that caused some to cling more tightly to the established way of things, even as it began to change. The arrival of women students both coincided with the establishment of alternative models of university education, as well as actively shaping and benefitting from these changes. The Cambridge Review similarly attributed the collegiate system with the forming of ‘a finished gentleman’, supporting Sonja Levsen’s argument that elite masculinity in this period was understood as something that had to be acquired, and not regarded as given. As she notes, the communal life of the colleges of the ancient English universities was interpreted as a ‘primary means of achieving this aim’.31 This could not be instructed in the classroom or lecture theatre, but had to be attained through the complete embodiment of a lifestyle. This idea of masculinity as what John Tosh describes as a ‘social status’, rather than ‘a set of cultural attributes’, is central to the idea of the university as a space in which masculinity could be actively demonstrated and validated by public affirmation.32 The longevity of the ‘character forming’ philosophy of a university is made evident by a 1909 memorandum on university reform prepared by the vice-chancellor of the University of Oxford, Lord Curzon of Kedleston, whose words echo the sentiments of Newman over 50 years before. without the good fellowship and mutual respect that are born of contact between men of different stations and upbringing … Oxford could never have fulfilled its mission, and could not now fulfil it to the nation.33

Time spent at university can be understood in this way as a liminal period, in which undergraduates were understood to be neither boys nor fully developed men. Ben Griffin has written about the nineteenth-­century belief that ‘manliness’ was not innate, but rather a state to be attained by effort. ‘Boys grew up’, he notes, ‘but particular effort was required if they were to grow up to be ‘real’ men’.34 The transition from boyhood to manhood, therefore, was a subject of popular anxiety, with adolescent male youth—a figure ‘physically but not socially adult’—traditionally viewed with wariness or suspicion.35 The university gave a certain structure to this time, providing students with what Paul Deslandes terms a ‘series of informal initiations and rites of passage that signified a distinctive stage of life

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and delineated those masculine traits that distinguished younger from older men’.36 Students of the time actively engaged with this narrative of the college as a transformative space in which boys became men, with an 1896 issue of the Granta featuring a short article on ‘the mere undergraduate’ in a comic series on college ‘types’. The Mere Undergraduate is an inevitable development of the Mere School-­ Boy, and in almost every instance he will be found to have gone through that preliminary stage. Directly he comes up, he throws off the school-boy and becomes the man—at least this is his ambition. As a matter of fact he remains in all essentials ridiculously young to the end of his University career.37

This well-trodden idea of the university as a sort of institutionalised adolescence, however—shaping the malleable boys of today into the great men of tomorrow—applied exclusively to a small group of middle to upper-class men at Oxford and Cambridge. An examination of this model begs the question: if a university education was seen as a formative stage in the life course for a certain type of man to prepare him for a certain type of career, what was the point for women? Or a different class of men? While they may have lacked residential colleges, it is clear that, for the early generations of male students of the civic universities, fostering some sort of corporate feeling and sense of social life was a definite priority. Ramsay Muir, who entered University College Liverpool in 1889, eight years after its foundation, bemoaned the fact that the college was still, as yet, ‘no more than a mere knowledge-shop … There were almost no opportunities for the students to meet one another or to carry on the vital, if often shallow, talk which is the most valuable element in university life.’38 He attributed this almost solely to the lack of a residential college, noting ‘the students all lived at home, and scattered to every part of a wide area when lectures were over’.39 An article in the University of Birmingham Magazine in December 1902 declared that, ‘[a]s a University we have scarcely a vestige of esprit de corps’, and pointed to the lack of residence as the culprit. ‘There is a pressing need for some influence which shall draw students more together’, they continued, ‘and it seems to us that the hall of residence might become, as it were, the permanent centre of social life’.40 Eventually, as the provincial colleges grew in size and attracted students from beyond their immediate localities, the necessity of providing some form of accommodation became clear. However, as the relatively late dates

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of foundation of halls of residence for men at the civic universities show, the emphasis was purely on housing, rather than the moral and social benefits associated with residential collegiate life. The civic institutions wholeheartedly endorsed the use of lodgings by their students for decades, a feature that aligned them more strongly with the Scottish universities than with Oxford and Cambridge. It was only in 1852, after all, that living in lodgings, or ‘digs’, was first sanctioned at Oxford, the result of existing college accommodation struggling to cope with rising student enrolments.41 In contrast, at the Scottish universities, which were smaller and more urban than their English counterparts, students were free to live in town, rather than in strictly supervised college communities.42 At the civic universities, which similarly began as small institutions within larger urban centres, lodgings provided a means for students who lived beyond a commutable distance to study at the college or university, without the institution having to pay to build residential halls, or assume the resulting legal responsibilities that came with acting in loco parentis. This is not to say that the civic universities took no interest in where their students were lodging. In contrast, prospective lodging houses had to be vetted before they would be placed on an official register, from which students could choose where to live. In the early days of University College Bristol, it was often professors and other staff members who put students up in their own home. Edith Barrell, the wife of the College’s mathematics professor, recalled that no less than the Principal of the College, Conwy Lloyd Morgan, and his wife ‘found room for a few of them in their house—as we did also’.43 Applications regarding lodgings were made to the Principal, she noted, while the Registrar ‘kept a list of authorised lodgings suitable to the needs of the students and gave advice upon the subject to enquirers’.44 The extent of this oversight could vary between institutions. At University College Sheffield, the official calendar for the 1897 session stated that ‘students from a distance’ could either ‘reside with friends, or in lodgings recognised by the College’.45 The University of Birmingham was particularly conscious of absolving itself of any pseudo-parental responsibilities, making it clear that it ‘does not provide accommodation for residence’, and thus ‘has taken no responsibility for the conduct of its junior members outside University house’.46 While a Register of Lodgings was kept by the secretary, who could assist students in finding accommodation during term time, ‘for these … the University was in no way responsible’.47 While universities may have allowed their male students a

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degree of latitude in choosing where to live while undertaking their studies, however, the same could not be said of their women students.

Women Students and Residence While both men and women at the civic universities could theoretically choose to live in lodgings, the appropriateness of such an arrangement for women was a sensitive one. The Board of Education, which allocated grants for maintenance, education, and training to women students studying to become teachers only dispensed funds to those living in recognised colleges and hostels, not lodgings.48 Similarly, while early students of the Cambridge women’s colleges had been permitted to reside with parents and guardians, or in privately arranged circumstances if above undergraduate age, the 1881 Graces required women students to live in one of the two registered colleges.49 Although there was talk at the civic universities of the benefits of residential life for women—the decision to establish a hall of residence for women at Owens College, for example, was met by enthusiasm that ‘women students in Manchester are in a fair way to secure those advantages of common life which experience has proved to be of almost equal value in education with the teaching itself’—the main motivation for establishing halls of residence for women was in reality not so much proactive as it was preventative.50 This discomfort ensured halls of residence for women were founded at a much earlier period than those for their male counterparts, with their development hastened by what university authorities saw as a greater duty of care to ensure safe, respectable housing for women. Clifton Hill House, the first women’s hall of residence at the University of Bristol, was opened in 1909, 20 years before the first permanent men’s hall.51 At Owens College in the 1890s, some college authorities felt that potential women students—and their parents—were being put off by the lack of an officially sanctioned hall of residence.52 An article on ‘The Hall of Residence for Women Students’ in the Owens College Union Magazine of March 1899 described ‘the loss to the college of those who were (as some were known to have been) actually deterred from coming by the want of a Hall of this kind’.53 At some of the civic universities, the Oxbridge women’s colleges were held up as the model for women’s education. In 1893, a women’s hall of residence (which later closed) was opened in a private house close to Owens College, with ‘the arrangements proposed as to hours and meals …

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those that have been carried out for years at Newnham College and the Oxford Halls.’54 Despite lacking the teaching function of the Oxbridge colleges, the civic halls of residence looked to these institutions for inspiration and modelled themselves in their image. For their part, the women’s colleges of Oxford and Cambridge consciously modelled themselves on the middle-class family home. At Oxford, all the constituent women’s halls were located in the suburbs of North Oxford.55 This choice of location, in a residential area some distance from the men’s colleges situated in the city centre, signalled the domestic character of these emerging institutions before a single brick had been laid. Geoffrey Tyack, in his architectural guide to the city of Oxford, points out the women’s colleges’ abandonment of traditional ideas of what a college should look like, jettisoning grand buildings arranged around central quadrangles in favour of ‘a protective, domestic environment of the kind then deemed essential for well-bred young ladies’.56 The attempt of women’s colleges of this period to replicate the social structure and relations of the middle-class family home did not occur independently of the built environment, but rather illustrates one of the most significant ways in which the architectural design of a building was intended to shape the behaviour of those who inhabited it. In 1871, when a house on Regent Street, Cambridge, was procured to house the first students of what would later become Newnham College, it welcomed five women aged between 15 and 30, presided over by the 51-year-old Anne Jemima Clough. One of these early students, Mary Paley, who was 21 when she commenced her studies, later recalled that, ‘[p]erhaps in those days Miss Clough was rather inclined to treat us like school girls and in the small house we were at close quarters and of course had our meals together with her’.57 This domestic arrangement, with Miss Clough as the ‘mother’ of the house, can be explained at least in part by the small size and relative informality of the college during these early years, during which its members lived cheek-by-jowl in a rented family home and even said family prayers together—the mark of the Victorian evangelical household and its promotion of spiritual life.58 This way of conceptualising the college as a family was to play a foundational role in the way that Newnham developed as an institution, and indeed the way that colleges and halls of residences for women developed in universities across the country. The educational background of the first five women who arrived in Cambridge gives some insight into the state of education for girls and

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women in mid-to-late nineteenth-century Britain. They were generally older than later students of the college, as well as their contemporary male undergraduates, having been privately educated at home, while later generations benefitted from the new girls’ high schools founded from the early 1870s. Middle-class girls’ schools of this period were often established in what had once been private homes, an economical practice that had the added benefit of assuaging the fears of parents unused to the idea of entrusting their daughters to strangers, a feeling which the founders of the nascent women’s colleges also capitalised on.59 However, even as these institutions grew beyond their modest rented beginnings, commencing large-scale building works and overseeing expanding student populations far beyond the size of a nuclear family, colleges still strived to attain this elusive ideal. In 1893, after Lady Margaret Hall had been comfortably established for 15 years, its principal, Elizabeth Wordsworth, despaired of her inability to keep the number of students at her preferred size of 40, arguing ‘[m]y own ideal is a college consisting of moderately-sized groups of students, each of them small enough to have a somewhat homelike character’.60 She obviously achieved some success in this regard, as one student who matriculated in 1921 later recalled of her time there that ‘the numbers were few enough for it to be like a large family’.61 However, this says more about Wordsworth’s ability to maintain a sense of cosiness rather than the actual size of the college, as Lady Margaret Hall, along with all the other women’s colleges of this period, expanded rapidly with almost continual building work. One Somerville student in 1892 compared the ‘continual growth’ of the College to the British Empire, ‘annexing a bit here and there according to the possibilities or the expediencies of the moment’.62 The idea of the ‘college as family’ not only helped to ease the fears of parents, but also served to soften the idea of an all-female establishment, which before the mass proliferation of girls’ schools and colleges was a rarity in nineteenth-century Protestant Britain. As Christina de Bellaigue notes, female institutions ‘carried an echo of the convent’, and keeping girls’ schools (and, by extension, women’s colleges) small helped to avoid any connotations of the nunnery, an institution viewed as foreign and artificial in its sublimation of women’s domestic, familial nature.63 While the men’s colleges had grown from monastic foundations, women’s colleges had to explicitly distance themselves from similar associations. In the same manner, while elite male academic status in the early-to-mid nineteenth century still drew on clerical identity, epitomised by the celibate

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college Fellow, the first generation of women staffing the new female colleges had to actively refute such associations, instead drawing on the domestic authority of the family.64 The trend for the non-teaching halls of residence at the civic universities to be modelled on the women’s colleges of Oxford and Cambridge was undoubtedly influenced by the fact that many of the first women to preside over them had been part of the first generation of university women to go through Oxford and Cambridge. University House, the women’s hall of residence founded at the University of Birmingham in 1904, was led by Lady Warden Margery Fry, who had both studied at Somerville College and worked there as its librarian.65 In many ways, University House mirrored the secluded life of the women’s colleges: it was located nearly two miles from the main university campus, had a large private garden, published its own magazine (the Dolphin), and put on various plays and theatricals.66 May Christophera Staveley, Warden of Clifton Hill House at Bristol, had also studied at Somerville in the 1890s, and brought a similar ethos to the ‘stately Georgian mansion’ of Clifton Hill House, ‘with a garden and trees curiously reminiscent, as has often been said, of College Gardens in Oxford’.67 Having come from the Oxbridge women’s colleges, women such as Fry and Staveley implemented similar routines and systems at the non-­teaching halls of residence they presided over at the civic universities. At Somerville College until shortly before the First World War, Adams notes, ‘[s]tudents were expected to shake hands with the principal before morning prayers, and to sit at her table for at least one meal a day’.68 Staveley enforced a similar system at Bristol, with one former student of Clifton Hill House recalling of her tenure that, Changing for dinner every evening was expected, and residents awaited her in the Common Room before dinner when she invited those who should dine at the High Table and then led in the procession formally in two’s taking arms. After dinner, coffee was taken in the Common Room with general conversation and music, the company frequently graced by distinguished men and women staying at the hall as her guests.69

This account paints a picture of an upper-middle class family home, rather than an institution—and, indeed, one former colleague of Staveley once wrote ‘it was impossible to think of the hall as an “institution.” Her personal care was everywhere.’70 Joyce Senders Pedersen argues that the

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women’s colleges, in their initial organisation, drew inspiration from ‘Victorian family life and private social mores’ as much as they did from existing educational institutions, such as girls’ schools and the male Oxbridge colleges.71 However, the extent to which this was due to a veneration of these ideals, or a pragmatic understanding that conforming to them would make the advancement of women’s education easier, is less clear. Mary Agnes Hamilton, who came up to Newnham in 1901, attributed the domestic design of the College to the still-uncertain future of women’s education in Cambridge. ‘[T]he structure was so designed’, she wrote, ‘that it could, should necessity arise, be retransformed into a pair of ordinary dwelling houses’.72 Practicality, as well as ideology, had a part to play. Sara Delamont’s concept of the ‘double-bind’ articulates the difficult position educational reformers found themselves in, trapped between the standards of ladylike behaviour and conventional femininity on one hand, and the standards of the male educational establishment on the other.73 ‘It was only by continuing to glorify the Victorian domestic ideal, as the educational pioneers all did, that any educational progress could be made’, she argues. ‘Women’s education could only progress if the family was not threatened’.74 However, for many, the idea of women living away from their family in a residential college was an inherently threatening one. The foundation of the University of London as a non-residential institution was popularly received by many who lauded the opportunity for women students to live at home while taking academic courses.75 In this way, they could receive an education while remaining safely ensconced in the domestic family sphere, to which their true loyalties and responsibilities lay. When, in 1885, King’s College London inaugurated their Ladies’ Department, they chose to locate their premises in a private house at 13 Kensington Square, a residential area convenient for their middle-class clientele, who could safely commute from their homes on a daily basis.76 One 1884 guidebook on schools and colleges for girls applauded the arrival of non-residential colleges, noting that, thus may be avoided all that tendency to “mannish-ness” and unfeminine independence of manner and character too often imbibed and adopted by those who reside in colleges … daughters may still be the comfort of their parents and the ornament of the domestic circle—the primary duties of

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girls—while sharing some, at least, of the privileges conferred on women by our universities and colleges.77

A woman student at one of these non-residential institutions, Owens College in Manchester, also espoused the virtues of studying while continuing to live at home, admitting, ‘we cannot taste the full flavour of the life of a resident college like Girton. But the home life that we enjoy simultaneously with what we have of college life, more than compensates for this’.78 This attitude was bemoaned by Girton founder Emily Davies in her 1866 treatise, The Higher Education of Women, which called for the necessity of women students being allowed to study in private, away from the endless demands and interruptions of everyday domestic life.79 This perspective was also reflected in the writings of early students, who did not so much miss their home life as relish their distance from it. At Oxford, Hilda D. Oakeley found the ‘solitude’ which she declared to be the ‘right’ of the female student.80 In her memoirs, Winifred Peck described her time at Lady Margaret Hall as ‘magic years’, where she enjoyed ‘freedom without responsibility’.81 To know one was safe from the intrusion of friends, relatives and housemaids was freedom indeed. My sister and I had a sitting-room of our own at home, but we also shared a bedroom so that for the first time in my life I knew real privacy.82

The residential halls of the civic universities also engaged with this idea of a room of one’s own, with a 1910 prospectus for University Hall in Liverpool advertising itself as a haven for those ‘who would suffer from the strain of continuous and systematic work in busy homes where the necessary quiet and freedom from household cares can hardly be secured’.83 The evidence that women students welcomed term time as a period of freedom away from the family home serves to illustrate—somewhat ironically—the limits of the faux-domesticity that colleges sought to replicate. However much college founders and authorities attempted to mimic the family home in order to alleviate parents’ misgivings and toe the acceptable line of decorum for ladies’ education, they nevertheless remained educational spaces above all. Women students recognised the difference, and they appreciated it. While they may have had to change for dinner and take part in ‘family prayers’, they were also given the time and space to

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pursue academic work uninterrupted by family responsibilities. As one Newnham student of the late 1890s later wrote of her time at the College, These restrictions did not trouble us much; they were all part of the general Victorian attitude to women, and College life was full of interest and in many ways was a very free life in comparison with our home life.84

For some, life at a residential college for women was seen as a little too free. The idea that a period of college life was beneficial and character-­ forming for men but somehow dangerous for women, whose own characters would benefit most from remaining close to the bosom of their family, was notably championed by Alfred Marshall. A prominent and complicated figure in the story of women’s higher education at both the old and new universities, Marshall was, at different times, one of the movement’s greatest supporters and harshest critics. Over the course of his career, he served as both a lecturer (and, later, professor) of Political Economy at Cambridge and as the first principal of University College Bristol. He was also the husband of Mary Paley, one of the original ‘Newnham five’, and a lecturer and academic in her own right. In 1880, while principal at Bristol, Marshall wrote to Emily Davies, the founder of Girton College, in response to a memorial she had sent him to sign in support of the proposal to admit women to degrees at Cambridge. Davies had reason to believe she could count on his support, given that Marshall had been one of the earliest advocates of women students at Cambridge. A close friend of Newnham co-founder Henry Sidgwick, Marshall was an active participant in the Lectures for Ladies scheme, lecturing multiple times and even recommending the opening up of the Tripos examinations to women.85 He donated £60 of his own money to the Newnham Hall Company and, as a member of the Building Committee, even assisted the architect, Basil Champneys, in measuring out the ground for the first stage of building works.86 However, by the time Davies wrote to him in 1880, he was living and working at Bristol, having been forced to resign his Trinity fellowship upon marriage to Paley under the celibacy requirements still in place at that time. His ideas on women’s education, it seemed, had undergone a similarly dramatic transformation. He now strongly disagreed with the suggestion that women students, if admitted to degrees, should fall under the same residency requirements as men, in which it was compulsory to belong to a

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college and live in Cambridge. He declined Davies’ request to support the proposal, writing, I cannot see why women who can be taught well in local colleges should be refused recognition for their work by the older colleges, unless they consent to neglect what may be their urgent duties to their families.87

It is clear here that in non-residential ‘local’ colleges, like Bristol, Marshall saw the opportunity for women to achieve a level of higher education while still placing their domestic duties to their families above all else. ‘It has always seemed to me’, he wrote to the editors of the Western Daily Press in 1887, ‘that those women who are able to get all the highest education they want without leaving their homes, and breaking themselves away from the associations of domestic life, are singularly fortunate’.88 These views were only strengthened upon his return to Cambridge, where he described the system at Bristol as ‘almost perfect’, as ‘most of the women students were living with their parents … They gave as a rule half their time to study and half to domestic occupations.’89 Indeed, he even suggested that the ‘best’ sort of woman would be deterred from coming to live in a Cambridge women’s college, due to the conflict it would present to her home life. The implication was that given the option to study at an establishment like Bristol, where they could continue to live at home, those who chose to study at Newnham and Girton, where residence was required, were a less ideal type of woman.90 The question of age formed a significant part of the debate surrounding the appropriateness of women students living away from home, and differed significantly from the way the same issue was discussed in relation to men. The trajectory of the boy coming up to university and emerging a man was more complicated for women, for whom a period at university had not traditionally been viewed as a formative stage in the life course in the same way. Instead, the arrival of the first women students at Oxford and Cambridge saw it framed rather as a period of arrested development. A time when a woman hit pause on the usual trajectory of her life, which for most would include marriage and motherhood, remaining frozen in stasis until she decided what she wanted to do: earn her living by teaching, or marry. While the progression from boyhood to manhood was marked by the accomplishment of defined milestones—such as entering a profession or establishing a household—the line between girlhood and womanhood

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was less clear. Pat Jalland argues that ‘[f]emale adolescence was prolonged, and the role of the adolescent girl was ill-defined, since she was no longer a child not yet a marriageable woman’.91 University women, caught up in this prolonged adolescence, were more often portrayed as child than adult woman, a tendency epitomised by the popular fin de siècle epithet ‘Girton Girl’. As Margaret Beetham notes, this may have inured female university students against some criticism, as perceptions of them as ‘girls’ rather than ‘women’ suggested there was still time for marriage and motherhood eventually.92 It also implied a certain innocence, playing more fully into the Victorian construction of the ‘girl’ or ‘daughter’ as what Deborah Gorham terms ‘an unambiguous model of feminine dependence’, characterised by childlike simplicity and sexual purity.93 A grown-up daughter’s years as a ‘daughter-at-home’ could extend from her mid-teens until her middle or late twenties, a time that largely coincided with the period of life in which a woman would attend university or college.94 Female adolescence was a period of limbo in either scenario, with women waiting for the next phase of life to begin. Carol Dyhouse has described the differences between social definitions of mature behaviour in men and women in the nineteenth century as one in which, for women, it was the achievement of economic dependence through marriage, rather than independence through work, which defined ‘maturity’.95 An 18-year-old girl could marry and be considered mature, for example, while her 28-year-old unmarried sister remained defined by her status as daughter, effectively condemned to permanent ‘adolescent’ status.96 This discrepancy between what made a ‘woman’ as opposed to a ‘girl’ was brought into focus at the universities by the chaperonage rules that guided the behaviour of women students. In her memoirs, Hilda D. Oakeley, who studied at Somerville in the 1880s, described how her Greek History Professor’s ‘sunshiny young wife, though probably my junior, gaily chaperoned me as the only woman student to his lectures’.97 Another student at Lady Margaret Hall recalled, ‘I was lucky in having a young cousin married to a don at St Johns & any married woman could be a chaperone’.98 A married woman, even if she was younger, was perceived as the adult in the situation, while the university student remained a girl in need of supervision. The question of residence for women students was therefore deeply complicated and inextricably tied to ideas of domesticity and family life. Colleges and halls of residence for women sought to mimic the residential

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middle-class home their students had left behind, in this way mollifying parents’ fears about their daughters leaving the social as well as physical security afforded by parental supervision. They were advertised as embodying all the wholesome and necessary aspects of family life for women, while providing them with the space and time required to pursue their education free of distractions. For some, such as Alfred Marshall, however, the distractions of home life were a woman’s true responsibility, with any educational obligations taking second tier. What most commentators could agree on, however, was that accommodation outside of the family home but not within an accredited hall of residence was the most undesirable option of them all.

Living in Lodgings The understanding of the hall of residence as a domestic space, one which performed the function of a middle-class family home-away-from-home, must be contextualised by the fact that living in halls cost money. The type of student who attended a hall of residence, versus those who lived at home or in lodgings, was not dictated by ideology so much as it was by commerce—the residential experience was only available to those who could afford to pay. For the women students of the University College of North Wales who did not reside in Bangor, for example, living in lodgings was by far the more popular option compared to living in the hall of residence, with finances largely to blame. In 1903, the outgoing Lady Superintendent of the women’s hall of residence, Mildred Fowle, wrote to the principal of the College that, the almost invariable cause that students give for preferring to live in lodgings is that they find it cheaper than living in the Hall … they feel it “a point of honour” to live on the lowest sum possible.99

The Welsh colleges had, from the beginning, attracted a much larger proportion of working-class students than their English counterparts.100 This was a deliberate choice on the part of university authorities, who kept fees low (£10 for Arts students and £14 for Science students) in a bid to attract students from less well-off homes.101 A survey of fathers’ occupations of the 304 students enrolled for the 1906–1907 session found that 16 per cent were involved in agriculture, 23 per cent belonged to the

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professions, 27 per cent to the commercial class, and 32 per cent were categorised as ‘working men’.102 As with the English civic universities, the women students of the University College of North Wales in its early years were of a slightly higher class background than the majority of male students. While, economically, a working-class family might not be able to justify educating a daughter to university level as they could a son, a prosperous family of the professional classes might view it as an investment in her future, either in employment or marriage, or as a mark of elite status.103 To pay for a daughter to reside in a hall of residence, however, required a further financial undertaking. In 1888, fees at the Bangor hall of residence ranged from £30–£40, up to four times the annual tuition.104 In this way, the hall consciously fostered middle-class influences, emulating the genteel model of the Oxbridge and Cambridge women’s colleges.105 At University Hall in Liverpool in 1910, the cheapest bedroom (with a fire not included) cost 35 guineas for the session, while the most expensive cost 50 guineas.106 Adding to the financial burden, fees were required to be paid in advance each term.107 This could lead to a feeling of hierarchy or division among the female students, with ‘Hall’ students held apart from those who lived in town. This phenomenon was particularly strong at the Scottish universities, where residential halls for women were largely populated by upper-middle-class women from England, while the Scottish students lived at home or in lodgings.108 There was a similar situation in Wales, with the Bangor hall of residence largely populated by English women who had been educated at the new girls’ high schools (particularly North London Collegiate School) and were studying for the London B.A.109 As Williams notes, not one of the 13 residents in the women’s hall of residence at Bangor for the session 1886–1887 had been educated in Wales.110 For many women students and their parents, however, the real value in paying for accommodation at an official hall of residence, whatever the relative expense, was in enjoying the sense of propriety and safeguarding of reputation it offered. The Liverpool University Hall prospectus of 1910 explicitly advertised itself as ‘designed to meet the needs’ of ‘those who come from a distance, and to save them from the isolation of lodgings, with its inseparable drawbacks and perils’.111 While the potential ‘perils’ of lodgings are not made clear in this prospectus, fears of the unfortunate fate that would befall female students in lodgings were realised in the early 1890s at the University College of North Wales, when a female student

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living in lodgings named Violet Osborn was accused of impropriety by the Lady Principal of the women’s hall of residence, Frances Hughes.112 Violet Osborn had arrived at the University College of North Wales in 1891 as a 25-year-old exhibition student to take classes in a number of subjects, including Greek, Latin, Philosophy, and English.113 A residential hall for women students had been founded in 1886, but it was not compulsory to live there, and taking lodgings in town was considerable cheaper.114 Having resided in the hall to begin with, at the beginning of her second year Violet moved into a private house on Sackville Terrace.115 Now labelled an ‘out-student’, she nevertheless maintained ties of friendship with several of the women she had lived with during her time at the hall, including Myfanwy Rhys, daughter of John Rhys, the first Professor of Celtic at the University of Oxford.116 The Bangor Controversy stemmed from a conversation Frances Hughes, Lady Principal of the hall, had with Myfanwy’s mother, in which she intimated that the older Osborn was not a suitable companion for her daughter. The words Mrs Rhys later recalled Miss Hughes as having used were that Miss Osborn was ‘unfavourably brought up’, ‘guilty of falsehoods’, was not ‘a pure-minded girl, or a fit companion for young girls’ due to her ‘corrupting’ influence.117 Mrs Rhys mentioned this conversation to others, with the result that Violet was made aware of it. Feeling that her reputation was being attacked, she called on the University Senate to intervene, who conducted an inquiry in November 1892. The inquiry found that ‘there exists no foundation for any of the said charges’ against Miss Osborn and, going further, stated, ‘in her whole career in this College and her previous life, as testified to by overwhelming evidence, [Miss Osborn’s] conduct and character have always been that of a refined and elevated woman’.118 When the Senate called on Miss Hughes to apologise to Miss Osborne, she declared ‘I cannot withdraw charges or imputations which I am not conscious of having made’.119 They therefore found that Miss Hughes had acted inappropriately and removed her from her post as Lady Principal, revoking the hall’s license in the process (it was reopened in 1893 with a new Lady Superintendent).120 While the goings-on at the hall had been avidly followed by local newspapers, particularly the North Wales Observer and the North Wales Chronicle, the controversy reached a new peak when Miss Hughes’ brother, the prominent Methodist clergyman Hugh Price Hughes, wrote to the editor of the Times in April 1893, complaining about his sister’s treatment at the hands of the College.

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He defended his sister’s decision as Lady Principal ‘to prohibit resident students from visiting students in lodgings, and from receiving unattached students in their own study bedrooms’, referring to ‘unattached’ students twice more in the letter. 121 This particular phrasing, in contrast to the more common term ‘out-students’, carried a subtly unsavoury connotation. To refer to ‘unattached’ women evoked associations of single-status, perhaps even a lack of common domestic ties and supervision. The Principal of the College, Henry Reichel, took great offence at the use of the term, and wrote to the Times himself to rebuke Price for the language used. I … feel bound to protest against the language he has thought fit to use regarding a most deserving class of women-students, whose conduct has been without reproach—those, namely, who reside in registered lodgings other than the hall—and I trust that on reconsideration he will regret having used it.122

Despite Reichel’s protestations, the term continued to be used in the newspaper discourse surrounding the scandal to refer to out-students like Violet Osborn. One article in the Lancaster Gazette squared the whole blame for the controversy on their shoulders. The sweet Girl Undergraduate who lives in lodgings by herself, in a town frequented by the male undergraduate, was certain, sooner or later, to cause difficulties. Oxford and Cambridge foresaw that, and arranged that their young lady students should live in the cloistered seclusion of Girton and Newnham, instead of lodging “unattached.” But at Bangor, in Wales, it is otherwise, and an unpleasantness has been the result.123

By 1901, as a result of this scandal, the University College of North Wales had made residence in the official University College Hall compulsory for all women students younger than 21.124 No longer, for women under that age, was there the possibility of being an ‘unattached’ student living in lodgings. For men, in contrast, the use of lodging houses was not seen as a similarly present danger to reputation and safety, and in fact was almost universally preferred as the cheaper option. With the vast majority of students at the civic universities—both male and female—still living at home during this period, lodging houses provided adequate accommodation for men

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students travelling from further away and delayed the widespread foundation of halls of residence for men until after the First World War.125 This is not to say, however, that colleges had no remit over the accommodation their students sought from private landlords in town. At the University College of North Wales, the use of lodging houses, was strictly and unequivocally under the remit of the College, with rules for male students just as severe as they were for women who chose to seek lodgings in town. The College calendar for the session 1886–1887 printed an official list of rules regarding lodgings, demonstrating how closely the College monitored its students’ domestic arrangements. Students were unable to lodge in any house not listed on the official Register of Lodgings, with male and female students not permitted to lodge in the same house; all students were expected to be in their lodgings by 10 p.m.; and students had to spend every night in their lodgings during term time except by special written order of the principal, who it seems personally fulfilled the role of disciplinarian performed at Oxford and Cambridge by college proctors.126 While proctors and their bulldogs roamed the streets of the ancient universities in search of undergraduates behaving badly, Williams notes in his history of Bangor University that Professor Reichel himself would stop incorrectly-attired students in the street to take their College number, for which they would then have to pay a fine of sixpence to the Bursar.127 Rules also applied to the owners of lodging houses, who had to sign a declaration in order to be listed on the register that included promises to ‘lock the outer doors and securely fasten the shutters of the ground floor’ every night at 10 p.m., to prevent students coming or going, and that ‘the outer doors of the house shall not be opened except by the master or mistress in person, or by a representative approved by the Board’ between the hours of 10 p.m. and 6 a.m.128 In this way, the movements of both male and female students outside of classroom hours were circumscribed and managed to a degree that bears more in common with the strict gating rules of the Oxford and Cambridge colleges rather than the supposedly more laissez-faire civic universities. Indeed, the Bangor rules correspond almost exactly with the lodging house license books of Cambridge, which also required lodging-house keepers to sign a declaration that, I will fasten the shutters of the ground-floor of my house, and lock the doors at ten o’clock every night, and keep the keys in my own possession; and that

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after that hour the doors of my home shall not be opened, except by the master or mistress in person.129

These regulations, as at Bangor, were strictly policed. In February 1881, a meeting of the Lodging House Syndicate, ‘having reason to believe that the 5th Regulation referring to the fastening of shutters, &c. is frequently violated’, desired to ‘call the special attention of all Lodging-­ House Keepers to the said Regulation, and to inform them that the continuance of their Licences must depend on the due observance of this as well as of all the other regulations’.130 Such stringent rules were not merely emblematic of the Victorian era, but persisted into the twentieth century. In October 1907, Bangor student R. Lloyd Robert was disciplined for being out until 12:15 a.m. His excuse was that he did not take his tea until 10 p.m., then went out for a walk to relieve his insomnia, but the official student discipline book notes that he was let off with a warning ‘this time’, and ‘warned of taking tea so late’.131 The 10 p.m. curfew was tightly enforced, with the College rules warning ‘[t]he College bell is rung for three minutes after the clock has struck the hour, and every Student is required to be in his place when the bell ceases ringing’.132 Men, as these regulations demonstrate, also found their activities documented and controlled by university authorities to a certain extent, but not to the same degree as women students. For both, however, the surveillance of students’ movement through space became a form of discipline, with comings and goings assiduously noted in an attempt to protect colleges from any hint of impropriety.133

Residence to Non-residence and Back Again The non-residential nature of the London University, while following in the footsteps of institutions across the border in Scotland, was revolutionary in England. What you learned could be separated from the context in which you learned it, and higher education could be opened up to those who could not afford the prohibitive costs of collegiate life. The civic universities consciously emulated this radical and egalitarian model, enshrining their non-residential nature in their charters and highlighting it as one of the major ways in which they differed from Oxford and Cambridge. The civics were new, progressive, and modern, and their non-residential nature was a major symbol of this. From a twenty-first century perspective, however, it is clear that this is no longer the case. In England and Wales

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today, the university experience is once again largely a residential one. While, with the exception of Oxford and Cambridge, university halls of residence remain non-teaching, they nonetheless accommodate a large proportion of students, who come from all over the country and, in the case of international students, the world. The unwillingness of the civic universities to provide residence for their students in their early years, when compared to its current ubiquity, could be perceived as an example of the ‘academic drift’ mentioned in the previous chapter, in which ‘newer and/or second-rank institutions copy the curriculum and academic style of elite institutions’.134 However, it could also—more accurately—be seen as a reflection of the changing nature of university education as a whole over the course of the nineteenth century, rather than the civics moving closer to a static Oxbridge ideal. The establishment of halls of residence at the civic universities was, in all cases, precipitated by the need to provide safe and respectable accommodation for women, and in this sense is tied up in the expansion of women’s higher education more generally. The second phase of residential provision, this time for men, did not occur for several decades, in most cases after the First World War. This was directly linked to the explosion of student numbers that followed this conflict. ‘No one had foreseen the rate at which the demand for university education would rise’, wrote H.  B. Charlton of the University of Manchester, which saw the number of male day students rise from 787 in the 1913–1914 session to 1144 in the 1919–1920 session.135 At Bangor, student numbers climbed from 135  in 1917–1918 to approximately 500 in 1919–1920.136 Over the same period, what had begun as localised colleges designed to service the educational needs of their immediate urban environment had developed into larger universities, servicing a wider region. At Mason College, Birmingham, 82 per cent of the initial student intake of 1880 lived within what was classed as ‘inner Birmingham’.137 Over the next few years, they received more students from the Black Country and surrounding regions, but the growth was slower for women.138 Nevertheless, by the early years of the twentieth century, this demographic makeup had changed. By the 1905–1906 session, the women’s hall of residence welcomed two students each from Yorkshire, Warwickshire, Worcestershire, and Staffordshire, as well as one each from Shropshire, Westmoreland, Sussex, Cheshire, Cambridgeshire, Northumberland, Hertfordshire, Gloucestershire, and London.139

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In her examination of England’s civic universities in the nineteenth century, Sarah V. Barnes notes that most students lived within 30 miles of the institution they attended, and that 80 per cent of students at the University of Manchester in 1906 ‘lived within a train ride of the city’, while William Whyte has offered similar figures for the universities of Bristol, Leeds, and Liverpool.140 By 1952, approximately a quarter of students at the University of Sheffield had homes in the city, another quarter lived within 30 miles, and the rest were drawn from across the country, including 100 from overseas.141 While those who resided in Sheffield or nearby lived at home, there were places in halls of residence for approximately 300 men and 120 women, while about 1000 lived in lodgings.142 While the question of residence may have started out at the civic universities as an ideological point of difference with Oxford and Cambridge—a statement of intent about what kind of university they wanted to be—by the end of the period it was a question of practicalities. The civic foundations had been so successful in creating a new template for the modern university that they were, somewhat ironically, forced to adopt some of the features of the older institutions in order to deal with the fruits of their rapid expansion and popularity.

Conclusion The eventual return of the civic universities to a residential (although, it must be noted, non-collegiate and non-teaching) model brings us back to the central question of what university residence signified in the late-­ nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. The collegiate model of a university, found at Oxford and Cambridge, distorted the boundary between the institutional space of academia and the domestic space of the home. In the late-nineteenth century, this merging had different meanings for men and women students, who were bound by divergent social and cultural understandings of domesticity and their place within it. De Bellaigue, discussing girls’ schooling in this period, contends that ‘when women’s role was often idealised as private and domestic’, its development was impacted by ‘the characterization of education institutions as essentially public and masculine’. 143 The same can be said not just of the women’s colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, but the way issues of residence and lodging for men and women were treated at the civic universities. Rita Felski argues that ‘home’ is not merely a geographical designation, but ‘a resonant metaphysical symbol’.144 It is above all, she notes, ‘a highly

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gendered space’, with women often seen as its personification, and ‘even its literal embodiment’.145 This conflation of womanhood with domesticity both acted as a check on women’s participation in higher education, which was seen by some as an abandonment of their traditional family role, and dramatically shaped how higher education for women developed and established itself in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. The domestic style of these buildings was matched by an institutional replication of the family home in the relationship between staff and students. As Jennifer Hargreaves notes, the residential college, or non-teaching hall residence, ‘reproduced the structure and ideologies of the ‘perfect’ Victorian home’, with the principal (or lady principal) assuming a dual father/mother role—both ‘head of the house’ and ‘inculcator of high moral standards’.146 Falling prey to the ‘double-bind’ of Victorian feminism, promoters of women’s education had to be seen to conform to the values of middle-class feminine domesticity and propriety, even as they sought to free their students from its constraints. At the civic universities, lack of residence raised questions about what it meant to receive a university education, and the value placed on residential life in the formation of manly character. Dependence on lodgings as the primary form of accommodation for non-local students highlighted the extent to which university authorities could be said to be responsible for the well-being of their students’ outside of business hours, while forcing students at these institutions to question what, if anything, made them a community. Residential space at English and Welsh colleges and universities of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries was not a minor concern, secondary to the ‘main’ academic and institutional space of the campus. Instead, the question of residence was deeply tied up in what it meant to be a university, and the kind of education it offered. Residential spaces, through colleges and halls of residence, were highly visible parts of universities and colleges, with assumptions about gender shaping how these spaces were designed, used, and experienced.

Notes 1. ‘London University’, University College Liverpool, Calendar for the Session 1885–1886 (Liverpool: Adam Holden, 1885), p. 16. 2. ‘Report of the Committee on College Needs’, University College Liverpool, Calendar for the Session 1897–1898 (Liverpool: F & E Gibbons, 1897), p. xxxvi.

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3. Report of the Hall of Residence Session 1899–1900 (Liverpool: University Press of Liverpool, 1900), Reports of Hall of Residence for Women Students (1899–1914), Archive of the University of Liverpool: Records of Halls of Residence, ULIV Halls P7/16, University of Liverpool, p. 5. 4. Report of the Hall of Residence Session 1899–1900, p. 5. 5. Report of the Hall of Residence Session 1899–1900, pp. 7–8. 6. Report of the Hall of Residence Session 1899–1900, p. 7. 7. Report of the Hall of Residence Session 1899–1900, pp. 7–8. 8. Report of the Hall of Residence Session 1899–1900, pp. 7–8. 9. Ashton Rathbone Hall (previously known as the University Training College Hostel) provided accommodation for men, but only accommodated trainee teachers. 10. ‘Preface’, University College of North Wales Calendar for the year 1886–7 (Manchester: J. E. Cornish, 1886), p. ix; J. G. Williams, The University College of North Wales: Foundations 1884–1927 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1985), p. 290. 11. ‘The New Hostel’, Hall of Residence for Women Students at the Birmingham University, UB/HUH/A/1/1/1/138, University of Birmingham. 12. Report of the Hall of Residence Session 1899–1900, pp. 7–8. 13. Report of the Hall of Residence Session 1899–1900, pp. 7–8. 14. ‘Introduction’, Owens College Magazine 1 (March 1868), p. 1. 15. G.  Sutherland, ‘“The Plainest Principles of Justice”: The University of London and the higher education of women’, in F.  M. L.  Thompson (ed.), The University of London and the World of Learning, 1836–1986 (London: Hambledon Press, 1990), p. 36. 16. Sutherland, ‘The Plainest Principles of Justice’, p. 39. 17. R. D. Anderson, Universities and Elites in Britain since 1800 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), p. 17. 18. J. H. Newman, The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 105. 19. S.  Rothblatt, The Modern University and Its Discontents: The fate of Newman’s legacies in Britain and America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 19. 20. Rothblatt, The Modern University and Its Discontents, p. 19. 21. P. Howell, Geographies of Regulation: Policing Prostitution in Nineteenth-­ Century Britain and the Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 116. 22. Howell, Geographies of Regulation, p. 131.

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23. F.  S. D. de Carteret-Bisson, Our Schools and Colleges, Vol. II: For Girls (London: Simpkin, Marshall & Co., 1884), p. 43. 24. de Carteret-Bisson, Our Schools and Colleges, p.  43; S.  Rothblatt, The Revolution of the Dons: Cambridge and Society in Victorian England (London: Faber & Faber, 1968), p. 183. 25. R. D. Anderson, Education and Opportunity in Victorian Scotland: Schools & Universities (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), p. 35. 26. S. Rothblatt, ‘London: A Metropolitan University?’, in T. Bender (ed.), The University and the City: From Medieval Origins to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 125. 27. ‘Charter’, University College of North Wales Calendar for the year 1886–7 (Manchester: J. E. Cornish, 1886), p. 44. 28. ‘Sir Josiah Mason’s Science College, Birmingham Memorandum as to Conditions of Appointments’, Minute book of the Board of Trustees (1872–1897), UB/MC/A/1, University of Birmingham, p. 67. 29. J.  E. C.  Munro, ‘Suggestions for the formation of a student’s club’, Owens College Magazine 6:16 (1884), p. 66. 30. ‘The Women’s War’, Granta 10:211 (15 May 1897), p. 324. 31. S.  Levsen, ‘Constructing Elite Identities: University students, military masculinity and the consequences of the Great War in Britain and Germany’, Past and Present 198:1 (2008), p. 149. 32. J. Tosh, ‘What Should Historians Do With Masculinity? Reflections on Nineteenth-Century Britain’, History Workshop 38 (1994), p. 184. 33. G.  N. Curzon, Marquess, Principles and Methods of University Reform: Being a letter addressed to the University of Oxford (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909), p. 90. 34. B.  Griffin, The Politics of Gender in Victorian Britain: Masculinity, Political Culture and the Struggle for Women’s Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 173. 35. A.  J. Hammerton, ‘Pooterism or Partnership? Marriage and Masculine Identity in the Lower Middle Class, 1870–1920’, Journal of British Studies 38:3 (1999), p.  297; Tosh, ‘What Should Historians Do with Masculinity?, p. 191. 36. P. Deslandes, Oxbridge Men: British Masculinity and the Undergraduate Experience, 1850–1920 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), p. 49. 37. The Granta Type-Writer, ‘The Mere Undergraduate’, Granta, 10:195 (1896), p. 60. 38. R. Muir, An Autobiography and some Essays (London: Lund Humphries & Co., 1943), p. 24. 39. Muir, An Autobiography, p. 24.

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40. ‘A Hall of Residence and Social Club’, University of Birmingham Magazine 3:2 (December 1902), pp. 35–6. 41. L.  Stone, ‘The Size and Composition of the Oxford Student Body 1580–1910’, in L. Stone (ed.), The University in Society, vol. 1 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), p. 65. 42. A.  L. Turner, History of the University of Edinburgh, 1833–1933 (Edinburgh: Published for the University by Oliver & Boyd, 1933), p. 15. 43. ‘Reminiscences Mrs Barrell’, Reminiscences: Papers relating to the history of University College Bristol, and the University of Bristol, DM219/ series five, University of Bristol, p. 1. 44. ‘Reminiscences Mrs Barrell’, p. 1. 45. ‘Admission of Students’, University College of Sheffield Calendar, 1897–8 (Sheffield: Independent Press, 1898), p. 87. 46. ‘Lodgings’, Mason College, Birmingham with Queen’s Faculty of Medicine Calendar, 1894–1895, UB/MC/H/1/15, University of Birmingham, p. iii. 47. ‘Editorial’, Mermaid 4:1 (1907), p. 5. 48. C.  Dyhouse, No Distinction of Sex? Women in British universities 1870–1939 (London: UCL Press, 1995), p. 21. 49. A. Gardner, A Short History of Newnham College (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1921), pp. 27, 48. 50. ‘The Hall of Residence for Women Students’, Owens College Union Magazine, 6:52 (1899), p. 78. 51. D.  Carleton, A University for Bristol: An informal history in texts and pictures (Bristol: University of Bristol Press, 1984), p. 61. 52. M.  P. Tylecote, The Education of Women at Manchester University (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1941), p. 84. 53. ‘The Hall of Residence for Women Students’, p. 78. 54. ‘Notes’, Iris (September 1893), GB 133 UMP/2/5, University of Manchester, p. 5. 55. P. Adams, Somerville for Women: An Oxford College 1879–1993 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 44. 56. G.  Tyack, Oxford: An Architectural Guide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 278. 57. M.  P. Marshall, What I Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1947), p. 9. 58. Gardner, A Short History of Newnham College, p. 62; J. Tosh, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 36–7. 59. B.  Turner, Equality for Some (London: Ward Lock Educational, 1974), p. 124.

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60. M. Vicinus, Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women, 1850–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), p.  150; G.  Battiscombe, Reluctant Pioneer: A Life of Elizabeth Wordsworth (London: Constable, 1978), pp. 146, 150. 61. U. K. Yeo, matriculated 1921, Reminiscences Gathered for the History of the College, Rem 1/1, Lady Margaret Hall, p. 1. 62. E.  G. Powell, ‘Oxford Letter’, Somerville Students’ Association: Fifth Report and Oxford Letter, August 1892, S.S.A.  Reports, 1888–1914, Somerville College, p. 6. 63. C. de Bellaigue, Educating Women: Schooling and Identity in England and France, 1800–1867 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 18, 22. 64. J. S. Pedersen, ‘Some Victorian headmistresses: A Conservative Tradition of Social Reform’, Victorian Studies 24:4 (1981), p. 473. 65. Board of Education Preliminary Statement, UB/HUH/A/1/1/1/34, University of Birmingham, p. 2. 66. Board of Education Preliminary Statement, p. 1; Hall of Residence for Women Students, Second Annual Report, Early Reports (1904–1928), UB/HUH/A/1/8/1/99, University of Birmingham, p. 2. 67. G.  H. Leonard, ‘The Last Twenty-Seven Years: An Appreciation’, In Memoriam, May C.  Staveley, Clifton Hill House 1909–1934, DM2227/6/1, University of Bristol, p. 10. 68. Adams, Somerville for Women, p. 106. 69. J. M. Bowie, ‘Recollections of May. C. Staveley, First Warden of Clifton Hill House, 1909–1934’, DM2227/6/1, University of Bristol, p. 31. 70. Leonard, ‘The Last Twenty-Seven Years’, p. 11. 71. J. S. Pedersen, ‘“Enchanting Modernity”: The invention of tradition at two women’s colleges in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Cambridge’, History of Universities 17 (2001), p. 168. 72. M. A. Hamilton, Newnham: An Informal Biography (London: Faber & Faber, 1936), p. 119. 73. S. Delamont, ‘The Contradiction in Ladies’ Education’, in S. Delamont & L. Duffin (eds.), The Nineteenth Century Woman: Her Cultural and Physical World (London: Croom Helm, 1978), p. 140. 74. S. Delamont, Knowledgeable Women: Structuralism and the Reproduction of Elites (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 146. 75. D.  Rubenstein, Before the Suffragettes: Women’s Emancipation in the 1890s (Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1986), pp. 196–97. 76. F.  J. C.  Hearnshaw, The Centenary History of King’s College London (London: George C. Harrap & Co., 1929), p. 315. As numbers grew, the houses at 11 and 12 Kensington Square were also taken over. 77. de Carteret-Bisson, Our Schools and Colleges, p. xxxi.

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78. ‘College Life’, Iris (March 1894), GB 133 UMP/2/5, University of Manchester, p. 10. 79. See E. Davies, The Higher Education of Women (London: A. Strahan, 1866). 80. H.  D. Oakeley, My Adventures in Education (London: Williams & Norgate, 1939), p. 69. 81. W. Peck, A Little Learning or A Victorian Childhood (London: Faber & Faber, 1952), p. 155. 82. Peck, A Little Learning, p. 157. 83. Prospectus (1910), Archive of the University of Liverpool: Records of Halls of Residence, ULIV Halls P7/39, University of Liverpool, p. 3. 84. C. Crowther (Kenyon, 1896), in A. Phillips (ed.), A Newnham Anthology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 39. 85. T.  Raffaelli, E.  Biagini & R.  McWilliams-Tullberg, Alfred Marshall’s Lectures to Women: Some economic questions directly connected to the welfare of the labourer (Aldershot: Edward Elgar, 1995), p. 59. 86. Raffaelli, Biagini & McWilliams-Tullberg, Alfred Marshall’s Lectures to Women, p. 59. 87. A. Marshall, Alfred Marshall to Sarah Emily Davies, 11 November 1880. Letter. In John K. Whitaker (ed.), The Correspondence of Alfred Marshall, Economist, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 128. 88. A.  Marshall, ‘Alfred Marshall to the Editors’, Western Daily Press, 21 January 1887. Letter. In John K. Whitaker (ed.), The Correspondence of Alfred Marshall, Economist, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 226. 89. A.  Marshall, Alfred Marshall to Members of the Cambridge University Senate, 3 February 1896. Letter. In John K.  Whitaker (ed.), The Correspondence of Alfred Marshall, Economist, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 151–2. 90. ‘Those whose natures are the fullest, and who would turn to best account for the world whatever opportunities were afforded to them, are just those who are most likely to be deterred from coming to Cambridge by the fear of this strain between their desire for knowledge with honour and their affection for those at home’. Marshall, Alfred Marshall to Members of the Cambridge University Senate, p. 151. 91. P. Jalland, Women, Marriage and Politics, 1860–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), p. 10. 92. M.  Beetham, A Magazine of Her Own? Domesticity and Desire in the Women’s Magazine, 1800–1914 (London & New  York: Routledge, 2003), p. 137. 93. D.  Gorham, The Victorian Girl and the Feminine Ideal (London & New York: Routledge, 1982), p. 7. 94. Gorham, The Victorian Girl and the Feminine Ideal, p. 27.

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95. C. Dyhouse, Girls Growing Up in Late Victorian and Edwardian England (London: Broadway House, 1981), p. 117. 96. Dyhouse, Girls Growing Up, p. 118. 97. Oakeley, My Adventures in Education, p. 60. 98. ‘To College Archivist, L.M.H., July 7th 1986’, Deposit 27, Erskine Clarke letters, Lady Margaret Hall, pp. 3–4. 99. M.  Fowle, Mildred Fowle to Principal Reichel, 16 June 1903. Letter. Bangor Mss 34534, Bangor Women’s Hostel Company, Bangor University. 100. While many of the new civic university colleges of the industrial Midlands and North founded in the 1850s to 1880s courted working-class students with their technological and vocational focus, university education in England in this period remained decidedly middle-class. 101. Williams, The University College of North Wales, p. 123. 102. Figures taken from ‘University College of North Wales, Bangor: Foundation Stone Laid by King Edward VII, July 9, 1907’, University College of North Wales: Records 1905–1925, Bangor University, pp. 6–7. 103. J. S. Pedersen, The Reform of Girls’ Secondary and Higher Education in Victorian England: A study of elites and educational change (New York & London: Garland, 1987), p.16. 104. Williams, The University College of North Wales, p. 106. 105. Williams, The University College of North Wales, p. 288. 106. Prospectus (1910), p. 3. 107. Prospectus (1910), p. 3. 108. For divisions between women students by nature of residence at the Scottish universities, see S. Hamilton, ‘Women and the Scottish universities c. 1869–1939: A social history’ (University of Edinburgh, unpublished doctoral thesis, 1987), pp. 151–7. 109. There was a particularly strong link between the University College of North Wales and the North London Collegiate School. Dilys Glynne Jones, one of the founders of the Association for Promoting the Education of Girls in Wales, was a student at NLCS under Frances Buss, and later a teacher there. Eight of the first 13 students at the Bangor Women’s hall were former students of the school. Williams, The University College of North Wales, p. 106. 110. Williams, The University College of North Wales, p. 78. 111. Prospectus (1910), p. 3. 112. I discuss this scandal in more detail in the article ‘Segregation, regulation, and the gendering of space at the University of Wales, Bangor, 1884–1907’, Women’s History Review 29:2 (2020), pp. 308–30.

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113. ‘University College of North Wales: Close of the Session’, North Wales Express, 8 July 1892, p. 2. 114. Residence at the hall was made compulsory for women students under 21 years of age in 1900 [‘Preface’, University College of North Wales Calendar for the year 1900–1 (Manchester: J.E. Cornish, 1900), p. 12]. 115. Williams, The University College of North Wales, p. 107. 116. H.R.  Reichel, The Bangor Controversy: A Statement of Facts (London: The Educational Review, 1893), Llyfran Prin X/GC 415 REI, p. 1. 117. ‘Bangor College Scandal’, Cheshire Observer, 5 August 1893, p. 6. 118. ‘Chester Summer Assizes’, Cheshire Observer, 29 July 1893, p. 8. 119. ‘Chester Summer Assizes’, p. 8. 120. Roberts, Bangor University, p. 11. 121. H. R. Reichel, ‘Extraordinary Proceedings at Bangor College’, Times, 24 April 1893, p. 14 [my emphasis]. 122. Reichel, ‘Extraordinary Proceedings’, p. 8. 123. ‘Bangor College Scandal’, Lancaster Gazette and General Advertiser for Lancashire, Westmorland, and Yorkshire, 22 April 1893, p. 3. 124. ‘Preface’, University College of North Wales Calendar for the year 1900–1, p. 12. 125. H. Mathers, Steel City Scholars: A Centenary History of the University of Sheffield (London: James & James, 2005), p. 73. 126. ‘Residence of students’, University College of North Wales Calendar for the year 1900–1 (Manchester: J. E. Cornish, 1900), p. 54. 127. Rothblatt, The Revolution of the Dons, p. 183; Williams, The University College of North Wales, p. 306. 128. ‘Rules for Students’, University College of North Wales Calendar for the year 1886–7 (Manchester: J. E. Cornish, 1886), pp. 102–4. 129. ‘Regulations of Lodging-Houses’, volume 3 (1872), T.V. 1–3: Lodging house licence books (3 volumes), 1842–1873, University Library, University of Cambridge. 130. Corpus Christi College Lodge, February 12, 1881, volume 4, T. V. 4 & 5: Minutes of meetings of the Lodging House Syndicate, signed (8 volumes), 1855–1913, University Library, University of Cambridge, p. 194. 131. Student Discipline Book, Bangor Mss 14810, Bangor University, p. 5. 132. ‘Rules for Students’, University College of North Wales Calendar for the year 1886–7, p. 103. 133. Patrick Joyce discusses the type of freedom experienced by those who moved through the late-Victorian British city, one in which their ‘freedom’ inculcated a set of self-regulating behaviours, so that a person was at once ‘freely choosing, responsible and therefore self-monitoring.’ The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City (London: Verso, 2003), p. 11.

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134. S.  V. Barnes, ‘England’s Civic Universities and the Triumph of the Oxbridge Ideal’, History of Education Quarterly 36:3 (1996), p. 271. 135. H. B. Charlton, Portrait of a University, 1851–1951: To Commemorate the Centenary of Manchester University (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1951), pp. 127, 166. 136. D. Roberts, Bangor University, 1884–2009 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009), p. 31. 137. E.  Ives, D.  Drummond & L.  Schwartz, The First Civic University: Birmingham 1880–1980: An Introductory History (Birmingham: The University of Birmingham Press, 2000), p. 61. 138. Ives, Drummond & Schwartz, The First Civic University, p. 61. 139. Hall of Residence for Women Students, Second Annual Report, p. 2. 140. Barnes, ‘England’s Civic Universities’, pp. 285–6; W. Whyte, Redbrick: A Social and Architectural History of Britain’s Civic Universities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 144. 141. A. Chapman, The Story of a Modern University: A History of the University of Sheffield (Sheffield: For the University of Sheffield by Oxford University Press, 1955), p. 3. 142. Chapman, The Story of a Modern University, p. 3. 143. de Bellaigue, Educating Women, p. 18. 144. R.  Felski, Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture (New York & London: New York University Press, 2000), p. 86. 145. Felski, Doing Time, p.  86. Doreen Massey also presents the home as a feminised space, arguing that place called home is frequently ‘personified by, and partakes of the same characteristics as those assigned to, Woman/ Mother/lover.’ D.  Massey, Space, Place, and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), p. 10. 146. J. A. Hargreaves, ‘Victorian Familism and the Formative Years of Female Sport’, in J. A. Mangan & R. J. Park (eds.), From “Fair Sex” to Feminism: Sport and the Socialisation of Women in the Industrial and Post-Industrial Eras (London: Cass, 1987), pp. 139–40.

CHAPTER 4

Class, Commuting, and the City

In 1876, Marian Fry Pease left her house just after eight o’clock in the morning. Aged 17, she lived at home with her family in Cote Bank, a sprawling suburban villa on the southern edge of Westbury-on-Trym, a small Gloucestershire village about five miles north of central Bristol. Her mathematics class at the new University College there, held three days a week and taught by recent Cambridge graduate, Robert William Bousfield, started at 9 o’clock. She carried her heavy bag of books, which she took home with her every day as the college was not yet fitted with lockers, and walked across Durdham Down, the wide expanse of public land dotted with grazing sheep and Hawthorne trees. At Durdham Down, she met Amy Bell, who along with Emily Pakeman and herself comprised the first three women to study at the College. Amy lived with her uncle, Colonel Goodeve, at Cook’s Folly in Hotwells, the only house to overlook the Avon Gorge, and had reached the Downs via cab from Stoke Bishop. From there, the two women hopped on the horse tram at the bottom of Blackboy Hill, which had only begun service the previous year and took them to the top of Park Street, where the College was located. There would be no omnibuses or trams to Marian’s home in Westbury until the line was extended in 1908, and gas lamps reached only as far as White Tree at the foot of the Downs. ‘The journey had its difficulties on dark, wet and windy winter mornings and afternoons’, Marian would remember in later life.1 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Oman, Higher Education and the Gendering of Space in England and Wales, 1869–1909, Genders and Sexualities in History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29987-2_4

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Marian and Amy’s thrice-weekly sojourns, which together comprised miles of walking, cabs, and trams, was a daily reality for many students who attended non-residential tertiary institutions, such as University College Bristol, during the period from their foundation in the mid-to-­ late nineteenth century and into the twentieth. Unlike Oxford and Cambridge, where undergraduates lived, worked, ate, and prayed in their colleges, the new civic universities separated residence from learning. Thomas Campbell, one of the original founders of the London University, wrote an open letter to Henry Brougham in the Times of February 1825, outlining his vision for the institution. I propose, for the youth of this momentous mass of society in London, a place worthy of our gigantic metropolis, and suited to the circumstances of the times… an university combining the advantages of public and private education, the emulative spirit produced by examination before numbers, and by honours conferred before the public, the cheapness of domestic residence, and all the moral influence that results from home.2

Both Campbell and Brougham were Scottish and had themselves attended the universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh, which like all the ancient Scottish universities were non-collegiate and non-residential.3 In England, however, such an innovation was revolutionary. This principle was adopted by the new civic universities which were founded in towns and cities across the country in the decades following the establishment of the London University, and which, in the years before they received their own university charters, were reliant on the metropolitan centre to set exams and confer degrees. At these institutions, the separation between work and home was near universal. While not all students lived at home, the opportunities for living out—in lodgings, for example, or later in non-teaching halls of residence—were also located off the site of the campus. This meant that students had to physically move between the two spaces of work and home, with the result that commuting became a daily necessity. The term ‘commuting’—with its connotations of crowded commuter trains trundling back and forth between the city and suburbs—fails to fully encapsulate the myriad ways students at the colleges and universities of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries moved through and

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occupied the space of the city. The very establishment of new institutions of higher learning in regional centres such as Bristol, Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield, and Birmingham during this period speaks to a wider phenomenon of urban growth and development which saw the emergence of new suburbs populated by a middle class growing both in size and influence. These new institutions did not just passively benefit from the influx of potential students this demographic change wrought, but actively sought to appeal to this market through careful geographical positioning at the earliest stages of planning and site selection. The movement of students through the urban environments in which these institutions were often founded is therefore complicated by issues of class, as well as gender. With the very location of universities themselves often determined by the social strata of the type of student they hoped to attract, the accessibility, distance, and methods of transport available to those who attended varied greatly, and often upon class lines. The issue of commuting also further underscores the spatial differences that existed between male and female students, as the latter had to negotiate the complicated and ever-evolving social expectations that framed women’s movement through, and occupation of, public space.

The City and the Suburbs When Owens College was originally founded in Manchester in 1851, its first home was not a specially-designed academic building, but rather an eighteenth-century townhouse that had once been the home of Richard Cobden, the famous Radical.4 In 1865, the growing College began to think of extending its premises and commenced the search for a new site. The records relating to the college extension reveal the central concern that authorities grappled with at the earliest stages of the project. If they were to seek a new location, ‘the question arises between a central and a suburban site’.5 The benefits of a central site included the convenience of ‘those living in the majority of suburbs’ and nearness to railway stations, while suburban land was cheaper, with more space for ‘exercise and amusement’.6 They were at pains to emphasise that ‘suburban’ meant ‘comparatively suburban’, still within easy distance of the city and principal railway stations, ‘and not unfavourably placed as regards any of the principal suburbs’.7 Their clarification in this respect reveals the extent to which the nineteenth-century city had already come to be shaped by the development of suburbs and the displacement of the prosperous middle class from

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increasingly crowded urban centres. ‘[T]he College is not designed for Manchester alone’, noted the committee, ‘but for the populous district of which Manchester is the centre’.8 Simon Gunn argues that suburbanisation in English industrial cities was precipitated from the 1830s by a combination of ‘increasing social and industrial conflict, environmental pollution, and escalating property values in the central areas combined with the availability of cheap building land on the rural fringes’.9 Manchester was similar to other rapidly industrialising and urbanising British cities in that this expansion was aided by the growth of new forms of transport, most significantly the railways. The suburbs of Manchester developed from the large private homes of the wealthy, often situated in spacious grounds or even private parks, which when encroached upon by the outward growth of the city in the later nineteenth century moved even further outward along the lines of the new suburban railway network.10 New suburbs did not spring up overnight, but rather followed the gradual roll-out of lines. As G. E. Mingay notes, the ‘superior suburb’ of Alderley had been created within ten years of the opening of the line from Manchester to Chester in 1849, with Altrincham and Bowdon also benefitting greatly. Other lines radiating from Manchester in the 1870s and 1880s led to a second wave of suburbs who felt the ‘powerful expansionary influence’ of the railway, such as Urmston, Flixton, Heaton Park, Cheadle Heath, Chorlton, Withington, and Didsbury.11 Bristol was also undergoing a period of suburban expansion during this period. In 1869, a guide to ‘Bristol & Clifton’, the latter being the most prominent and wealthy suburb of the city, celebrated the relationship between older centres and their developing fringes, writing, There is no pleasanter union, in spite of all the predictions to the contrary, than the union of May and December, as exemplified in the Old City and the New Suburb. The old sombre, wrinkled, and somewhat crooked city tells of busy ages past; and the pert, handsome, light and airy suburb bespeaks the wealth and beauty pertaining to modern life and civilisation.12

The heart of ‘Old Bristol’ consisted of the intersection of four principal streets (High Street, Broad Street, Wine Street, and Corn Street) which made up the mediaeval town centre.13 Wealthy residents had begun to move further out by the eighteenth century, with a guidebook published in 1794 noting that ‘the delightful situation of Clifton has long induced

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several opulent persons and families to make it their principal residence’.14 The author, George Heath, also drew attention to more recent growth, noting, the continually new accessions of inhabitants has occasioned the hill to be almost covered with elegant piles of building and separate mansions, most of which are built with freestone and deserve attention. The number of houses here and about the Hotwell below, have been lately much increased.15

Less than a 100 years later, the reach of the suburbs had grown exponentially, with an extensive public transport system to match. The principal means of getting about Bristol and its immediate suburbs were the tramways, of which there were 40 cars running daily, ‘at intervals of a few minutes’, from 8 a.m. until 11 p.m. on weekdays, and from 2 p.m. to 10 p.m. on Sundays.16 In addition to this, there was also an omnibus service as well as ten local railway stations, in addition to the main Bristol station which served as a gateway to the rest of the country via two main lines.17 An 1885 residential guide to the city made great mention of the standard of public transport enjoyed by the inhabitants of Bristol, declaring, The service of trains between the city and the various suburbs (Clifton especially), are frequent and prompt… The Cabs and Hansoms of Bristol are superior to many towns, being kept in clean condition. The number of public and private carriages is large, and the fares are regulated by the local authorities.18

This phenomenon was replicated across the country, with the population of Edgbaston, an exclusive suburb ten minutes’ carriage ride from Birmingham which had just over 1000 inhabitants at the turn of the nineteenth century, rising to 16,500 by 1841.19 In Sheffield, Helen Mathers notes how western suburbs such as Ecclesall, Broomhill, and Ranmoor escaped the ‘dense pall of smoke’ which lay over the city, and as such became the city’s ‘most desirable, and expensive, residential areas’.20 The increase in cheap and rapid transportation during this period was not a purely middle-class phenomenon, however. As express and local commuter trains might bring students to the civic colleges, so too might trams allow those living in working-class districts to attend evening classes.21 Manchester’s central area lost two thirds of its population between 1851

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and 1900, with some of this loss attributed to working-class families moving out with the tram lines.22 These changing geographies did not escape the notice of the founders of the new civic universities, which were being established in a roughly contemporaneous period. At Owens College, the eventual location of the new university site was chosen after a survey of student residences, which not only asked the students of the 1864–1865 session where they lived, but what transport they used to get to College.23 Thirty-four per cent of students lived in ‘A District’, comprising of Cheetham Hill and Broughton, and used ‘omnibuses entering by this district and railway routes via Victoria station’, while only five per cent lived in ‘B District’ (Harpurhey and Smedley Lane), and used ‘omnibuses entering by Oldham St’.24 Universities and colleges grasped the significance of transport links, and often advertised them prominently. In the 1880s and 1890s, the calendars of Mason College and University College Bristol offered half-price student rates for train travel, with a typical advertisement reading: Upon production of a certificate, signed by the Secretary, that the bearer is a Student of Mason College, and under 18 years of age, the various Railway Companies will issue Season Tickets at half the usual rate.25

Later, in 1904, an early brochure for 215 Hagley Road Hostel, a hall of residence for women students at the University of Birmingham, assured prospective students and their parents that the Hall was ‘conveniently situated in one of the principal thoroughfares of Edgbaston, on which is a good Omnibus service’, and that ‘[a] convenient service of trams runs very near the new site, and by their means Edmund Street can be reached in about half an hour’.26 The central conundrum faced by university authorities in selecting a site to cater to the changing landscape of the nineteenth-century city was succinctly elucidated in the pseudonymous Bruce Truscot’s (really Edgar Allison Peers, Professor in Hispanic Studies at the University of Liverpool) controversial and influential 1943 book, Redbrick University. since undergraduates, living at home, would stream daily into the city from all four points of the compass, the buildings had either to be dingily central or, for a large proportion of their staff and students, inconveniently remote.27

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The term ‘dingily central’ all too plainly depicts the unglamorous reality for many fledgling institutions, which found it difficult to source parcels of land large enough to suit their needs in desirable city-centre areas. While this presented a larger issue in burgeoning industrial and manufacturing centres, such as Manchester and Liverpool, it was not so much a problem in smaller cities. The University College of North Wales, for example, was offered ‘a valuable site of rather more than ten acres in the heart of the city at a cost to the city of about £15,000’, as a free gift from the Bangor City Council in January 1900.28 The incoming Bishop of Bangor had apparently decided that he would prefer not to live in the damp Bishop’s Palace, empowering the Ecclesiastical Commissioners to sell the palace and episcopal estate to a syndicate with the intention of selling the lands to the City Council for public purposes.29 It was offered to the College, who ‘gratefully accepted’.30 At Manchester, the extension committee worried about ‘the question of association’ in regards to the potential location of their site, as ‘the immediate neighbourhood to the N. and E. is of the most disreputable character’.31 It seems the presence of the university did not immediately transform the nature of the area, either, as Christopher Driver wrote of Manchester in 1971 that, The streets between London Road and the University were some of the worst slums in England until Hitler’s bombs and more recently the Council’s demolition men shovelled them away into local history. It is still, and in spite of hopes may remain, a district in which no one much wants to live, except students who have no choice in the matter.32

Again, in this respect, Manchester was not alone. King’s College London was founded on the Strand, which a 1929 history of the College described as ‘a most unholy and unsavoury neighbourhood’.33 Early plans, which were later abandoned, had suggested the College be situated in Regent’s Park, and while in that genteel location the fear had been that students might ‘corrupt modest and timid nursemaids’, in the Strand the peril was that ‘they should themselves be corrupted by actresses and other immodest and bold young persons’.34 A letter published in Mechanics’ Magazine in November 1829, titled, ‘The Situation of King’s College London, Bad, Very Bad’, wrote that the proposed site was perhaps ‘the very worst that could have been selected in the whole metropolis or its

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vicinity’.35 Ramsay Muir, who started as a student at University College Liverpool in 1889, described his first impressions of his alma mater. When I entered it, the main part of the college was housed in a disused lunatic asylum, in a slum district, with a huge workhouse on one side, and on the other the Royal Infirmary with its medical school, which became the Medical Faculty. Across a corner of the derelict quadrangle ran a deep railway cutting, which belched forth clouds of smoke. The street which climbed the hill from the city to the college—about a quarter of a mile long—contained twenty-two public-houses and a number of sordid shops; the pavements were haunted by slatternly women and barefoot street Arabs. The city abattoirs lay just behind and diffused a smell of blood. These were sorry surroundings for the education of aspiring youth.36

He argues that the founders had been offered an alternative site in a small, privately-owned suburban park but had turned it down in order to be closer to the city centre and the existing medical school.37 As with Manchester, the establishment of a university did not seem to bring any immediate sense of urban renewal or gentrification to the neighbourhood. Writing in 1943, Muir wrote, ‘throughout my student days, the situation was mean and sordid, as it still is’.38 This could give university authorities some cause for concern, as their students had to navigate these undesirable and ‘sordid’ spaces to attend classes and lectures. At Bangor, despite its propitious beginnings with the gift of a site from the City Council, W. Lewis Jones, when discussing the College in 1905, opined that, its distance from the best residential parts of the town always mitigated against the success of the social life of the College and of the many-sided activities of the student community outside the classroom’.39

While the civic foundations aspired to symbolise the stature and influence of the cities whose names they bore, the reality was that it was not easy to find large spaces to build within crowded city centres. Lack of funds also meant that founders often had to look further afield, locating many of the first wave of civic universities in less than salubrious precincts. At Bangor, J.  Gwynne Williams argues that, by 1900, ‘[t]he immediate neighbourhood tended to be non-residential or largely inhabited by the poor’, and that the industrial activity caused smoke and noise.40 Of even greater cause for concern, however, and indicative of wider anxieties that plagued institutions across the country, was that access to the College

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from the new Women’s Hall in upper Bangor was through ‘the least desirable part of town’.41

Women in the City While men and women might both move through the streets of the early nineteenth-century city, their engagement with this space was dictated by gender. In the university towns of Oxford and Cambridge, for example, the men might be scholars, students, professors, or Fellows, while the women would most likely be domestic servants. Simply occupying the same space did not invest women with equal status or the perceived right to be there. While class played an obvious part in these hierarchies of belonging, the significant role played by gender in the occupation of space was thrown into relief by the arrival of women students at these institutions later in the century. While largely drawn from the same socio-­ economic background as their male peers, in contrast to the female domestic workers who staffed the colleges, women students still did not— and, in some cases, could not, through explicit rules and regulations— occupy the space of the university in the same way that men did. Lynn Staeheli uses the term ‘out of place’ to describe how women were seen to transgress both social and physical boundaries of location, arguing that, as more and more women transgressed the boundaries of public and private places, the physical spaces of the city were gradually transformed in order to accommodate them.42 Women-only tea rooms, lavatories, and waiting rooms for public transport only emerged because women were inhabiting public space and required such facilities.43 ‘[T]he transgression reshaped social relations and identities’, she argues, ‘as the fact of being in “public” gradually came to change the ways that women in public were viewed’.44 Moira Martin has also drawn attention to how women’s voluntary associations facilitated the entry of women into public life, using the example of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Bristol.45 Working within the framework of philanthropy, she argues, ‘single women were able to traverse the boundaries of class and gender without any loss of social status’, linking the private and public space of the city in new ways.46 Women’s participation in higher education worked in much the same way, with the networks it offered contributing to what Martin terms ‘the emergence of a female culture, which was not necessarily feminist, but which allowed women… to move easily between the public and private spheres’.47 In the context of higher education, the emergence of all-female

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common rooms and halls of residence can be seen on the one hand as evidence of gender segregation. Using this framework of facilitation of entry into public life, however, the same features can be perceived as evidence of women’s transgression of both physical and social boundaries, inhabiting public space and in fact transforming and shaping it to accommodate themselves and their needs. Elizabeth Munson also notes how women occupying public space were viewed in a certain way, arguing that society needed to ‘legitimate’ their presence through establishing rules of appropriate behaviour.48 Chaperonage regulations at the women’s colleges of Oxford and Cambridge may be seen as unnecessarily strict and regressive when viewed through modern eyes, yet their very existence is evidence of women occupying spaces to which they had never before been granted access. The growing participation of women in public space during this period is characterised by this central conundrum: while physical changes to the urban environment may have created new spaces for women, this spatial reconfiguration also served to reinforce gender difference. As with the expansion of the suburbs, the growth of the public transport system in the latter decades of the nineteenth century was central to the presence of women in public. It made it easier for women to come and go from their homes, either individually or in pairs and groups, which was seen to be safer. Students at Somerville College were directed by the ‘House Rules’ of 1894 to walk ‘two together’ when they made their way around Oxford.49 Patricia Cline Cohen has drawn attention to the gendered nature of commercial travel during this period, noting that public transport provided ‘a new arena for social interaction between the sexes’, constituting a potential breach of the public/private divide.50 As these modes of transport were relatively new, and as such not yet subject to the same degree of entrenched formal customs and etiquette as more well-­ established social spaces, she argues that public transport presented a possibility for ‘cultural improvisation’.51 For women students attending classes at universities and colleges during this period, as with those shopping at department stores, moving through the public space of the city was a necessity, and one that was aided both by advances in transportation and shifting social attitudes towards women in public. In 1871, for example, Alfred Barry, principal of King’s College London, declared in a lecture that ‘the inconveniences of access through the bustle of the Strand would prejudice any attempt to open [the college’s] teaching to ladies’, but that ‘the completion of the Metropolitan Railway to the

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Temple, and the private access which we have gained from the Thames Embankment’ would solve these problems.52 In this sense, resistance to women students attending classes alongside men was not framed in terms of the appropriateness of their participating in the public intellectual world of the university, but in their navigating the unseemly public streets of the city in order to do so. From 1878, King’s held separate ‘lectures for ladies’ in Kensington, with the wealthy West End district seen to be a more suitable locale for respectable women than the rough and tumble of the Strand—so much so that the college authorities chose a house in Kensington Square when King’s College Ladies’ Department was officially inaugurated in 1885.53 University authorities were not solely concerned with the safety of women students, however, especially in London. The founders of King’s College London’s worries about the inherent temptations that came with being located on the Strand were particularly vivid in the earlier part of the century, when male university students could be as young as 15 or 16 years old.54 In general, the English universities contrasted with their Scottish counterparts in this respect, where the absence of admissions requirements and entrance exams allowed students of secondary school age to attend classes and lectures.55 Upon their foundation in the fifteenth century, the ancient universities of Scotland followed the European model of matriculating students between the ages of 14 and 16, a practice that continued until the early part of the nineteenth century.56 In contrast, the age of undergraduates coming into residence at Oxford and Cambridge rose steadily from the seventeenth century, settling at around 18 or 19 years of age.57 Thomas Campbell, who had himself attended the University of Glasgow, was perhaps thinking of the tender age of the Scottish university student when, in his letter proposing the foundation of a London University, he sought to mitigate the fears of those who felt that the streets of London might unsuitable for a teenage boy to navigate by himself. On the days of study, they might breakfast early at home, and return after receiving instruction for several hours, always by day-light, to their parents’ home… They would thus have to perambulate London only twice a day, and that during day light.58

The emphasis on daylight is significant here, drawing attention to how the Victorian city was perceived to change character at night, and

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specifically in the darkness. Chris Otter has highlighted the ways in which ‘the unseen’ generated both fears and fantasies, with the dark, secluded spaces of the city characterised as areas of crime and disorder.59 While fears for male students were mainly concerned with the corrupting influence of big-city London, as described above, regulation of women’s movement was a feature across all higher education institutions during this period, from the non-residential civics through to collegiate Oxford and Cambridge. In a welcome letter sent to all Somerville College’s matriculating students for the session 1907–1908, Principal Emily Penrose wrote of her students that, ‘[a]s a rule, they do not walk much about the city alone’.60 The women’s colleges of both institutions were often founded at a relative distance to the men’s colleges, with Girton College founded over two miles distant from the centre of Cambridge after first being temporarily located in the market town of Hitchin, over 20 miles away in North Hertfordshire. While at Hitchin, two of the early Girton students received visits from their brothers, causing Emily Davies to remark that, ‘though everyone concerned behaved with the utmost propriety, we were thankful that brothers did not live within thirty miles’.61 Regular interaction with men, it seems, was manifestly undesirable. At the same time, however, the women’s colleges could not afford to be too picky when it came to choosing a site. As nineteenth-century Oxford and Cambridge expanded, available land in a central location big enough to build a college was not easy to come by. Newnham College, for example, was considered remote from the centre of town when its first buildings were erected east of the river Cam in 1875. As one student described it in a letter to her mother the following year, ‘it is just like the country here. We are completely private in our garden, and quite surrounded with country sights and sounds—cows and sheep in the fields round us, and birds of all sorts just outside the hedge’.62 While this may paint a picture of a sort of feminine rural idyll, located far from the haunts of men, the village of Newnham was soon subsumed as a suburb, while the all-male Selwyn College began construction on directly adjacent land just five years later.63 Whatever the motivations, however, the result was that women’s colleges were often located at a distance from the centre of town and the older men’s colleges. Transport, accordingly, became a daily concern for students. In the 1880s, early students made use of fly carriages, although market carts could be pressed in to service if the former failed to show up on time.64 Grace Hickie, who studied at Girton in the early 1900s, recalled that students would give their names to the ‘Portress’, who would order

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cabs to take them to lectures.65 Another student remembered the anxiety this could cause, as, [w]e are nearly two miles from Cambridge—twenty minutes’ drive—so that any unfortunate student arriving at the door after twenty minutes to nine finds the cabs gone and herself left behind, either to run to lecture or miss it altogether.66

Dorothy Howard, who in 1901 was the Senior History student at Girton, was tasked with the responsibility of organising transport for the entire subject group. She wrote in frustration to her mother, Much of the cab management & shepherding of the freshers now devolves on me as the Senior History & it’s perfectly maddening to collect them all & get them to go to the right room or let me know if they want to stay in Cambridge for a while, walking out instead of driving … I may be Senior Hist & I may be supposed to understand our complicated cab system, but as last term I invariably bicycled, & I want to again this term, I only hope they will soon collect themselves.67

These horse-drawn cabs, lyrically dubbed ‘the Girton hearses’, provided the main form of transport for students, as the bus route did not extend to the college until 1919.68 Even if a method of transport was technically available, however, that did not mean it was viewed as suitable by the College authorities. E.  G. Brown, who came up to Newnham College in 1901, remembered that, although ‘in those days we had horse-­ trams up and down Cambridge streets’, if Newnham students wanted to go out after dinner, ‘we had to go in a hansom cab’.69 This was as much due to propriety as distance, as supervision was still required even if students were only travelling a short way. The advent of the bicycle in the 1890s provides yet another example of how new methods of transport could increase women’s mobility and visibility in the city, while still subjecting them to gendered expectations of conduct and behaviour.70 Girton had a cycling club from 1894, but kept a bike shed at the foot of Castle Hill, on the edge of the centre of town, so that students could cycle the majority of the two-mile distance, then park their bikes in the shed and proceed respectably on foot.71 Elastic stirrups were also sewn into skirt hems to keep them down to the ankle, therefore preserving the modesty of the rider.72 At Newnham, students had to take

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a proficiency test before they would be permitted to ride a bicycle, and had to have already attained the skill before they arrived—‘[t]he art may not be acquired at College’, recalled M. A. Quiggin, who came up in 1899. The test included ‘a searching examination in corner-turning’, amid other skills, ‘before candidates receive a diploma’.73 Other regulations applied, too, with Girtonians prohibited from cycling more than six miles outside Cambridge or riding after dark without a don, rules that had ceased to be enforced by 1906.74 Despite these regulations, cycling continued to grow in popularity, and by the early 1900s, Girton students were advised to bring bicycles with them when they came up.75 A student at St Hugh’s College, Oxford, in 1917 declared that ‘college life would have been impossible’ without bicycles, and that ‘almost all of us’ had them.76 Indeed, the image of the woman student pedalling around town on her bicycle became so ubiquitous that during the 1897 vote on women’s degrees at Cambridge, an effigy of a bloomer-clad woman student riding a bicycle was dangled from the window of Macmillan’s bookshop, opposite the Senate House where the vote was taking place.77 Women students at Oxford and Cambridge were not the only ones to benefit from this new mode of transport, as is made clear by an article in the Owens College Union Magazine from 1897. Women especially were for a long time de-barred by every conventional rule from sharing in this exercise, and it was only when Society revolted and insisted on riding, that the great run on ladies’ cycles commenced; but the victory of the women is now absolute and unquestioned, and to-day considerably more women than men may be seen on the road.78

In this way, new modes of transport, while facilitating women’s movement around the city to a much greater extent, served as yet another space in which gendered rules and behaviours applied. The idea of the independent and carefree ‘New Woman’, freewheeling about town on her bicycle in rational dress, becomes more complicated when we look more closely at the experiences of the women who inspired the archetype: the university-­ educated ‘Girton Girl’, who were in fact parking their bicycles out of public sight and weighting their skirts to preserve modesty. The collapsing of formal boundaries of segregation in public spaces did not mean that women were free to act as they pleased, but rather were expected to

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manage their own spatial boundaries, while still being subject to informal policing and judgement from both men and other women. Elizabeth Wilson notes the significance that appearance played in presenting as a respectable woman in public, and how traditional markers of this were disrupted by the urban environment. ‘[I]n the rough and tumble of the city street and urban crowd’, she argues, ‘distinctions of rank of every kind were blurred’.79 The danger of being mistaken for a less-­ respectable woman was ever present, regardless of actual social class or status. Mary Paley, one of the first five Newnham students to arrive in Cambridge in 1872, recalled that, ‘[s]ome of the Cambridge ladies did not approve of women students and kept an eye on our dress’.80 Ethel Wallace, a student at St Hugh’s, Oxford, from 1908–1911, described her college as ‘strict and pernickety’ in its rules, ‘even by Victorian standards’:81 We lived in two houses opposite each other, and one in Norham Road. We were not allowed so much as to cross from one house to the other without a hat! One was kept hanging in each hall for the purpose in case you had forgotten yours!82

Until 1893, university proctors at Cambridge also retained the power (granted during the reign of Elizabeth I) to arrest and detain ‘all public women, procuresses, vagabonds and other persons suspected of evil’.83 As Philip Howell argues, this meant that ‘all women in public spaces were potentially suspect, running the risk of apprehension, medical inspection, and incarceration purely on the suspicion of a private morals police’.84 While no women affiliated with the women’s colleges were ever arrested under these powers, several cases were brought against the university in the early 1890s by local Cambridge women who argued they had been unfairly labelled prostitutes as a result of the proctors’ interference.85 This preoccupation with appearance in public also shaped the strict chaperonage rules surrounding interaction with male relatives. As Michael Curtin notes, chaperonage was often lighter in the countryside, ‘where a lady was likely to encounter only those she knew and who knew her’.86 A women’s power, status, and agency was not static, but shifted depending on specific social contexts. Kathryn Gleadle’s use of the term ‘parochial realm’, for example, denotes a sphere between the domestic and the public where women were more able to act as authoritative public figures within their communities by dint of their family relations.87 In an unfamiliar

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university town, however, where these family connections were not widely known, it might not be immediately clear to others that a student at a women’s college was walking with her brother, and not another male undergraduate. Clara Money-Coutts, at Lady Margaret Hall in the late 1890s, remembered, My brother was at that time at New College, and I saw him every now and then, though the rules at the Hall were so strict that I was not allowed to go to New College to see him without a chaperon.88

Rita McWilliams-Tullberg reports in her history of women at Cambridge that a Newnham student once caused a ‘great panic’ by being seen walking in the College gardens with a man. ‘The offending male proved to be the girl’s brother, but the principal reminded her that “the brother of one was not the brother of all”’.89 These rules lasted throughout the War until 1919, when the Newnham College Council relaxed many of their chaperonage policies in response to student requests for a reconsideration of the rules.90 Lynda Nead contends that ‘respectability itself embraced a range of styles, behaviours and manners’.91 Women university students embodied a different kind of respectability in specific physical and temporal spaces—at college and during term time—that was contingent on their social role in that context, supporting Peter Bailey’s argument that ‘respectability was practised in a more limited and situational sense than of a lived ideal or permanent code of values … respectability was assumed as a role (or cluster or roles) as much as it was espoused as an ideology’.92 For women students at universities during this period, the behaviours signalling respectability were explicitly codified. C. Kenyon, another Newnham student who came up in 1896, remembered the formal rules that women students were subject to in order to signal their respectability in public. We were asked always to wear gloves in town (and of course hats!); we must not ride a bicycle in the main streets, nor take a boat out on the river in the day-time unless accompanied by a chaperon … When we watched the Lent and May Races on the river we were not supposed to go on the towing path, but to stand in the meadows on the opposite side.93

If Girton students had to stay in Cambridge for examinations or lectures during the day, they were permitted to lunch at the College’s

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‘Waiting Rooms’ in St Edward’s Passage, but not cafés or restaurants.94 They were also forbidden from sitting in the cheaper seats at the local theatre, ‘in case they met young men’.95 Whether this meant a disinclination on the part of the College for their students to meet any men at all, or signalled a particular fear of mingling with men ‘of the wrong sort’ from a lower socio-economic background, is unclear, but possibly reflects a tendency on the part of the college to conflate economic and moral hierarchies. In terms of whether or not such a policy disadvantaged poorer students, Grace Hickie remembered that ‘many’ students simply disregarded the policy.96

Class and Respectability But what was the case at the civic universities? What was it like for women students navigating the bustling centres of commerce at Manchester, Liverpool, and Birmingham, as opposed to the university towns of Oxford and Cambridge? Did preoccupations with respectability shape their movement through public space as much as it did those at Newnham or Girton, Somerville or Lady Margaret Hall? Julie Gilbert suggests not, arguing that ‘[c]lass distinctions and the civics’ relative obscurity may … have contributed to their position on student behaviour’.97 The ‘extreme concern for propriety at Oxbridge’, she continues, was a result of the older universities’ ‘central and prestigious position in English life’.98 The divide was not so simple, however, and the class compositions of both types of institution more complex, with significant ramifications for how both male and female students moved between the wider urban environments in which universities were located. Gilbert hypothesises that ‘the quality of femininity itself’ was defined differently at the civic universities, where semi-professional, mercantile, and skilled worker classes provided the majority of students, as opposed to the definitions of ‘proper female behaviour’ which predominated among the upper and professional class families who were more likely to send their children to Oxford and Cambridge, shaping the experience of women students at both type of institution.99 While historians often pluralise the word ‘masculinity’ to speak of the multifarious representations and permutations of such a concept, it is less common to speak about femininities in the same way. Mimi Schippers describes femininity as ‘still decidedly under-theorised’ as compared to masculinities, while Ben Griffin notes that power relations between different forms of femininity have become

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particularly entwined, among recent scholarship, in studies of class hierarchies.100 As such, Gilbert’s argument that students of the civic universities performed femininity in a different way to their contemporaries at Oxford and Cambridge based on their class background poses an interesting concept. It could be argued that the performance in question was of respectability rather than femininity, however, and the ways this could encompass ‘a range of styles, behaviours and manners’, harking back to Nead.101 The absence of widespread chaperonage at the civic institutions can be explained in terms of Gleadle’s model of the parochial realm, in that women were more able to act as authoritative public figures within their communities by dint of their family relations. Women at the civic universities during this period were largely non-residential students, living at home while they attended institutions located within the city in which they and their family resided and with which they were familiar. Their performance of respectability, as it were, was in a setting in which they already had strong personal ties and family relationships. They were therefore provided with a greater scope to enact an empowering role, one without the heavy regulations placed on women at the all-female colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, who were largely operating outside of these networks. Chaperonage and policing of women students at the civic universities was less prevalent than at Oxford and Cambridge not because the women students at the civics were of a lower class, but because they were operating within their parochial realm. The civic universities did not have to perform the in loco parentis duties of the women’s colleges, which saw members of the college step in as protectors of their charges’ reputations, because the majority of their students remained under the supervisory remit of their actual parents. The equation of the civic universities with lower-class students and Oxford and Cambridge with the middle and upper classes fails to allow for the complex distinctions of class and gender that existed in universities and colleges of all types across this period. The ‘Ladies’ Department’ of King’s College London was renamed the ‘Women’s Department’ in 1902, hoping to counteract the prevailing opinion that ‘one class did not pass examinations, while the other did’.102 Although Marian Pease was one of the first three registered women students at University College Bristol in the late 1870s, she remembered their numbers were enhanced by ‘some of the distinguished Clifton ladies—Miss Catherine Winkworth—Miss Alleyne

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and others attended lectures in that session and, of course, kept the tone up’.103 University College Bristol provides a useful example of the complicated class dynamics that shaped the civic universities, as revealed by its first principal, Alfred Marshall’s, evidence to the governmental Committee on Intermediate and Higher Education in Wales and Monmouthshire in December 1880. Asked to give evidence on the class composition of his students, Marshall noted a distinct division between the men and women who attended the college. The women who attend the day classes are chiefly the daughters of the best families in town. The male students in the day come from nearly the same classes, but not quite, because the tendency is for the sons of the richest inhabitants of Bristol still to go to Oxford or Cambridge.104

While the ‘best families in town’ might favour Oxford and Cambridge for their sons, the new civic universities provided an opportunity for them to educate their daughters while keeping them safely close to home. At Bristol, the majority of early female students came from the affluent suburbs of Clifton, Cotham, and Redland and attended day classes at the College.105 In contrast, the male students largely came from the industrial and commercial districts to the south of the city, and attended evening classes after their day’s work was done. During the first year of the college in 1876, women outnumbered men in day classes 69 to 30, while men dominated 143 to 95  in the evening classes.106 Indeed, Don Carleton argues that the very choice of site for the university was determined by this class discrepancy between male and female students, with the chosen location of Park Row rendered desirable by its position on the border of ‘old Bristol’: there were the rapidly burgeoning affluent suburbs to the north, ‘the districts from which the College Council expected their women students to come’, and the industrial and commercial districts to the south, ‘whose young men the council hoped to attract’.107 That the council hoped to attract working-class male students did not mean that this was the case, however. Indeed, many of the civic universities were founded in the hopes of welcoming working-class students through their doors, and through education raising them up to an elevated position in life. Josiah Mason, when founding his eponymous college in Birmingham, viewed it as a college for ‘the poorer classes’, and explicitly stated in its charter that ‘no person will be admitted to the

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College who is not wholly or principally dependent for a livelihood upon his own skill and labour’.108 The goal of Firth College upon its foundation in 1879 was to ‘provide for the people of Sheffield and the district the means of higher literary and scientific education by University methods of teaching. Its doors are open to all, without distinction of sex or class’.109 Like other similar institutions, the Sheffield College grew out of the University Extension Movement, which sought to bring education to those excluded from the traditional higher education system, such as women, religious Nonconformists, and the working classes. Despite this inclusivity, however, the spaces in which these lectures took place remained highly gendered, as middle-class women attended lectures during the day, when they had time to spare, while working men populated the evening classes.110 It is this characterisation of Oxford and Cambridge as catering to a higher class of student that has given rise to the perception that student behaviour—of both men and women—was not as carefully supervised, regulated, or chaperoned at the civic universities, if at all. However, the example of the University College of North Wales reveals how students’ movements as they navigated the public space of the city were subject to oversight on the part of university authorities. For both male and female students at Bangor, movement through the liminal space that connected the campus and the outside world increasingly came under the regulatory eye of the College, as movement to and from the domestic and the institutional was made subject to explicit rules. A letter sent by the principal to all students at the beginning of the 1901 session outlined the restrictions governing student behaviour beyond the physical boundary of the university campus: Men students may not—

(a) Meet women students by appointment or walk with them: (b) Accompany women students to or from College: (c) Walk with women students in the College grounds: (d) Visit women students in their lodgings or receive visits from them111

The letter then went on to detail what Reichel deemed ‘[r]easonable intercourse between men and women students’, which was permitted, (a) At authorised social meetings within the College

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( b) On the College field during the progress of matches (c) In the College itself for business connected either with College societies or class work.112 The penalty to be handed out for any breach of these rules was ‘rustication’, a term tellingly loaded with spatial meaning.113 At the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, rustication referred to the process of ‘sending down’, or temporarily suspending, a student, usually for a disciplinary infraction.114 Deriving from the Latin rus, or ‘countryside’, it conveyed the return of the student to the country from the academic centre of learning at the university. Punishment, therefore, was deeply tied up with the idea of access to space, and one’s exclusion or removal from it. Timothy Cresswell argues that ‘place is one of the easiest ways of being included and recognizing “other” positions’, with the very concept of ‘position’ itself having a geographical basis.115 Those who transgressed the figurative boundary of appropriate behaviour were banished beyond the physical boundary of the university as a result. Transgression resulted in expulsion, another linguistic term inextricably bound up with spatial connotations. In 1901, the North Wales Chronicle described the procession of ‘practically all’ the students of the College to the Bangor railway station, ‘to show their sympathy with [three] rusticated students, and to give them a hearty send-off as they left for their homes by the nine o’clock train’.116 This demonstration at a space symbolic of transport and movement, the railway station, most clearly reveals the obvious spatial connotations of punishment, as the offending students were literally removed from the city boundaries. As a breach of rules could mean expulsion from the university space through rustication, it could also mean confinement within that space, through the punishment of ‘gating’. Also borrowed from the collegiate systems of Oxford and Cambridge, gating signified confinement rather than expulsion, as offending students were required to remain in their rooms under strict curfew. The College discipline book lists offending students and the punishments meted out to them, and the following entry from May 1907 shows a typical example. May 21 ’07: Edith Davies, Mr Parry James, Mr W.T.  Griffiths. Walked together… All came from same school… Knew each other at home. 1. Reprimanded. 2. Gated at 10 for rest of term. 3. Forbidden to attend college functions. 4. Any further breach would involve rustication.117

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In this case, the infraction and punishment were both concerned with space. A mixed-gender party had been seen walking in public, contravening the strict regulations that sought to limit male and female interaction at the College. The punishment was gating, or confinement to a designated punitive space, followed in future by rustication, or expulsion from the university space. This policy on the part of the College aligns with Denis Cosgrove’s argument that ‘the concept and practice of precise and permanent separation, of spatial “fixing”, inherent in boundary definition … represent an urge towards classification, order, control and purification’.118 At the University of Sheffield, the official calendar for the session 1906–1907 featured a list of ‘Students’ Regulations’ which similarly highlights the many ways in which students could fall foul of the law. All students were required to ‘conduct themselves in a quiet and orderly manner’, while ‘habitual neglect of work in class shall be regarded as a breach of discipline’.119 As at Bangor, both infractions and their punishment were defined by space. ‘Smoking by students in front of the building or within the precincts of the University’, for example, was ‘strictly prohibited, except in the rooms where it is specially allowed’.120 What was forbidden in one spatial zone was explicitly permitted in another, with the transgression occurring when these physical boundaries were crossed. Similarly, any ‘disorderly conduct that may occur in a Class Room or Laboratory’ was punished by the student being required to ‘withdraw from the room for the day’, enacting expulsion/exclusion on a smaller scale.121 Class, then, was a complex and ever-evolving part of life at both Oxford and Cambridge and the new civic universities. It is too simplistic to state that the men and women who attended the older universities were of the middle to upper classes, while the civic universities attracted lower-middle to working class students. In reality, class at both types of institution could depend on gender and region, with multiple factors determining where a student would choose to attend, from the price of fees to a disinclination to live far from home. Class, whether real or imagined, shaped how men and women students negotiated the public spaces of the city as they moved between the university and the wider urban environment in which it was situated. In reality, the class composition of both types of institution was more mixed, and women students at both Oxford and Cambridge and the civic universities found their movement through the urban environment of the city curtailed and regulated by the assumptions and expectations that governed all women as they moved through public space in the

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Victorian and Edwardian eras. Class, while a significant factor in shaping how institutions permitted their students to navigate the space beyond the campus, was not the only determinant, however, with issues such as temporality also impacting where was considered appropriate for students to traverse and congregate.

Temporality On the 22nd of June, 1897, Queen Victoria celebrated her sixtieth year on the throne, and Owens College—then less than half a century old itself—celebrated with her. To mark the event, the male students of the College had decided on a torchlight procession through the streets of Manchester and Salford. A similar event had been attempted in 1887, on the occasion of a visit from the Prince of Wales, but this latest production was more ambitious in scale. The final procession numbered more than 500, including a band and police escort, as it marched down the main thoroughfares of the city. The crowd that gathered to watch, according to the Owens College Union Magazine, was ‘extraordinary’: over the five miles of the march, ‘every available inch was occupied, and the balconies, windows, and vehicles each had their load of spectators’.122 The crowd marched to Kersal Moor, where the city had built a giant bonfire in commemoration of the Jubilee, before returning to their College at half past three in the morning. Ten years later, the Jubilee procession saw an even more overt display of a distinctive student identity, as the participants (again, exclusively male) adorned themselves in fancy dress costumes. Ranging from ‘The New Woman’ and ‘The Lady Doctor’ to ‘The Wild Man from Borneo’, Carol Dyhouse has argued that these processions (as well as the later ‘rags’ into which they would evolve) acted as a form of inversion and parody, which, in traversing boundaries, ‘served to reinforce dominant student identities as young males’.123 In 1907, male students at the University of Sheffield made this assertion of masculine student identity upon the space of the city even more explicit, as they held their own three-hour ‘Torchlight Procession’ through the centre of the city. ‘Our sole idea was to let Sheffield know that it had a University’, they wrote in the student magazine Floreamus, ‘that this University had Students, and that these Students were “out” to show the world at large’.124 The significance of male students adopting drag to portray the ‘New Woman’ and ‘Lady Doctor’ also highlights the gender imbalance that

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infused these displays. For, of course, women students were not participants in these processions. Instead, they were oddities to be dressed up and performed, as comical and bizarre as ‘The Wild Man from Borneo’. As an informal gathering organised by male undergraduates, the torchlight procession revealed who they considered to be fellow students—men alone could assert their identity upon the physical space of the city. There were spaces designated appropriate for women at the universities, and the public streets, especially after dark, were not one of them. In the London of the 1880s and 1890s, notes Gillian Sutherland, ‘[t]here were some routes a woman could travel by omnibus on her own; there were others where it was necessary, however expensive, to take a cab and/or be accompanied’. Ladies, she argues, ‘had still to be self-conscious about their behaviour in public places and to know where one could and could not go—and at what times—unaccompanied, without being molested’.125 For the meaning of places is not static, but contingent on myriad factors, including the time of day or night. Burlington Arcade in London may have been a respectable shopping destination for middle-­ class women during the day, but its association with prostitutes made it a no-go zone in the afternoon and evening.126 ‘It may be useful to think of places, not as areas on maps’, suggests Doreen Massey, ‘but as constantly shifting articulations of social relations through time’.127 Different times of day could not only change the associations of a place itself, but also of those who frequented it, particularly in the case of women. As Liz Bondi and Mona Domosh contend, ‘[a] woman seen out alone after a certain time of night—or on the “wrong” street—was immediately marked as an outsider to society’s norms, that is, as some form of social outcast’.128 ‘They are not allowed to be out after dinner without permission’, read the Somerville College ‘House Rules’ of 1894, ‘nor to walk alone in the evening’.129 The rules of the Birmingham women’s hall of residence stated that, ‘[a]ll evening engagements should be referred to the Warden. Students are expected to return by 11 p.m. and to sign their names on coming back in in a book kept for the purpose’.130 The discipline book of the University College of North Wales similarly records the use of time as a regulatory measure. Curfews were strictly enforced according the rules governing lodging houses, requiring each student to be home by 10 p.m. at the latest. E. P. Thompson’s argument that a ‘new time-discipline was imposed’ throughout the nineteenth century, as new labour habits were formed based on an increasingly regimented focus on clock-time, gains new relevance when applied to the

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world of the university.131 F. Stuart Chapin has identified phenomena such as daylight saving time, the imposition of curfews, and the public regulation of transportation and communication through scheduling as ‘time controls’, which he argues ‘induce patterned forms of activity’.132 When applied to the context of higher education, time can be viewed a method of social control directed not against working people, but rather the middle-­class students of colleges and universities. Sheldon Rothblatt draws attention to how, in the collegiate world of Oxford and Cambridge, compulsory attendance at everyday events such as chapel, lectures, and dinners in hall required students to be in a certain place at a certain time, and thus ‘were given a disciplinary purpose’.133 Sutherland notes that, at the University of London, ‘it was agreed that lectures for men should begin and end on the hour, while those for women should begin and end on the half-hour’.134 Here, temporal controls were used to regulate spatial interaction. At non-collegiate Bangor, it was strict timetabling which most effectively used time as a disciplinary measure. The ‘Rules for Students’ in the University College of North Wales calendar demonstrate the value placed on punctuality: At every hour after the first lecture-hour, the College bell is rung twice; first, for half a minute, when the clock strikes, as a signal for all lectures to cease, next from five to eight minutes past the hour for the following lectures to commence. Every student is required to be in his place in class when the second bell ceases ringing.135

While temporality was used to control students’ movements through space, academic dress, in turn, provided a useful identifier of student identity as they negotiated space both within and beyond the boundaries of the university. At Oxford and Cambridge, academic dress was a marker of official undergraduate status, and as such women—who remained unofficial members of these institutions until they were granted degrees in the twentieth century—were forbidden from wearing the traditional cap and gown.136 Notably, at Bangor, where both men and women were admitted on equal terms and were both eligible to sit for degrees from the University of London, academic dress was only required for male students. ‘Male Students are required to wear Academical Dress (cap and gown) within the College and the College grounds, and after six o’clock in the evening (eight o’clock during the summer term)’, notes the official ‘Rules for Students’ of the 1886–1887 session.137 This insistence on the wearing of

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academic dress in the evening, when no longer within the College or its grounds, was presumably a method of identifying students for disciplinary purposes, in the same way that Paul Deslandes argues that the cap and gown at Oxford and Cambridge was a ‘visible symbol of [male undergraduate] student identity’, and therefore a disciplinary aid to College authorities.138 While women students may not have visibly displayed their student status through the wearing of academic dress, their movements through space were even more proscribed through the implementation of formal chaperonage rules. Gilbert, in her study of England’s civic universities, maintains that authorities at these coeducational universities ‘did not institute rules and disciplinary procedures designed to shelter women students from male influence. Neither internal records nor university publications mention chaperonage or other restrictive social policies’.139 While the University College of North Wales remained beyond her remit, as a Welsh rather than English college, it was also founded in the same late nineteenth-­ century period, strongly rooted in its locality, and admitted women on the same terms as men. And, yet, the University College of North Wales instituted formal chaperonage rules for its women students. In 1888, it was decreed that ‘no mixed meeting of students may be held in the College after 5:30 p.m., or continued after that hour’.140 When a woman student did attend mixed evening meetings, her presence was dependent on the condition that she ‘come and return in the company of her own parent or guardian’, or another suitably vetted chaperone’, (which in this case consisted of ‘a lady expressly named by her parent or guardian in a letter to the Principal, the Lady Principal of University College hall, the wife of a member of the Council, or of a permanent officer of the College, or a lady whose name has been approved of by the Principal upon the application of the student in question’).141 The space of the university was not one which men and women could negotiate freely and equally, but was dominated by numerous rules and regulations which governed movement and controlled interaction between students. At the civic universities, the issues inherent in women students navigating the city after dark were brought under scrutiny by the question of evening classes. Many of the civic universities offered evening classes as a means of attracting working-class students who might not otherwise be able to attend, given that they worked during the day. While some institutions welcomed both men and women to their evening classes—including University College Bristol, and University College Liverpool, which

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announced in the calendar for the 1882–1883 session that ‘[t]he College provides Day and Evening Classes, both of which are open to male and female Students alike’—others, such as Owens College, officially excluded women.142 As Mabel Tylecote notes, ‘[i]t was thought there would be grave danger if they were admitted to classes with men at the witching hours between say 6 and 8 or even 9 p.m.’143 While women may have been officially excluded from evening classes at Manchester, the very fact that such classes were offered could reflect a desire on the part of university authorities to separate their male and female students in an informal manner, while still claiming to admit both men and women equally, with no distinction of sex. Mary Paley, former Newnham student and wife of Alfred Marshall, first principal of University College Bristol, remembered in her memoirs how the day and evening classes were divided by gender. ‘I was allowed to give the morning lectures in Economics to a class which consisted mainly of women’, she wrote, while ‘he continued to give the evening lectures which were attended by business men, trade unionists and a few women’.144 In Sheffield, the University Extension Lectures which laid the foundation for the establishment of the city’s own university college were arranged at specific times for each subject, with English literature at twelve noon for the ladies, and more masculine subjects scheduled for after working hours.145 While the scheduling of evening classes may have acted as an informal method of regulation, students were also subjected to hard and fast curfews. In 1875, the earliest students of what would become Newnham College were given a list of ‘General Rules for Students’, which declared, ‘[s]tudents are expected to be home, during the Michaelmas and Lent Terms, at 6.30 p.m. During the Easter Term, at 8.30 p.m. On Sundays, throughout the year, at 8.30.’146 This was earlier than the curfew imposed upon the men students, who for hundreds of years had been called back to their colleges by the tolling of a curfew from the tower of Great St Mary’s Church at nine o’clock every evening, a tradition that continued until 1939.147 Even as the strictness of chaperonage rules gradually lapsed over time, temporal curfews remained largely the same. Over a quarter of a century later, M.  W. Balcombe, a Newnham student in 1901, recalled attending the twenty-first birthday party of a friend, an out-student who lived nearby with her parents. At the stroke of 9 p.m. a maid announced, ‘The gentleman from the College has called for the young ladies.’ We meekly said goodnight and followed the

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majestic black-coated porter, who carried a candle-lantern to lead us the short distance back to the college.148

Eleanor C. Lodge, who studied at Lady Margaret Hall in Oxford during the early 1890s, recalled that she could not attend the theatre without a chaperone, but considered herself lucky compared to the women of Somerville, who ‘were obliged to be in by eleven o’clock, and so nearly always had to tramp out before the play was over whilst we could stay to the end, however late’.149 Temporality also impacted the relationship between the university and the city through the academic year, as term times full of students in residence gave way to near-empty long vacations. The Granta of 1896 featured a poem entitled ‘The Deserted Varsity’, which described how the city of Cambridge transformed between term time and vacation. Such, Cambridge is thy life when Term is on; But in Vacation all thy charms are gone. O dreary, weary moth, strange, silent Town, With Dons departed, Undergrads gone down.150

All of this again raises the question of where was the university. Here, it is operating as an imaginative space, as well as a physical one. Without the students that make it a university, Cambridge out of term becomes just another ‘strange, silent, Town’. While this phenomenon was most clearly visible at the residential universities of Oxford and Cambridge, which swelled each term with student populations that emptied out just as quickly at the long vacation, students at the civic universities made similar observations about the changing character of the city as shaped by the ebb and flow of the academic year. In 1896, an Owens College student described the aftermath of the Victoria University degree day. With that the ceremony finished. For half an hour or so the neighbouring streets were thronged with undergraduates and their friends, and then the College returned to its natural abode, and the city was left to its desolation.151

The space of the university as it related to the city was shaped as much by the academic calendar as it was by the temporal distinctions between night and day, determining where it was appropriate for men and women

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students to go and what it was appropriate for them to do. ‘Smoking was forbidden and so were amateur theatricals in term-time’, remembered C. Crowther of Newnham College in 1896, ‘but acting was allowed in the “Long”’.152 Space and its meaning was not fixed and immutable, but rather contingent on a variety of factors—such as the divisions between term time and vacation and the going down of the sun—which converged to determine what was acceptable or not in men and women students’ movements through the public space of the city.

Conclusion For Marian Pease, the daily commute from Westbury-on-Trym to the University College Buildings on Park Street was just part of the many ways she, and other students like her, navigated the boundaries between the university and the city. Once she had arrived at the University College Bristol campus for her classes, she was not sequestered there all day, but rather continued continually crossed and recrossed the boundary between academic and non-academic space. For example, she recalled in her memoirs that, once, ‘a group of us, greatly daring, walked up Park Row to sign a petition which was taking signatures outside the Museum for some reform’.153 She also remembered that, as there were no tea shops or restaurants in Park Street or Queen’s Road, students visited one of the small shops located in the converted stables at the back of Berkley Square, where an Italian man named Jacomelli sold chocolate. ‘We felt uncertain about … whether it was quite proper to frequent the shop’, she noted, ‘but the chocolate was too alluring to be resisted’.154 Universities are always a part of their wider environments. Despite the etymology of the word itself stretching back to the Latin universitus, meaning ‘the whole’, universities rarely exist in complete isolation, providing within themselves all the necessary components of education and life. Whether located in the growing industrial cities of Birmingham, Manchester, and Liverpool, or the smaller centres of Oxford or Cambridge, higher education institutions in England and Wales during the late-­ nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries shared a symbiotic relationship with the wider urban environment in which they were located. The proliferation of these different models of what it meant to be a university also made it harder during this period to apply the crude binary of ‘town and gown’, which, while overly simplistic, had been used to broadly describe the social organisation of Oxford and Cambridge.

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The nature of the civic universities as institutions blurred the boundaries between the city and the university, given their non-residential nature and prominent location in large urban centres. The absence of residential colleges, which combined students’ living and working spaces into one, necessitated the daily negotiation of public space as students moved back and forth between their homes, lodgings, or (later) off-site, non-teaching halls of residence, and the demarcated space of the campus. This process of commuting was facilitated by the advent and utilisation of new forms of rapid transport, such as the railway and tramways, which brought students in from their homes in the expanding suburbs that were reshaping cities at this time. The civic universities were indeed often planned with these considerations in mind, orienting their location in terms of transport links and suburban growth. Moving through the city was, therefore, a daily part of life for students at universities and colleges during this period, and one that was as shaped by gender as their movements on and around the place of the campus. For women students, navigating the public space of the city and public transport systems was more fraught than for male students, but men also negotiated the uneasy divide between university and city space, most notably through ‘rags’ which served to assert their student status and identity in a setting in which the bounds between town and gown were less clearly defined. While class status affected both men and women students, women in particular found their movements through the city impacted by social class, or more accurately through generalised assumptions about their social class based on the type of institution they attended. A working-class girl on a scholarship at Oxford, for example, would find her movements curtailed more severely than her upper-middle-class counterpart at University College Bristol. Temporality also played a role, shaping what spaces were considered appropriate for men and women students to inhabit at different times of day, as well as at different times of the academic year, dependent on the cycles of the academic term. The threads of commuting, class, and temporality may seem disparate, but they all serve to illustrate how students’ movements between the university and the larger urban environment were shaped by various forces. On the Bristol tram each morning, Marian Pease cut a different figure than the professional men heading in to work. A male student walking the city streets of Oxford in his academic dress occupied the space differently as would a student from one of the women’s colleges, required to travel in pairs. For the men of the civic universities enacting torchlight processions

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and rags, the public streets of the city were places to assert student identity and group belonging in a way that was impossible for women students. The space of the university, as it shaped the lives of its students, was not constrained to the boundaries of the campus, but stretched beyond to encompass the towns and cities in which these institutions were located, and of which they were an integral part.

Notes 1. M.  F. Pease, ‘Some Reminiscences of University College, Bristol’, in J.  Jerrard (ed.), Reminiscences: ‘University College Bristol and The University of Bristol’ (Bristol: The University of Bristol Women’s Club, 1997), p. 8. 2. T. Campbell, ‘Proposal of a Metropolitan University, in a letter to Henry Brougham, Esq.’, Times, 9 February 1825, p. 4. 3. The Scottish universities of the nineteenth century also differed from Oxford and Cambridge in not administering religious tests for students, offering vocational professional training in subjects like law and medicine, and being supported financially by the state, keeping fees low. R. D. Anderson, Edinburgh History of Education in Scotland (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), p. 266. 4. F. W. Macdonald, As a Tale that is Told (London: Cassell & Company, 1919), p. 93. 5. Report (24 February 1868), Records Relating to the College Extension, 1865–1877, GB 133 OCA/7/2/8, University of Manchester, p. 5. 6. Report (24 February 1868), p. 5. 7. Report (24 February 1868), p. 5. 8. Report (24 February 1868), p. 5. 9. S.  Gunn, The Public Culture of the Victorian Middle Class: Ritual and Authority and the English Industrial City, 1840–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 38. 10. M. E. Rose, ‘Culture, Philanthropy and the Manchester Middle Classes’, in A. J. Kidd & K. W. Roberts (eds.), City, Class and Culture: Studies of social policy and cultural production in Victorian Manchester (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), p. 103. 11. G.  E. Mingay, ‘Introduction: Rural England in the Industrial Age’, in G.  E. Mingay (ed.), The Victorian Countryside (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), p. 9. 12. A.  Heywood, Bristol & Clifton (Manchester: Abel Heywood and Son, 1869), p. 3.

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13. A.  L. Salmon, Bristol: City, Suburbs & Countryside (London: Bristol Times & Mirror, 1922), p. 25. 14. G. Heath, The New History, Survey and Description of the City and Suburbs of Bristol: Or complete guide (Bristol: W. Matthews, 1794), p. 107. 15. Heath, The New History, p. 107. 16. H. J. Spear, Residential guide to Bristol and its immediate suburbs (Herbert & Stephens, 1885), p. 14. 17. Spear, Residential guide to Bristol, p. 14. 18. Spear, Residential guide to Bristol, p. 14. 19. L. Davidoff & C. Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780–1850 (London & New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 368. 20. H. Mathers, Steel City Scholars: A Centenary History of the University of Sheffield (London: James & James, 2005), p. 6. 21. D.  R. Jones, The Origins of Civic Universities: Manchester, Leeds, and Liverpool (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 46. 22. Jones, The Origins of Civic Universities, p. 47. 23. Jones, The Origins of Civic Universities, p. 52. 24. ‘Return of the Residence of Day Students in 1864–5’, Records relating to the College Extension, 1865–1877, GB 133 OCA/7/2/1–22, University of Manchester, p. 6. 25. ‘Residence of Students’, Mason College, Birmingham with Queen’s Faculty of Medicine Calendar for the session 1894–1895, UB/ MC/H/1/15, University of Birmingham, p. iii; ‘University College, Bristol, Calendar for the Session 1889–90’, Calendars of University College, Bristol and University of Bristol, DM1191, University of Bristol, p. 26. 26. Hall of Residence for Women Students, Early brochures for 215 Hagley Road hostel (1904–1906), UB/HUH/A/5/1/4–6, University of Birmingham, pp. 1–2. 27. B. Truscot, Redbrick University (London: Faber & Faber, 1943), p. 17. 28. ‘Preface’, University College of North Wales Calendar for the year 1903–4 (Manchester: J. E. Cornish, 1903), p. 9. 29. J.  G. Williams, The University College of North Wales: Foundations 1884–1927 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1985), p. 242. 30. ‘Preface’, University College of North Wales Calendar for the year 1903–4, p. 9. 31. Report (24 February 1868), p. 5. 32. C.  Driver, The Exploding University (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1971), p. 27. 33. F.  J. C.  Hearnshaw, The Centenary History of King’s College London (London: George C. Harrap & Co., 1929), p. 63. 34. Hearnshaw, The Centenary History of King’s College London, p. 63.

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35. E.  L. D., ‘The Situation of King’s College London, Bad, Very Bad’, Mechanics’ Magazine, 14 November 1829, p. 10. 36. R. Muir, An Autobiography and some Essays (London: Lund Humphries & Co., 1943), p. 23. 37. Muir, An Autobiography and some Essays, p. 23. 38. Muir, An Autobiography and some Essays, p. 24. 39. W. L. Jones, The University College of North Wales After Twenty-One Years (Bangor: Jarvis & Foster, 1905), p. 9. 40. Williams, The University College of North Wales, p. 240. 41. Williams, The University College of North Wales, p. 240. 42. L.  Staeheli, ‘Place’, in J.  A. Agnew, K.  Mitchell & G.  Toal (eds.), A Companion to Political Geography (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), p. 160. 43. E.  Munson, ‘Walking on the Periphery: Gender and the discourse of modernization’, Journal of Social History 36:1 (2002), p.  70. On the appeal of tea rooms to newly independent women diners, see Perilla Kinchin, Tea and Taste: The Glasgow Tea Rooms 1875–1975 (Wendlebury: White Cockade Publishing, 1991), pp. 30–1. 44. Staeheli, ‘Place’, p. 160. 45. M. Martin, ‘Single Women and Philanthropy: A case study of women’s associational life in Bristol, 1880–1914’, Women’s History Review 17:3 (2008), pp. 395–417. 46. Martin, ‘Single Women and Philanthropy’, p. 395. 47. Martin, ‘Single Women and Philanthropy’, p. 408. 48. Munson, ‘Walking on the Periphery’, p. 63. 49. G.  Sutherland, In Search of the New Woman: Middle-Class Women and Work in Britain 1870–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), p. 76; A. Maitland, Miss Maitland to Miss Fry, 30 August 1894. Letter. Discipline, Somerville College. 50. P. C. Cohen, ‘Safety and Danger: Women on American Public Transport, 1750–1850’, in D. O. Helly & S. M. Reverby (eds.), Gendered Domains: Rethinking Public and Private in Women’s History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), p. 110. 51. Cohen, ‘Safety and Danger’, pp. 110–11. 52. A. Barry, The Higher Education of Women: Inaugural Lecture to the Course of Lectures for Ladies in Richmond and Twickenham in Connection with King’s College, London, Delivered on May 13, 1871 (London: Bell & Daldy, 1871), p. 6. 53. Hearnshaw, The Centenary History of King’s College London, p.  315; L.  M. Faithfull, In the House of my Pilgrimage (London: Chatto & Windus, 1924), pp. 102, 104.

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54. Thomas Campbell imagined the students of his new London University as ‘between the age of 15 or 16 and 20, or later if you please’. ‘Proposal of a Metropolitan University’, p. 4. 55. J.  B. Morrell, ‘Science and Scottish University Reform: Edinburgh in 1826’, The British Journal for the History of Science 6:1 (1972), p. 46 56. Anderson, Edinburgh History of Education in Scotland, p. 68. 57. S. Rothblatt, ‘The Student Sub-Culture and the Examination System in Early 19th Century Oxbridge’, in L. Stone (ed.), The University in Society, Volume I: Oxford and Cambridge from the 14th to the Early 19th Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), p. 248. 58. Campbell, ‘Proposal of a Metropolitan University’, p. 4. 59. C.  Otter, The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision in Britain, 1800–1910 (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 2008), p. 64. 60. E. Penrose, E. P. to K. F. Jones, 6 Sept. 1907 (Somerville). Letter. Cited in P. Adams, Somerville for Women: An Oxford College 1879–1993 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 116. 61. B. Megson & J. Lindsay, Girton College 1869–1959: An informal history (Cambridge: W. Heffer & Sons, 1960), p. 7. 62. M. de G.  Verrall (1876), in A.  Phillips, A Newnham Anthology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 5. 63. T.  Richardson, Cambridge College Gardens (London: White Lion Publishing, 2019), p.  190; W.  R. Brock & P.  H. M.  Cooper, Selwyn College: A History (Edinburgh: Pentland Press, 1994), p. 59. 64. ‘Review of the Term’, Girton Review 8 (July 1884), p. 1. 65. G. Hickie, ‘Miss Grace Hickie remembers three glorious years’, Memoirs and reminiscences, GCRF 4/1/25, Girton College, p. 12. 66. ‘Cambridge Letter’, Iris (July 1888), GB 133 UMP/2/5, University of Manchester, pp. 10–11. 67. D. Howard, Dorothy Howard to Rosalind Howard, Countess of Carlisle, 15 October 1901. Letter. Personal papers of Dorothy Howard (The Lady Henley), ‘First Term’, GCPP Howard 1/1, Girton College. 68. Megson & Lindsay, Girton College, p. 41. 69. E. G. Brown (Parsons, 1901), in A. Phillips (ed.), A Newnham Anthology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 50. 70. See P.  Marks, Bicycles, Bangs, and Bloomers: The New Woman in the Popular Press (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1990) and S. Wintle, ‘Horses, Bikes and Automobiles: New Woman on the Move’, in A. Richardson & C. Willis (eds.), The New Women in Fiction and Fact: Fin-­de-­siècle Feminisms (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), pp. 66–78.

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71. Sutherland, In Search of the New Woman, p. 140; M. C. Bradbrook, ‘That Infidel Place’: A Short History of Girton College 1869–1969 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1969), pp. 106–7. 72. Bradbrook, ‘That Infidel Place’, pp. 106–7. 73. M.  A. Quiggin (Hingston, 1899), in A.  Phillips (ed.), A Newnham Anthology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 44. 74. Hickie, ‘Miss Grace Hickie remembers three glorious years’, p.  12; Megson & Lindsay, Girton College, pp. 40–1. 75. Hickie, ‘Miss Grace Hickie remembers three glorious years’, p. 12. 76. I. Brooksbank (1917), Reminiscences pre-1920, SGH/Q/6/2/1/1/3d, St Hugh’s College p. 6. 77. R. McWilliams-Tullberg, Women at Cambridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 115. 78. ‘On Bicycles’, Owens College Union Magazine 4:37 (1897), p. 153. 79. E.  Wilson, ‘The Invisible Flâneur’, in S.  Watson & K.  Gibson (eds.), Postmodern Cities and Spaces (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), p. 60. 80. M.  P. Marshall, What I Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1947), p. 10. 81. E.  Wallace (1908–1911), Reminiscences pre-1920, SHG/Q/6/2/1/1/18a, St Hugh’s College, p. 14. 82. Wallace, Reminiscences, p. 14. 83. D.  A. Winstanley, Later Victorian Cambridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1947), p. 92 [my emphasis]. 84. P. Howell, Geographies of Regulation: Policing Prostitution in Nineteenth-­ Century Britain and the Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 126. 85. Jane Elsden and Daisy Hopkins were both arrested in 1891. See J. Oswald, ‘The Spinning House Girls: Cambridge University’s Distinctive Policy of Policing Prostitution’, Urban History 39:3 (2012), p. 469. 86. M.  Curtin, Propriety and Position: A Study of Victorian Manners (New York & London: Garland, 1987), p. 238. 87. K. Gleadle, Borderline Citizens: Women, Gender and Political Culture in Britain, 1815–1867 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 123, 155–6. 88. Deposit 10, Clara Money-Coutts (1897–1898), MPP/Memorabilia and Personal Papers of College Members, Lady Margaret Hall, pp. 93–4. 89. McWilliams-Tullberg, Women at Cambridge, p. 86. 90. McWilliams-Tullberg, Women at Cambridge, pp. 143–4. 91. L.  Nead, “Many little harmless and interesting adventures…”: Gender and the Victorian city’, in M. Hewitt (ed.), The Victorian World (London & New York: Routledge, 2012), p. 294.

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92. P.  Bailey, Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 32. 93. C. Crowther (Kenyon, 1896), in A. Phillips (ed.), A Newnham Anthology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 38. 94. Hickie, ‘Miss Grace Hickie remembers three glorious years’, p. 12. 95. Hickie, ‘Miss Grace Hickie remembers three glorious years’, p. 12. 96. Hickie, Miss Grace Hickie remembers three glorious years’, p. 12. 97. J.  Gilbert, ‘Women Students and Student Life at England’s Civil Universities before the First World War’, History of Education 23:4 (1994), p. 411. 98. Gilbert, ‘Women Students and Student Life’, p. 411. 99. Gilbert, ‘Women Students and Student Life’, p. 422. 100. M. Schippers, ‘Recovering the Feminine Other: Masculinity, Femininity and Gender Hegemony’, Theory and Society 36:1 (2007), p. 85; B. Griffin, ‘Hegemonic Masculinity as a Historical Problem’, Gender & History 30:2 (2018), p. 381. 101. Nead, ‘Many little harmless and interesting adventures’, p. 294. 102. Hearnshaw, The Centenary History of King’s College London, p. 438. 103. Pease, ‘Some Reminiscences of University College, Bristol’, p. 10. 104. J.  K. Whitaker, ‘Alfred Marshall: The Years 1877 to 1885’, History of Political Economy 4:1 (1972), pp. 6–7. 105. J.  W. Sherborne, University College Bristol, 1876–1909 (Bristol: Bristol Branch of the Historical Association, 1977), p. 13. 106. Sherborne, University College Bristol, p. 3. 107. D.  Carleton, A University for Bristol: An informal history in texts and pictures (Bristol: University of Bristol Press, 1984), p. 100. 108. ‘Sir Josiah Mason’s Scientific College, Birmingham: Laying of the Foundation-Stone’, Birmingham Daily Post, 24 February 1875, p. 6. 109. ‘Admission of Students’, University College of Sheffield Calendar, 1897–8 (Sheffield: Independent Press, 1898), p. 2 [my emphasis]. 110. L. Goldman, Dons and Workers: Oxford and Adult Education since 1850 (Oxford, Clarendon, 1995), pp. 87–8. 111. H.  R. Reichel, H. R. Reichel to Mr Elias Jones, 29 March 1901. Letter. Bangor Mss 21054, Bangor University. 112. Reichel, H. R. Reichel to Mr Elias Jones. William Whyte draws attention to how these strict rules were received at other civic universities in England in Redbrick, pp. 45–6. 113. The letter states that students guilty of breaching the rules ‘must be regarded as exposing themselves to the penalty of rustication’. Reichel, H.R. Reichel to Mr Elias Jones. 114. S.  Rothblatt, The Revolution of the Dons: Cambridge and Society in Victorian England (London: Faber & Faber, 1968), p. 183.

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115. T. Cresswell, In Place/Out of Place: Geography, Ideology and Transgression (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 15. 116. ‘Bangor University College: Social Intercourse between Men and Women Students’, North Wales Chronicle, 23 July 1901, p. 8. 117. Student Discipline Book, Bangor Mss 14810, Bangor University, p. 4. 118. D.  Cosgrove, ‘Introduction: Mapping Meaning’, in D.  Cosgrove (ed.) Mappings (London: Reaktion Books, 1999), p. 4. 119. ‘Students’ Regulations’, The University of Sheffield Calendar for the Session 1906–7 (Sheffield: Independent Press, 1907), pp. 154–6. 120. ‘Students’ Regulations’, p. 156. 121. ‘Students’ Regulations’, p. 155. 122. ‘The Torchlight Procession’, Owens College Union Magazine 4:36 (1897), p. 131. 123. C.  Dyhouse, Students: A Gendered History (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 194. 124. ‘Students’ Night at the Theatre’, Floreamus! A Chronicle of University College, Sheffield, 3:31 (1907), p. 205. 125. Sutherland, In Search of the New Woman, p. 77. 126. J.  Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 31–2. 127. D.  Massey, ‘Places and their Pasts’, History Workshop Journal 39 (1995), p. 188. 128. L. Bondi & M. Domosh, ‘On the Contours of Public Space: A Tale of Three Women’, Antipode 30:3 (1998), p. 270. 129. Maitland, Miss Maitland to Miss Fry, 30 August 1894. Letter. Discipline, Somerville College. 130. Hall of Residence for Women Students, Early brochures for 215 Hagley Road hostel (1904–1906), UB/HUH/A/5/1/4–6, University of Birmingham, p. 2. 131. E. P. Thompson, ‘Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism’, Past & Present 38 (December 1967), 56–97. See also, A.  P. Donajgrodzki (ed.), Social Control in Nineteenth-Century Britain (London: Croom Helm, 1977) and H. J. Voth’s Time and Work in England, 1750–1830 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000). 132. F. S. Chapin, Jr., ‘Human Time Allocation in the City’, in T. Carlstein, D.  Parkes & N.  J. Thrift (eds.), Human Activity and Time Geography (London: Edward Arnold, 1978), p. 13. 133. Rothblatt, The Revolution of the Dons, p. 183. 134. G.  Sutherland, ‘“The Plainest Principles of Justice”: The University of London and the higher education of women’, in F.  M. L.  Thompson

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(ed.), The University of London and the World of Learning, 1836–1986 (London: The Hambledon Press, 1990), p. 39. 135. ‘Rules for students’, University College of North Wales Calendar for the year 1887–8 (Manchester: J. E. Cornish, 1887), p. 62. 136. J. Howarth, ‘“In Oxford but… not of Oxford”: The Women’s Colleges’, in M.  G. Brock & M.  Curthoys (eds.), The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 7 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 253. 137. ‘Rules for Students’, University College of North Wales Calendar for the year 1886–7 (Manchester: J. E. Cornish, 1886), p.102. Whyte discusses the difference between the English and Welsh civic universities’ wearing of academic dress in Redbrick, pp. 147–8. 138. P. Deslandes, Oxbridge Men: British Masculinity and the Undergraduate Experience, 1850–1920 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), pp. 33–4. 139. Gilbert, ‘Women Students and Student Life’, p. 409. 140. ‘Rules for students’, University College of North Wales Calendar for the year 1888–9 (Manchester: J.  E. Cornish, 1889), p.  52. The rule was relaxed the following year to exempt the Choral and Debating societies. 141. ‘Rules for students’, University College of North Wales, Calendar for the year 1890–1 (Manchester: J. E. Cornish, 1890), p. 38. 142. As the evening classes only provided ‘elementary instruction’, they did not prevent women from following the degree programme. ‘Prospectus of Day Classes in Arts and Science, and of the Evening Lectures, for the year 1882–3’, University College Liverpool, Calendar for the Session 1882–1883 (Liverpool: Adam Holden, 1882), p. 5. 143. M.  P. Tylecote, The Education of Women at Manchester University, 1883–1933 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1941), p. 14. 144. Marshall, What I Remember, p. 23. 145. Mathers, Steel City Scholars, p. 6. 146. ‘General Rules for Students’, The Hall, Bateman Street, Cambridge (pamphlet), 1875, AD/5/4/1, Newnham College. 147. K.  Taylor, Central Cambridge: A Guide to the University and Colleges (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 21. 148. M.  W. Balcombe (1901), in A.  Phillips (ed.), A Newnham Anthology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 48–9. 149. E.  C. Lodge, Terms and Vacations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1938), p. 49. 150. ‘The Deserted Varsity’, Granta 10:199 (1896), p. 126. 151. ‘Degree Day’, Owens College Union Magazine 3:27 (1896), p. 147. 152. Crowther, A Newnham Anthology, p. 38. 153. Pease, ‘Some Reminiscences of University College, Bristol’, p. 9. 154. Pease, ‘Some Reminiscences of University College, Bristol’, p. 9.

CHAPTER 5

Libraries, Laboratories, and Learning Spaces

In October 1884, Edith Lang entered Owens College as a student for the very first time. She had recently graduated from Manchester High School for Girls, where she had been an exhibitioner and distinguished herself in the Cambridge Higher Local Examinations, winning the Lady Goldsmid Prize for the best junior candidate in Mathematics.1 Lang had hoped to continue on with the subject at university, but was told when she arrived that ‘a woman’s brain was not equal to the higher mathematics,’ and refused entry to the Bachelor of Science degree course.2 With that door closed, she and a similarly rejected friend turned their attentions instead to Classics—‘of which we were well aware we knew nothing’—and History.3 In her first year, Lang was one of only seven women at the College who were working towards a degree, although the number later grew to thirteen.4 Owens College had been founded in 1851 as the result of a bequest from a prosperous local cotton merchant, John Owens, who had specified the bulk of his considerable fortune be put towards the establishment of an institution ‘for providing or aiding the means of instructing and improving young persons of the male sex.’5 In 1883, after over thirty years’ adherence to these provisions, the College Council sought to change this fundamental condition of Owens’ endowment, resulting in the admission of women students from the beginning of the 1883–1884 session.6

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Oman, Higher Education and the Gendering of Space in England and Wales, 1869–1909, Genders and Sexualities in History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29987-2_5

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This achievement did not happen overnight, but was rather the result of a long and tireless program of campaigning on the part of numerous educational activists. The North of England Council for Promoting the Higher Education of Women, spearheaded by Josephine Butler and Elizabeth Wolstenholme, had been founded in 1867, and an 1870 Act of Parliament had removed all legal restrictions preventing the admission of women to Owens, declaring that the College ‘shall not be bound to observe the restrictions imposed by the founder’s will as to the sex of the students.’7 In 1874, women were admitted to classes at the College as visitors in a trial that was not permanently adopted, and in 1877 there was a push to establish an independent college for women with close links to Owens, leading to the opening of the Manchester and Salford College for Women later that year.8 With the passing of the 1883 decision, however, the College for Women was dissolved and its students absorbed into Owens proper as the newly titled Department for Women. Edith Lang and her fellow students were part of just the second intake of women students admitted to an institution that had been designed and run as an all-male establishment for thirty-two years. In a spatial sense, the transition was not a smooth one. While the buildings of Owens College were situated west of Oxford Road, the women were taught at premises on Brunswick Street, to the east, until 1897.9 Women were permitted to ‘go across’ to Owens (as the phrase went) before this time, but only if they passed an exam known as the ‘preliminary.’ 10 A woman student’s first visit to Owens was regarded as a momentous step, as described by Lang. How awe-stricken my chum and I felt the first day we “went across”! Not that we were met with any worse treatment than being gazed at as if we were a new species; but, still, we were very glad when the first plunge was over.11

However, entry to ‘the sacred precincts of Owens College proper’ did not automatically imply an extended stay.12 An article in the Iris, the Department for Women’s magazine, described their complicated relationship with the College, claiming ‘we rush in just before the lecture begins, we rush away when it ends; but if we have an hour to spare between two lectures, we spend it in Brunswick Street.’13 As Lang wrote, remembering her time at the College, ‘we never thought of entering Owens by the principal door, but always that to the right of the quad, and we were always ushered out of the History theatre by the professor.’14 Women students

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were not even allowed to enter the College library, but instead had to send a maid to collect any books they required.15 The physical removal of the female student population of Owens College to a self-contained Department for Women, located in an entirely different building off-site from the main campus, represents one of the most extreme examples of how spaces of learning were bifurcated along gender lines at the universities and colleges of England and Wales in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Interactions between male and female students were not just governed by informal rules, such as a preference for women to sit with other women during lectures, but were solidified in both a spatial and temporal sense. Women occupied separate buildings, or used shared spaces at special times, and entered through separate doorways. In this way the academic spaces of universities—their lecture halls and libraries, their laboratories and class rooms—were subject to the same gendered dynamics that governed other, less formal social spaces, such as halls of residence and sports fields. In her study of university coeducation in the Victorian era, Christine D. Myers argues that, while housing and other facilities might not always be mixed, ‘the classrooms of a coeducational institution would be open to all enrolled students.’16 While the collegiate model of Oxford and Cambridge, where students were largely taught within their own (single-­ sex) colleges, makes it harder to claim that these institutions were truly coeducational in this sense, the civic universities of the same period not only expressly defined themselves as coeducational, but advertised as such. ‘All Departments of the College are open to both sexes on the same terms,’ declared the calendar for Mason Science College, Birmingham, in 1880.17 These admirable intentions were often not achieved in practice, however, as the Mason Science College ‘Regulations for Admission of Students’ from which this statement was taken continues on immediately afterwards to note that ‘[s]pecial arrangements are made for the convenience of Ladies.’18 Academic spaces, like the social, leisure, and residential spheres that also formed part of university life during this period, were subject to both formal and informal separation along gender lines. Policies and behaviour shaped student life at the supposedly coeducational civic institutions as much as at the more formally divided universities of Oxford and Cambridge.

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Lecture Theatres and Classrooms The expansion of higher education in the nineteenth century was epitomised by the growth of the lecture hall. In 1867 a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, began giving scientific lectures in several northern towns, spearheading what would become known as the University Extension Movement. As the movement rose in popularity across the country, large municipal buildings were often needed to accommodate the sizeable crowds who came to hear experts speak on a variety of topics.19 The civic universities founded in the second half of the century, which like the Extension movement grew out of a desire to expand learning and knowledge outside the rarefied world of Oxford and Cambridge, followed this model of large-scale lecturing in capacious public halls.20 Eschewing the small-scale, personalised tutorial system of Oxford and Cambridge, they instead looked towards the professorial model of the Scottish and German universities, with this philosophy made physically manifest through the design of university buildings. Building lecture theatres was often the first priority and greatest centrepiece of the newly established institutions of the later nineteenth century. When the University College of North Wales at Bangor took possession of an old coaching inn for their first premises, ‘steps were at once taken by the Building committee to erect suitable Lecture Theatres.’21 A meeting of the trustees of Mason College in 1873 resolved that ‘it is desirable to build a lecture theatre capable of accommodating 150 students.’22 When the building was eventually opened in 1880, the ‘chief and central room’ was the chemical lecture theatre, ‘49 ft. by 33 ft., fitted with seats tier above tier, for the accommodation of 155 students.’23 In 1899, a £1000 donation from an anonymous benefactor allowed University College Bristol to extend their existing buildings, with their student magazine excitedly describing the ‘handsome hall’ that would be built on the first floor, ‘capable of accommodating about a thousand people, where examinations and public lectures will be held.’24 Perhaps the greatest expression of this ideal was the main lecture theatre of Firth College in Sheffield, which took up close to half the total space of the college building and occupied its full height, with room for 400 people seated and another 170 in the gallery.25 As much as lecture halls were a practical requirement for teaching, they also acted as a statement of prestige for fledgling provincial institutions who could not yet compete with the scale of architectural history and

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gravitas on display at the older universities. Often large in scale and spectacular in design, the lecture theatres of the civic universities were occasionally thrown open to the public for lectures and other events, further cementing the strong link between these institutions and their local communities. Lecture theatres became imbued with a sense of institutional status and regional pride, as well as serving a regulatory purpose. As Sophie Forgan notes, sloping lecture theatres allowed instructors to see all their students and spot absences easily, arguing that ‘[s]uch an arrangement supposes an exceedingly didactic, controlled and organised form of teaching.’26 A significant proportion of this regulatory control was directed towards the separation of male and female students, or at least the conscious supervision of mixed-gender interaction. In some cases, this regulation began before students even set foot in a lecture hall, through the use of separate entrances for men and women. At Owens College, Edith Lang recalled women not being allowed to use ‘the principal door,’ but rather having to make do with a smaller one ‘to the right of the quad.’ As well as entering via a separate entrance, their exit was controlled on an additional temporal level, as the professor himself escorted the women students out as a separate group once the lecture was over.27 Regulation of how and when men and women students entered and exited lectures were not just a feature of Owens College, but also governed mixed-gender lectures at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. By the mid-1890s, women attendees of lectures at Balliol College, Oxford, were still expected to enter via a back entrance.28 Eleanor C. Lodge, who studied at Lady Margaret Hall in the early 1890s, describes the extreme lengths to which women students were forced to go in order to ensure their presence was felt as little as possible. Balliol admitted women, but woe to that student who unwittingly entered the Hall by its main entrance and walked up to her seat at the High Table; such action was not allowed; the women crept discreetly up a winding stair from the Senior Common Room, which opened on to the daïs itself, and so enabled them to slip comparatively unnoticed into some seat at the back of the lecture.29

Once the lecture theatre had been entered, the room itself was often designed to effectively separate men and women students. In the main lecture theatre of Mason College, its tiered seating acted as an efficient

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barrier between mixed-gender interaction, devised in such a way so that the men could not even see the women. ‘The male students will occupy the lower half, and the female students the seats above and behind them, a separate entrance being provided for each sex.’30 The issue of enforced seating arrangements, while providing evidence of deliberate policies on the part of university authorities to manage and regulate mixed-gender interaction, also raises the question of to what extent student behaviour was shaped from above and to what extent it emerged from the students themselves. Even if not directed by the authorities, it is perhaps not unexpected that women students would gravitate towards other women when choosing where to sit in a lecture hall, given their smaller numbers and the wider social and cultural behaviours governing Victorian mixed-gender interaction that existed beyond the world of the university. Indeed, student magazines from the civic universities often poked fun at the self-imposed isolation of women students in lectures, who they viewed as standoffish. An article in the Owens College Magazine of October 1892 described how the women students ‘appropriate a particular row of seats, upon which they expect no man ever to trespass,’ before regaling readers with a comical story of an oblivious male student who made the mistake of sitting in their usual position. Presently the ladies trooped in in a body, but on catching sight of the intruder they shrank back in dismay, and crowded round the doorway undecided as to the proper thing to do under the circumstances. Just as the professor entered the room one of the men students, thinking that the fun had gone far enough, went up to the innocent offender and explained matters, whereupon he meekly took another seat amidst the suppressed titters of his fellow men, and the ladies were able to occupy their accustomed seats without running the risk of being contaminated by having a man sit amongst them.31

The use of the word ‘contaminated’ is telling, even if deployed in jest, as sitting next to, or even near, students of the opposite sex could be seen as improper, even if not subject to any formal rules. Ramsay Muir, who studied at University College Liverpool in the 1880s, described attending a lecture on Greek history. ‘I duly turned up; saw two women students sitting in the front row, and took a seat some rows behind.’32 One Cambridge University Lecturer, James Bass Mullinger, even formally complained about the tendency of the women students to cluster together,

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writing to the Degrees for Women Syndicate in 1897 that ‘[t]he women coming more punctually and generally together have occupied the best seats.’33 This antipathy towards women occupying the ‘best seats’ is significant, as seating arrangements at some Oxford and Cambridge colleges—when women students were allowed to attend at all—were often much more intent on obfuscating, or even completely disguising, their presence. Lodge described her group of Lady Margaret Hall students as sometimes having to sit behind the lecturer, so that he would not have to see them.34 Alice Gardner notes in her history of Newnham College that, for lectures given at the University Library, women students sat in a gallery, ‘where their presence was not easily discerned.’35 The formal and informal prohibitions on mixed-sex interaction in lecture halls, both enforced by university authorities and enacted by the students themselves, raises the question of why both parties were so keen to toe the line of strict gender segregation within the academic setting of the lecture theatre.36 Little social interaction was likely to occur, unlike at a tea party or dance, and all parties were visible and able to be supervised by the lecturer at the front of the theatre. On the part of university authorities, one possible motivation may have been the lingering impression, a holdover from earlier in the century, that lecturing to a mixed audience was inappropriate. Not only in terms of the close proximity of men and women in the audience, but also because the content of lectures could be seen to be unsuitable for women, and the different learning styles of men and women incompatible. Mary Paley, while a student at Newnham, recalled having ‘practically the same lectures as the men, but as mixed classes were improper the lecturers had to give their lectures twice over.’37 In the run up to the 1897 vote on admitting women to degrees at Cambridge, much energy was expended on debating the question of mixed lectures and whether they were improving or damaging for both men and women students. ‘We should have thought that any man of sense would see that a large number of subjects do not lend themselves to treatment in mixed classes,’ ran an editorial in the Granta, and indeed a special inquiry was formed by the Degrees for Women Syndicate to investigate the impact of women upon lectures.38 One questionnaire distributed to lecturers and professors asked whether they thought that ‘the system of teaching which seems best adapted to men, is different from that which is best for women, while neither is good for a mixed class.’39

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The teaching of mixed classes was rare at all levels of education during this period. While genuinely coeducational establishments emerged in the 1850s at the primary level, Barry Turner notes that by 1900 only half the primary-aged schools in Britain were mixed, with a disproportionate amount located in the north and Scotland.40 Even then, ‘there was considerable worry that boys and girls might see too much of each other and special precautions were taken to make sure this did not happen—separate entrances to the building, for example, and divided playgrounds.’41 Joyce Goodman also notes how both board schools and pupil-teacher centres from the 1890s, where working-class girls could receive a secondary education, were ‘organised on a mixed model that segregated education for girls and boys in the same building.’42 When it came to tertiary education, the jump from the playground did not seem so large. ‘It has been unanswerably shown that mixed classes in [universities] are as undesirable as mixed public schools,’ wrote G. Clarence in the Echo in 1897, ‘for what are all fresh undergraduates but sixth form school boys?’43 The responses of Cambridge lecturers to the survey distributed by the Degrees for Women Syndicate returned mixed results, highlighting the contradictory views held about educating women alongside men. Some lecturers felt that the presence of women ‘causes a constraint in the class,’ meaning that ‘the men do not respond so freely as they otherwise would’; others that ‘[t]he presence of Women has a good effect on the behaviour of the men.’44 This vein of response, in which women were seen as a moderating presence, supports Myers contention that the female societal role as the protector of the community’s virtues was unexpectedly strong in the campus environment, as ‘many universities found that the male students were more restrained than previously.’45 In these responses, the education of the male student is seen as the norm, to which the addition of women in the classroom would cause some sort of disruption. The disruption may have been good or bad, but in either case it needed to be mediated and planned for. There was little consideration, if at all, for what effect the presence of men had upon women’s learning, as this was in itself an anomalous state. Women in lectures could therefore be viewed as both unhelpful distractions or civilising influences—rarely, however, was their presence seen to be neutral. The polarising figure of the woman in the lecture hall did not just apply to students, moreover, but was further complicated as the first generation of female students graduated into academia and had the opportunity to become teachers and lecturers themselves.

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Teaching Provision In 1888, Edith E. Read went up to Girton College to study mathematics. She had spent seven years at the North London Collegiate School for Girls, and received a scholarship to continue her education at Cambridge.46 She completed her course in 1891 and spent a short time at home, before returning to Cambridge in the Autumn of 1894 to ‘earn her living for a time by coaching at Girton, and then gradually take on an increasing amount of lecturing—that is, if an appointment as a University lecturer gave her the chance.’47 She wrote to the Secretary of the University Extension Board asking to be considered as a university lecturer, but found that Professor Alfred Marshall—who had lectured her on Political Economy in her final year—was ‘strongly opposed to her appointment.’48 As Read described the situation in her memoir, [I] was, in his opinion, too young and feminine to be suitable for audiences almost wholly masculine. He was prepared to believe that [I] would be able to hold the attention of [my] audience but, from a psychological point of view, would this holding influence be the kind of influence which was altogether satisfactory?49

While Marshall believed that Read may have been able to lecture when she was older, he thought that the presence of a young (Read was twenty-­ five years old at the time), unmarried woman holding forth to a room full of men was too risky to contemplate, and wrote a personal letter to every member of the board urging Read’s non-appointment.50 Marshall’s personal opinions clearly did not reflect a homogeneity of attitudes among university authorities regarding the appropriateness of women lecturing to men during this period as the University Extension Board eventually awarded Read three trial lectures at the Cambridge Training College, which she ended up having to decline upon her marriage.51 Nevertheless, the incident indicates that women in teaching and lecturing positions were just as divisive a figure in the academic space of lecture theatres and classrooms as were women students. At Oxford and Cambridge, the debate around women teaching men was largely bypassed by the tutorial model of teaching that dominated both universities. In this arrangement, students were mostly taught within their colleges in one-on-one sessions. However, this system of personal tuition only became widespread in the men’s colleges during the 1890s.52

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It originated with the foundation of the women’s colleges in the late 1860s, where the method of providing intensive, personalised coaching sought to overcome both the educational deficiencies of the early women students, who often had not received the formal schooling of their male counterparts.53 Anna Lloyd, one of the original five students of Girton who began her studies in 1869 when the College was still located in Hitchin, Hertfordshire, describes in her memoir how the Cambridge professors came to teach the women students in their own surroundings, ‘the length of the lecture being fixed neither by their capacities for taking in knowledge nor by the convenience of the lecturer, but by the hours of railway trains.’54 As these were among the first women to receive a university-level education, they could understandably only be taught by men—women lecturers simply did not yet exist. It took years for the first generation of students at the women’s colleges to become tutors themselves, and even then their limited numbers meant that male coaches and tutors were still required to plug the gaps in provision. While Hunt and Barker argue that the tutorial system provided a solution to the question of propriety when it came to women entering the space of the university, allowing them to be taught within the privacy of their own colleges and away from male undergraduates, the model of personal tuition when it came to a male tutor and single female student could also provide cause for concern. ‘What was very much disliked was the idea that a coaching could not be given to a girl alone,’ wrote Lodge of her time at Lady Margaret Hall. ‘As a rule, therefore, two girls always went together to any man tutor.’55 Edith E. Read remembered the Mistress of Girton paying special attention to her lessons with her male mathematics ‘don in residence.’ The next afternoon when [I] was sitting by Mr. Dobson’s side while he explained [my] difficulties, the Lecture Room opened without any preliminary knock, and the Mistress herself stood in the doorway. She said nothing in explanation, she looked, and that was all! For a minute or two she may have stood there, an imposing figure framed by the open doorway, then— still without saying anything—she withdrew, closing the door.56

With these concerns in mind, the women’s colleges of Oxford and Cambridge preferred to employ their own graduates as tutors as soon as they were able. Hiring women also fulfilled a practical concern, Lodge notes, as while the women’s colleges grew in size, ‘the original supporters

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of the movement in Oxford became fewer and busier and less and less able to spare time for the supervision of the women’s work.’57 Mary Paley became Newnham College’s first lecturer in Economics at the age of twenty-five. Marion Greenwood, who studied Natural Sciences, was appointed ‘Demonstrator in Physiology to the Science Students of Newnham’ in 1888, after having studied both there and at Girton.58 While occupying these positions, however, women academic staff continued to hold a tenuous position in the university as a whole. The women’s colleges were still not officially recognised by the university, and their graduates did not hold an official degree. Indeed, hiring technically degree-less women tutors was in fact a necessary step towards achieving this official recognition, as the women’s halls could not qualify to rank as colleges unless they provided their own tutoring and educational supervision for students. As late as 1922, however, the Report of the Royal Commission on Oxford and Cambridge recommended formal provisions be made to exclude women from a number of university positions, from the heady reaches of chancellor and vice-chancellor down to proctor, head of department, professor, or reader—although this proposal was shaped more by concerns over admitting women to governance positions, rather than teaching.59 While the university seemed happy for women to teach other women within the safe confines of their colleges, the question of women teaching men was another thing entirely. Lodge taught History at Lady Margaret Hall from 1899 and coached her own students for ‘well over twenty hours a week,’ but was prevented from lecturing until the exodus of men from the university brought about by the First World War. ‘Before that time there were no lectures in history given by women with one exception,’ she writes.60 Women academics were given a place at Oxford and Cambridge, albeit a limited and unofficial one, by virtue of there being women-only colleges in need of female teachers. The situation was slightly more complicated at the civic universities, where women students were eligible for degrees, but where they were also taught in mixed classes. Mary Paley, both student and lecturer at Newnham College, provides a useful bridge between the two types of institution. In 1877 she married Alfred Marshall, who was later to oppose Edith E.  Read’s application to become a lecturer at Cambridge, in the same year that he became the first principal of University College Bristol.61 As the College provided both day and evening classes, a gendered divide in student attendance soon emerged, with the evening classes mostly comprised of male students who worked during the day, and

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the day classes chiefly attended by women. In the Marshalls’ second year there, Mary took over the teaching of the female-majority day classes— with her salary deducted from her husband’s—while Alfred taught the largely male evening lectures.62 Marshall’s firm ideas in later life about the appropriateness of women teaching men, exemplified by his opposition to Read’s appointment to lecturer, may have stemmed from the organisation of this early teaching at Bristol. The Marshalls’ arrangement was rare, however, in that few women occupied teaching positions at the civic universities during this time, even if they were majority-female classes. Indeed, while Paley may have taught classes, she was nevertheless still viewed as an extension of her husband rather than a lecturer in her own right, as demonstrated by the fact that her salary was deducted from his own. When women were hired to the academic staff of the civics, it was more commonly as some sort of tutor or warden to the women students, in a role specifically designed to cater to their pastoral, rather than academic, needs, and with little to no authority over—or interaction with—the men students. Some early women lecturers bucked this trend. Alice Cooke attended Manchester High School for Girls before entering Owens College in 1887, from which she graduated with first-class honours in History three years later. She was later described by the historian Sir Adolphus Ward, who was professor of History and English Literature at Owens from 1866 and principal from 1890 to 1897, as ‘one of the most distinguished students known to me during my connection with that College.’63 In 1893 she was selected to become assistant lecturer in History, a position her biographers describe as ‘notable as one of the earliest appointments of a woman to a university post,’ and certainly the first woman to be hired to the teaching staff at Owens.64 Between 1901 and 1903, she was an assistant lecturer in History at Cardiff, where ‘she taught mixed classes,’ followed a few years later by a tenure at Leeds University, where she was appointed Lecturer in History in 1907.65 By and large, however, women lecturers remained an anomaly until the depletion of staff numbers caused by the First World War. Hilda D. Oakeley studied Greats at Somerville College in the late 1890s, and in 1905 was appointed tutor to women students at the Victoria University of Manchester. She found the position ‘in the form which it had at that time was somewhat distasteful to me,’ as her role was largely supervisory rather than academic. ‘If I could have had in Manchester… a definite place in the Philosophy Department, and a fair amount of teaching, I should most

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probably have felt differently,’ she wrote in her autobiography, ‘but the lecturing I was given in my second year was too slight for me to feel it a reality.’66 The role of the Lady Tutor at Mason College in 1900 was described as ‘a woman responsible for the comfort of the Lady-Students,’ rather than one requiring any formal academic qualifications or background.67 However, as with Hilda Oakeley, there might also be opportunities to perform a reduced amount of lecturing or teaching. May Christophera Staveley was appointed tutor to women students at University College Bristol in 1907, and combined her duties with lecturing in History, something she carried on when she became head of the women’s hall of residence at the University of Liverpool.68 It is difficult to accurately gauge the number of women university teachers in Great Britain prior to 1919, when regular statistics began to be produced under the auspices of the University Grants Committee. Fernanda Perrone has nevertheless compiled statistics from the women’s colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, as well as selected London colleges, and estimates that the numbers of women teaching at these institutions grew from seventeen to eighty-six in the twenty-year period between 1883–1884 and 1903–1904.69 Somewhat ironically, she notes, university teaching was relatively open to the admission of women compared to other professional careers available to them at this time, such as law and medicine, which required well-defined training, certification examination, or licensing procedures, and which were governed by a central professional body.70 The academic profession, in contrast, was relatively unregulated and flexible, with the early twentieth century a period in which ‘university teaching was gradually coming to be seen as a profession for the intellectually gifted woman.’71 Despite this, Perrone argues that ‘few women academics held senior posts in any discipline’ before 1930, a phenomenon she attributes to both the exclusion of women academics from full participation in university government and the poor financial situation of the women’s colleges at which many of them taught. While the principals of women’s colleges received small stipends or nothing at all, male heads of Oxford colleges were making as much as £1000 per year. A resident tutor at Newnham made £100 a year, whereas a fellow at an Oxford men’s college made five times as much. For women graduates, it was much more financially lucrative to teach in a secondary school, where a headmistress might make £400 a year, drawing away from university life many academic women who did not have private incomes to support themselves.72

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In 1894, Amy Bulley and Margaret Whitley published Women’s Work, a compendium of the types of employment available to women as well as a more general exploration of the position of women in the labour market. Bulley had been an early student at both Girton and Newnham Colleges, and included college lectureships in her survey. These, the authors noted, were ‘very limited in number.’73 Furthermore, they went on to say, These are not well paid, and are chiefly attractive for the pleasant university life they afford. Few women are as yet engaged as University Extension lecturers, though it is hard to see what impediment, beyond the prejudice of sex, stands in the way of their employment.74

In 1909, University College Sheffield appointed Elizabeth Cowper Eaves as Demonstrator in Physiology.75 While a significant achievement for Cowper Eaves, Perrone has drawn attention to the way in which the proportion of women academics represented by science subjects during this period was significantly higher than the proportion of women students studying science subjects.76 This was based at least partly on the belief that women were particularly suited to some aspects of scientific work—namely, the conscientiousness and accuracy needed to perform monotonous laboratory work. While they may not have had the genius and original thinking required to make grand scientific discoveries, their feminine patience and diligence made them ideal demonstrators and research assistants.77 On top of this, they did not have to be paid as much as their male counterparts, making them an attractive prospect to professors who were required to pay their assistants’ wages out of their own salary.78 As Rosaleen Love notes of research workers at Karl Pearson’s eugenics laboratories at the University of Cambridge in the first decade of the twentieth century, five out of fourteen of which were women, ‘some women were voluntary, unpaid assistants, so enthusiastic were they to put their newly won degree to some use.’79 The appointment of women such as Cowper Eaves and others as scientific demonstrators is also significant in that it highlights the specific anxieties that surrounded the place of women—as both teacher and student—in the scientific, and particularly medical, space of the laboratory.

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Laboratories What became the first wave of civic universities, proudly decreed by royal charters awarded in the first decade of the twentieth century, were often a conglomeration of many smaller institutions, such as technical colleges, medical schools, and teacher training colleges. The University of Sheffield, for example, emerged not only from Firth College (founded in 1879 and renamed University College Sheffield in 1897), but also Sheffield Technical School (1884) and Sheffield Medical School (1828). That the medical profession and its associated schools provided such determined opposition to the admission of female students speaks to a wider concern with women’s involvement in science, and particularly the science of the human body, that shaped how men and women were taught the subject, both separately and together. Within universities and colleges, the laboratory was a highly gendered space, and one which men and women students experienced in different ways. The presence of women in laboratories was more fraught than in other academic spaces, such as the lecture room or library, leading to more explicitly codified separation. At the civic universities, the laboratory acted as an uncomfortable nexus between two of the great, modernising claims of the new wave of higher education institutions: first, that they dispensed with the liberal, classics-based curriculum of Oxford and Cambridge (in which mathematics, which had a particularly storied history at Cambridge, was included) in favour of a more vocational, technological, and scientific ethos; and second that they admitted women on an equal basis with men. In the prospectuses of civic universities, the exclusion of women from medical classes was often an addendum to the lead pronouncements of complete equality. ‘Any student whether male or female shall be admitted as a regular Day Student of the College,’ declared the statutes of University College Sheffield in 1897. ‘Subject, however, to the exception that no woman Student shall be admitted in the Medical Faculty without the separate consents of the Board of Medical Studies and the Senate.’80 The University College Liverpool prospectus for the 1882–1883 session stated that the College’s day and evening classes ‘are open to male and female Students alike,’ but that ‘classes of the Medical Faculty are open to male students only.’81 When this final barrier ultimately fell in the first years of the twentieth century, the admission of women to medical study came with strict rules, often enforced in a spatial sense. At Manchester, Owens College decided

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to ‘admit women to its courses of study which will prepare them for degrees and other qualifications in Medicine and Surgery’ from the 1900–1991 session, and announced that ‘[a]rrangements including the provision of a separate Dissecting Room for women students are now being made,’ which only the dean and senior demonstrator in anatomy were allowed to enter.82 The idea of men and women students being in the same room while body parts were dissected and studied was seen as a step too far in terms of propriety and decorum. At Liverpool, the lack of enough applicants to form a separate class for women was identified as the cause of women’s exclusion from the medical school, ‘which there alone are [separate classes] thought necessary.’83 By the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, attitudes to women students studying medicine had changed enough for the women’s hostel of the University of Birmingham to advertise the ‘special advantages’ offered by the university to women studying for a medical degree: ‘All Lectures and Scholarships, as well as Hospital Clerkships and Dresserships, are open to them on the same terms as to men Students.’84 However, in the next sentence, they also drew attention to the spatial segregation that separated men and women students, even as they studied towards the same degree. ‘[T]hey have a separate Dissecting Room, where they have the assistance of a qualified woman Demonstrator.’85 The anxiety over women in laboratories was not just confined to the study of medicine and surgery, however, and nor was it related purely to the learning and dissemination of anatomical knowledge. All of the college laboratories of Owens College, not just those for medicine, were closed to women until 1894, and even after the separate classes held for women in Brunswick Street were shuttered in 1897, some science teaching for women students at Owens still took place in the laboratories of the Manchester High School for Girls.86 In 1900, a report of University College Liverpool notes that women students were admitted to certain college laboratories (botany, chemistry, physics, and zoology), ‘where there are special facilities for teaching them.’87 When women did enter the space of the laboratory alongside men, their presence was not always welcome. Edith Lang remembered the difference in how the female arts students were treated compared to the rare few who studied science. ‘[W]hen our first science student begun work, the very ink seemed in conspiracy against her, and she had to take a “safety-bottle” across in self-defence.’88 It was a similar story at Oxford and Cambridge. William Bate Hardy, a biochemical researcher at Cambridge from the 1880s, shared a bench at

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the laboratory run by the physiologist Michael Foster with Marion Greenwood, a Girton natural sciences graduate performing research at Newnham, and the only woman in the laboratory. ‘At that time women were rare in scientific laboratories and their presence by no means generally acceptable,’ remembered Hardy. ‘Indeed, that is too mild a phrase.’89 At Oxford and Cambridge, the difficulties faced by the civic universities in reconciling coeducational principles with laboratory teaching were magnified by the trenchant gender lines drawn by the existence of separate men’s and women’s colleges. Even in the earliest days of women students at Cambridge, their presence in science lectures and demonstrations was seen as a novelty at best and distraction at worst. Barbara Stephen, who studied at Girton College between 1891–1894 and later wrote the history of the College, told the story of a mixed-gender lecture given by George Humphrey, Professor of Physiology and Anatomy, in 1873. [W]hen a specimen of the human brain was passed around for inspection, they became aware that the undergraduates in front had all turned around to see whether this would discompose the ladies. Their quiet demeanour however had its effect, and at the end of the first term the lecturer complimented the men on their good behaviour under this trial.90

When Girton students attended Professor Foster’s lectures in Biology, their physical separation from the men students was even more severe than simply sitting in the row behind. Instead, as Stephen notes, ‘they sat in a gallery where they had their microscopes at a low window, and the demonstrator went up to help them in their seclusion.’91 Women students at Cambridge were banned from working in the main Cavendish university laboratory, which was opened in 1874.92 In 1879, to counteract this exclusion, Newnham College built its own laboratory in the grounds of the College, located at ‘a respectful distance from the original Hall,’ lest the smells and sounds of chemical research be too distracting.93 Three years earlier, a £600 donation from Baroness Stanley of Alderley had permitted Girton to build their own laboratory, which was later expanded over time.94 Despite these generous benefactions, the necessary economy which defined life at the women’s colleges meant that the laboratory was not a particularly pleasant place to work. ‘I still quiver with cold as I remember those raw days in the laboratory barely tempered by a little grate fire in one corner,’ remembered one Newnham student.95

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By the early 1880s, women students from both colleges had begun to tire of the inconvenience of having such isolated laboratories, which they felt wasted time as they endlessly traipsed back and forth between the lectures they attended in town with the men students, and the precincts of their own colleges to which they had to return in order to perform scientific experiments in decorous seclusion. In 1880, a student petition and collection of funds was presented to the Council of Newnham College, ‘for the purpose of erecting such a laboratory for Women in Cambridge.’96 They complained about the ‘insufficient accommodation’ of the current laboratory, the unsatisfactory light and ‘want of room for storing reagents.’97 They wished to partner with Girton College in building a laboratory specifically for women students, right in the centre of town, so as to avoid ‘[t]he great loss of time occasioned to Newnham Students by the present position of the Laboratory, which entails walking from lecture to laboratory and again back to lecture, in the time that should be devoted to practical work.’98 The Balfour Biological Laboratory for Women was eventually established in 1884, in an abandoned chapel on Downing Place about five minutes’ walk from the men’s laboratory.99 The fact that it was a biological laboratory is in itself significant, as it represents the shifting focus away from the dominance of Chemistry towards the discipline of Natural Sciences. Marsha Richmond argues that many students seeking to read Natural Sciences, both men and women, were attracted to Cambridge’s ‘unexcelled’ reputation in the field, led by Michael Foster and Francis Maitland Balfour, who had established the first university biological laboratories in England.100 This system, in which men and women students attended mixed scientific lectures, then relocated to separate gender-­ segregated laboratories for practical work, continued until 1914, and is described by Catherine Durning Holt, a student at Newnham between 1889 and 1892. I attended my first lecture yesterday; it was Chemistry; there were about eight students from this college and three from Girton; with a large ­background of undergrads and medical students. Afterwards we adjourned for a couple of hours to the laboratory here.101

While resistance to male and female students sharing laboratory facilities was often framed in terms of the appropriateness of men and women performing practical scientific work together, at Cambridge the issue was

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also framed in terms of space and overcrowding.102 The debate over the admittance of women to degrees often drew on this point, with an article in the March 1897 issue of the Granta arguing that increasing the number of women students would put ‘consequent pressure on the already inadequate lecture rooms and laboratories of the University.’103 An article in the same publication the following month declared that ‘the University Lecture Rooms and Laboratories are crowded enough in all conscience,’ even without the addition of women students.104 The Women’s Degrees Syndicate itself recognised the strength of this line of resistance, noting in their ‘suggestions for inquiry’ report that, On the other side it has been urged (…) That the presence of women in the lecture rooms and laboratories in Cambridge produces inconveniences both by overcrowding and by limiting the freedom of speech of lecturers.105

When they circulated their questionnaire to members of the university’s academic staff, several responses viewed the presence of women unfavourably. They were a ‘decided inconvenience in the laboratory,’ according to pathology demonstrator Walter Sydney Lazarus-Barlow, while an anonymous responder asserted that there was ‘occasional difficulty in arranging for room in the laboratory.’106 As Marsha Richmond notes, space limitations in laboratories—which, by design, allowed for less capacity than lecture halls—‘forced many instructors, even those sympathetic to the “cause”, to reconsider allowing women, who were not officially members of the university, into classrooms that were already overflowing.’107 The idea that there was simply not enough room, spatially, for women to fit into the university was reflected on an institutional level by caps on the number of women students at Oxford and Cambridge. In 1922, the Report of the Royal Commission on Oxford and Cambridge officially recommended that the number of women undergraduates at Cambridge ‘be limited by University Statute to 500, which would at present be a proportion of about one in each ten of the total number of undergraduates.’108 At Oxford, the 1927 Limitation Statute decreed that the total number of women students not to exceed 840, or approximately one-sixth of the student body.109 Limitations on the number of women students were only removed at Oxford in 1957 and Cambridge in 1960, although the right to reinforce these limitations was retained at Cambridge until 1987.110

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Libraries The prohibitions and restrictions that regulated women students’ access to laboratories impeded their ability to perform practical work necessary for the completion of their degree. However, other controls on the spatial movements of men and women at the universities and colleges of this period sought to regulate their access to knowledge in a more generalised sense: through the design and arrangement of, as well as access to, libraries. Jane Harrison, who came to Newnham to read Classics in 1874, recalled a visit to the College from John Ruskin in the days when ‘[w]omen’s colleges were a novelty, and distinguished visitors were brought to see us as one of the sights.’111 I showed him our small library. He looked at it with disapproving eyes. “Each book”, he said gravely, “that a young girl touches should be bound in white vellum.”112

It is significant that Newnham, in this early stage, even had a library, however small. It owed its existence to the fact that women students needed to apply for explicit permission to use the University Library until 1923, a rule which extended not only to undergraduates but also fellows of the women’s colleges.113 In 1891, both women students and teachers could only access the University Library between 10 am and 2 pm, a time when many of them were busy with lecturing and tutorials, yet a request that year to extend the hours to 4 pm was refused.114 Until 1923, when the restrictions were finally abolished, senior members of the women’s colleges could only borrow books after having a slip signed by a male colleague.115 As Anne Manuel argues, the fact that women at Oxford and Cambridge were not seen as full members of the university allowed them to be barred from access to the universities’ libraries, which therefore made it all the more vital that the women’s colleges had their own.116 The library of Somerville College, completed in 1903, was designed by Basil Champneys, architect of both Newnham College and the spectacular John Rylands Library in Manchester. As Manuel notes, Somerville’s was the first purpose-­built library among the Oxford women’s colleges, and among the very first college libraries built at Oxford for the use of undergraduates rather than fellows.

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For it is important to note that, until relatively recently in their histories, university libraries were not primarily used by undergraduate students. David McKitterick argues that undergraduates were ‘a rare sight’ in the Cambridge University Library until the late nineteenth century, an absence which gives an insight into the organisation of teaching at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge.117 James Thompson has drawn attention to the fact that, until the professionalisation of library staffing began in earnest from the 1870s, libraries were much more closed-off spaces, without the freedom of access, extensive opening hours, and provision of ‘bibliographical, reference and information services’ with which we associate modern libraries.118 For many centuries, the scarcity of books and the value in which they were held meant that libraries were designed more as fortresses to keep precious commodities safe, rather than as open spaces meant for sharing and collaboration. From the thirteenth century, books were kept chained to lectern-style desks, with R. S. Smith noting that the practice of chaining books persisted even after the development of the printing press placed increasing pressure on shelf space, and in fact remained the norm in Oxford throughout the seventeenth century.119 Even after books had ceased to be chained to the furniture, however, consulting them remained the remit of a select few scholars, such as the masters and fellows of a college, rather than the undergraduate body as a whole. Students were in fact barred from using the Cambridge University Library in the fifteenth century after series of thefts, but McKitterick notes that even had an official ban not remained in place, they would have had little call to show their faces anyway, as the pre-nineteenth-century curriculum did not require extensive use of textual sources.120 Under a Tripos system which largely placed teaching in the hands of colleges and privately arranged tuition from ‘coaches,’ and before the widespread implementation of written examinations, there was little need for the male undergraduate to read widely.121 Trinity College, Cambridge, was anomalous in establishing a separate collection of books for undergraduates to use in 1700, as most Cambridge colleges did not provide similar provision until the nineteenth century or even later—Clare College, Cambridge, did not have an undergraduate library until 1930.122 The early establishment of libraries at the women’s colleges for the specific use of undergraduate students was therefore ahead of the curve. As Manuel argues of the Somerville library, ‘politically, it signified to the University that Somerville students were serious about their studies and that the College was here to stay.’123 Architecturally, it also deviated from

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the rest of the college at that time, which tended to follow a more domestic style. The library, in contrast, was steadfastly Renaissance in character, its façade dominated by an open loggia supported by Ionic columns (the feminine counterpart of the masculine Doric).124 As at Cambridge, the development of libraries at the Oxford women’s colleges was directly related to the university’s own library, the Bodleian, remaining a steadfastly male space. In the years before the advent of the women’s colleges, a select number of women had been granted one-off permission to access its precincts for academic study. These included Josephine Butler, who assisted her husband—then a fellow of Exeter College—to prepare an edition of Chaucer from the Bodleian manuscripts in the early 1850s.125 Matthew Arnold’s niece, Mary—later known for her writings under her married name, Mrs Humphry Ward—also gained access to the library’s collections in 1868 at the age of seventeen, a feat John Sutherland attributes to the fact that the then fifty-five-year-old curator, Mark Pattison, was ‘notoriously fond of pretty girls.’126 By and large, however, women were only ever permitted to enter the Bodleian during set visiting times, and only as the express guests of male students—never as scholars themselves. An 1872 article in The Dark Blue attributed to the pseudonymous ‘Two Fellows’ described ‘A Morning in the Bodleian.’ In the summer term at Oxford, down the centre passage of the library, goes a ceaseless rustle of ladies’ dresses; ‘lionesses,’ led by undergraduate escorts as strange to the place as themselves, glide past the studies or stand more than half-bored at the cases of manuscripts and autograph letters. Yet even the giddiest and most ignorant among them must feel a little ashamed of the ennui which oppresses them… even the girl fresh from one flirtation and already planning another, must feel a moment’s sobering, a moment’s sense of insignificance.127

The contempt with which the authors hold the lady visitors to the library—focusing on the ‘ceaseless rustle’ of their dresses, describing them as ‘more than half-bored,’ ‘giddy,’ ‘ignorant,’ and concerned only with their next flirtation—is given an added layer of meaning when it is revealed that ‘Two Fellows’ was the pen name of the newly married Mrs Humphry Ward, who had herself been granted unique access to the Bodleian only a few years before, and whose complicated relationship with the women’s

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movement was later epitomised by her position as President of the Women’s Anti-Suffrage League. When women students arrived at Oxford a few years after Ward’s article was published, their use of the Bodleian was heavily restricted. In 1888, ten years after the founding of Lady Margaret Hall and Somerville, an article entitled ‘A Day in Her Life at Oxford’ appeared in Murray’s Magazine. In it, ‘A Lady Undergraduate’ at ‘one of the Ladies’ Halls’ wrote about her use of the Bodleian as a woman student. While she did not require a chaperone as she did for lectures, use of the Radcliffe Camera reading room was only available to honours students via a ‘reading order’ from the lady principal, with the author noting that ‘this privilege is very highly appreciated.’128 Once they had gained access to the library, women students were permitted to work at tables that had been specially ‘reserved for ladies,’ and not alongside men students.129 Regulations such as these were not unique to the women’s colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, but were also a feature at some of the civic universities. Lang, at Owens College in the 1880s, remembered ‘[t]he rule about the use of the library was peculiar.’130 It would have been the height of impropriety to enter the library and demand a book in the hardened manner now usual. No, we had to “fill up a voucher,” and a dear little maid-of-all-work, aged about 13, went to the library with it. If we were not quite sure of the volume required, she might have to make the journey ten times, but it was never suggested that she should be chaperoned.131

This anecdote raises interesting questions about class and gender, and what was considered ‘appropriate space’ within the university according to these metrics. The arrival of women students did not represent the first wave of feminine intrusion into an all-male space, but rather the entrance of a different class of women. Describing the universities of Oxford and Cambridge as homosocial spaces elides the stories of the many women who lived and worked in these spaces as domestic staff. As Laura Schwartz argues in her history of St Hugh’s College, which re-inserts the story of domestic staff into the type of institutional history from which they are so often erased, ‘the life of the mind… has been intimately bound up with the details of domesticity while the roles and aspirations of undergraduates were forged in relation to those women who cooked and cleaned for them.’132

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The presence of domestic staff was built into the very fabric of colleges and universities, with the accommodation of workers an essential feature of educational buildings into the twentieth century. In 1915, when Somerville College was requisitioned by the War Office for use as a hospital and temporarily relocated to Oriel College, it was requested ‘to retain the servant’s room in the S.W. corner.’133 Winifred Peck, in discussing the ‘room of one’s own’ she finally achieved while in residence as a student at Lady Margaret Hall, rhapsodised over the ‘freedom’ she felt ‘to know one was safe from the intrusion of friends, relatives and housemaids,’ but as Schwartz argues it was the domestic labour of housemaids like this who enabled the life of the mind lived by women like Peck.134 The idea that the female student was somehow a different kind of woman than the one who cooked her food and cleaned her room was pervasive from the earliest discussions around women’s higher education. In 1874, one of Britain’s first female physicians, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, wrote an article in the Fortnightly Review disputing contemporary medical theories that the strain of sustained mental effort would be too much for women students to bear, and would be particularly debilitating during menstruation.135 As she pointed out, such theories despairing over the dangers of intellectual labour to middle-class women ignored the strenuous physical labour performed by working-class women at all times of the month. ‘Among poor women,’ she wrote, where all the available strength is spent upon manual labour, the daily work goes on without intermission, and, as a rule, without ill effects. For example, do domestic servants, either as young girls or in mature life, show by experience that a marked change in the amount of work expected from them must be made at these times unless their health is to be injured? It is well known that they do not.136

The Victorian servant, Schwartz notes, was in many ways ‘required to offer her own body as a replacement for that of her mistress,’ literally and metaphorically protecting their employer from the contamination of the wider world.137 Perceived as somehow intrinsically different, the ‘dear little maid-of-all-work’ sent to fetch books from the library could traverse the boundary of the masculine enclave from which her mistress was forbidden, only because she was not really seen to be there at all. The reason why the library was seen as an unsuitable space for women goes unaddressed in Lang’s recounting, but Chris Otter has drawn

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attention to the increasingly common view in the Victorian period that the ‘alcove’ system followed by most libraries, ‘where readers occupied desks between bookcases position at a right angle to walls,’ provided ‘excessive opportunity for nefarious practices and was, consequently, often abandoned.’138 M. A. Quiggin, who came up to Newnham in 1899, said that she found out in later life from her husband that the old University Library had been used as ‘one of the rendezvous for assignations,’ despite only ‘a select few third-year students’ being permitted to use it. ‘Anyone who remembers its mazes and intricacies will realise its potentialities,’ she noted.139 In a bid to restrict this kind of behaviour, Otter argues that library design in the later Victorian period became influenced by ideas of collective perception and social monitoring, defined by ‘oligloptic ensembles, whereby small groups of free, mobile, and potentially self-aware individuals monitor one another.’140 A classic example of this idea of surveillance influencing the design of university space can be found in the Edgar Allen Library at the University of Sheffield. First proposed in 1905 and eventually opened in 1909, it has been described by Arthur Chapman as ‘one of the earliest specially designed university libraries in the country,’ with shelving room for 120,000 books and seats for 104 readers.141 The library was designed in an unusual octagonal shape, with a central control desk in the centre out from which radiated the reading bays.142 This allowed the librarian at the central desk to maintain sightlines in all directions, while the sculpted busts of prominent university personalities positioned over each bay added to the sense of being constantly monitored.143 The parallels with Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon are clear within this design, serving as an example of a person in need of inspection, whether or not they actually are, ‘at every instant, seeing reason to believe as much, and not being able to satisfy himself to the contrary, he should conceive himself to be so.’144 In Michel Foucault’s analysis of the panopticon, in which he argues that the function of surveillance of this kind is ‘to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power,’ the layers of scrutiny and observation that governed the behaviour of early generations of women students at universities can be more fully explored.145 By creating and sustaining a power system independent of the person who exercises it, ‘the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers.’146 This, in many ways, encapsulates the position of the first generation of women university students in England and Wales. Aware of the

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novelty and, in some cases, precarity of their situation, women students surveyed and regulated themselves as much as they were supervised by others. In 1901, Dorothy Henley, a student at Girton, wrote home to her mother about her disappointment in a fellow student’s conduct, despairing, She is very conceited & therefore because our lecturer happens to be a beginner she thinks she knows more than he does, & won’t take any notes (which is her own affair) but stares abstractedly before her in languid & becoming attitudes,—which is our affair, because it looks so bad before the whole class.147

The misbehaviour of one student in this case was perceived to reflect badly on women students as a whole, leading to the policing of behaviour from within the peer group rather than from above. This phenomenon was heightened at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, where the admission of women to the most prestigious all-male institutions in the country led to increased scrutiny from both the press and residents of both towns. ‘The more numerous those anonymous and temporary observers are,’ argues Foucault, ‘the greater the risk for the inmate of being surprised and the greater his anxious awareness of being observed.’148 Even before the Edgar Allen Library had been built, however, access to library spaces at University College Sheffield was heavily regulated. ‘If we look for a room worthy of the name of a Library,’ wrote a contributor to Floreamus in 1898, ‘we look in vain. The library is at the same time the lecture hall and examination hall.’149 As Chapman notes in his history of the university, this arrangement—in which books were housed in cases around the walls of the main hall—meant that students could only use the library when the hall was not in use. This was in itself a rare occurrence, as not only was the hall used for college lectures, but it was also thrown open to the public for meetings, as well as hosting college socials, dances, and examinations.150 ‘As the Hall was so public a place,’ he notes, ‘the bookcases were kept locked and readers had to obtain their volumes from the Assistant Librarian.’151 For men students as well as women, therefore, access to knowledge through the physical space of the library was not always easy. Temporal controls, through only allowing access at certain times, were reinforced by figures such as librarians and their assistants, who acted as a mediator between the students and the shelves.

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Conclusion On Thursday, 3 November 1887, the Victoria University Degree Day presentation ceremony took place at the Manchester Town Hall. Of the thirty-two students from the constituent colleges of Manchester and Liverpool receiving their degrees (Yorkshire College in Leeds would not be admitted until later that year), four were women. ‘This is the first occasion in the history of the University on which lady students have been presented with the cap and gown,’ noted the Manchester Times, ‘and the fact lent an additional interest to the proceedings.’152 One of the four women, all of whom were receiving a Bachelor of Arts, was Edith Lang. While Lang may have graduated with a degree alongside her male fellow students, her journey to wearing a cap and gown at the Manchester Town Hall had not followed the same path. Barred from the Bachelor of Science course, she had studied Arts instead. Prohibited from the main campus of Owens College, she had primarily spent her time at the Department for Women on Brunswick Street. When she did occasionally come across to the Oxford Road site for lectures, she entered through a separate doorway to the men, and was escorted away at the end of the class by the professor himself. When she wanted to borrow a library book, she had to send a maid to retrieve it for her. All this took place at a supposedly coeducational university, which advertised that women and men were admitted on equal terms. The academic spaces of universities and colleges in England and Wales during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were the most important areas of student life. While students may have spent more time in other leisure and residential spaces—such as halls of residence and common rooms, sports fields and debating chambers—the academic spaces of the lecture hall, classroom, laboratory, and library, were integral to why these students attended higher education institutions in the first place: to learn and, in some cases, receive a degree. While many institutions acknowledged that it was not feasible for men and women during this period to mix freely in all aspects of university life, such as in residential accommodation or athletics, they nevertheless argued that, at least in the basic matter of academic life and the curriculum, men and women students were treated equally, and true coeducation can be said to have prevailed. This was often far from the case. Separation between genders was as prevalent in the academic spaces of the classroom as it was in the common rooms and leisure spaces where students relaxed between

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lectures. It was also not only confined to the residential universities of Oxford and Cambridge, where it was formalised through the official separation of men’s and women’s colleges, but also shaped life at the coeducational civic universities. The gendering of academic space highlights how formal prohibition often mixed with unofficial rules of behaviours drawn from the students themselves. Seating in lecture halls was sometimes regulated through the provision of separate entrances and areas of seating for men and women students, for example, but it was just as often determined by the choices of students, who preferred to sit with their friends or in a particular area. The broad pattern of behaviour at University College Bristol in the 1870s, which saw women attend daytime classes and men attend evening classes, was not the result of official policies, but rather of numerous intersecting factors, such as the working hours of students and the shared teaching duties of the husband-and-wife Marshalls. The examples of libraries and laboratories show how excessive rules and regulations could be used to limit female participation, for example through restricted visiting hours and the excessive verification required of women students and teachers, who relied on male colleagues to vouch for them in order to access these spaces. However, they also provide examples of how—when excluded from certain spaces—women created their own. The exclusion of women students from the university libraries of Oxford and Cambridge meant that they built their own, and in doing so created the model for the modern undergraduate collegiate library, a template that was soon followed by the men’s colleges. In the same way, the exclusion of women from laboratory work in Cambridge led to the founding of the Balfour Laboratory, creating a women-only space where scientific work was allowed to carry on in parallel to that of the men. Academic spaces, therefore, did not represent the achievement of the coeducational ideal to which so many of these institutions aspired. Instead, like the other myriad spaces which made up university and college campuses of this period, they remained a product of the wider social and cultural forces that shaped relations between men and women.

Notes 1. ‘Local and District’, Manchester Times, 12 April 1884, p. 6; J. H. Murray & M.  Stark (eds.), The Englishwoman’s Review of Social and Industrial Questions, 1871 (London & New York: Routledge, 2016).

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2. E.  Lang, ‘The Beginnings of the Women’s Department’, The Owens College Jubilee, Being a Special Issue of the Owens College Union Magazine to commemorate the recently accomplished Jubilee of the College (Manchester: Sherratt & Hughes, 1901), p. 56. 3. Lang, ‘The Beginnings of the Women’s Department’, p. 56. 4. Lang, ‘The Beginnings of the Women’s Department’, p. 56. 5. Report (24 February 1868), Records Relating to the College Extension, 1865–1877, GB 133 OCA/7/2/8, University of Manchester [my emphasis]. 6. Annual Reports, Manchester and Salford College for Women, GB 133 MCW/1/1–4, University of Manchester. 7. M. L. Shanley, Feminism, Marriage, and the Law in Victorian England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 51–2; Owens College: Bill for confirming a Scheme of the Charity Commissioners for the Owens College at Manchester; and for other purposes connected therewith [HL], Bill 211, 1871, p. 6. 8. J. Thompson, The Owens College, Its Foundations and Growth (Manchester: Cornish, 1886), p. 492; The women’s College had no formal relationship with Owens, but was largely administered by members of the Owens Council and Senate, while most of its teaching staff were professors and lecturers of that institution. M. P. Tylecote, The Education of Women at Manchester University, 1883–1933 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1941), pp. 9–10, 20. 9. Tylecote, The Education of Women at Manchester University, p. 7; S. V. Barnes, ‘Crossing the invisible line: Establishing co-education at the University of Manchester and Northwestern University’, History of Education 23:1 (1994), p. 47. 10. Lang, ‘The Beginnings of the Women’s Department’, p. 56. 11. Lang, ‘The Beginnings of the Women’s Department’, p. 56. 12. ‘College Life’, Iris (March 1894), GB 133 UMP/2/5, University of Manchester, p. 10. 13. ‘College Life’, p. 10. 14. Lang, ‘The Beginnings of the Women’s Department’, p. 56. 15. Lang, ‘The Beginnings of the Women’s Department’, pp. 56–8. 16. C. D. Myers, University Coeducation in the Victorian Era: Inclusion in the United States and the United Kingdom (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 4. 17. ‘Regulations for Admission of Students’, The Mason Science College, Birmingham Calendar for the session 1880–1881, UB/MC/H/1/1, University of Birmingham, p. 22 [my emphasis]. 18. ‘Regulations for Admission of Students’, p. 22.

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19. As Bernard Jennings notes in history of the University Extension movement, demand for university extramural education often came from ‘the large industrial towns which were conscious that the splendour of their new civic buildings was not matched by their facilities for higher education.’ The University Extension Movement in Victorian & Edwardian England (Hull: Department of Adult Education, University of Hull, 1992), p. 2. 20. The University of Cambridge set up a Syndicate for Local Lectures in 1871. Oxford began giving extension lectures in 1878. Jennings, The University Extension Movement, pp. 2–3. 21. ‘Preface’, University College of North Wales, Calendar for the year 1886–7 (Manchester: J. E. Cornish, 1886), pp. vii–viii. 22. Special Meeting of the Trustees at Norwood House, December 16 1873, Minute book of the Board of Trustees (1872–1897), UB/MC/A/1, University of Birmingham, p. 8. 23. ‘Descriptions of the College Buildings’, The Mason Science College, Birmingham Calendar for the session 1880–1881, UB/MC/H/1/1, University of Birmingham, p. 133. 24. The Editors, ‘Editorial’, Magnet 2:1 (1899), p. 3. 25. H. Mathers, Steel City Scholars: A Centenary History of the University of Sheffield (London: James & James, 2005), p. 7. 26. S.  Forgan, ‘The Architecture of Science and the Idea of a University’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 20:4 (1989), p. 428. 27. Lang, ‘The Beginnings of the Women’s Department’, p. 56. 28. V.  Brittain, The Women of Oxford: A Fragment of History (London: George G. Harrap & Co., 1960), p. 95. 29. E. C. Lodge, ‘Growth, 1890–1922’, in G. Bailey (ed.), Lady Margaret Hall: A Short History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1923), p. 66. 30. ‘Descriptions of the College Buildings’, p.  133; ‘Sir Josiah Mason’s Scientific College’, Birmingham Daily Post, 13 September 1880, p. 5. 31. J. H. Bailey, ‘Types of College Men—and Women. No. VIII. The Lady Student’, Owens College Magazine 25:1 (1892), p. 24. 32. R. Muir, An Autobiography and some Essays (London: Lund Humphries & Co., 1943), p. 25. 33. ‘Degrees for Women Syndicate’, Papers of University Syndicates, Papers of the Degrees for Women Syndicate, Synd.II:2, University of Cambridge, p. 2. 34. E.  C. Lodge, Terms and Vacations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1938), p. 49. 35. A. Gardner, A Short History of Newnham College (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1921), p. 40.

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36. At lectures where more than one woman was present, chaperonage was usually deemed unnecessary. 37. M.  P. Marshall, What I Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1947), p. 14. 38. ‘Women’s Degrees’, Granta 10:208 (1897), p. 264. 39. ‘Women’s Degrees Syndicate. Suggestions for Inquiry. Cambridge, October 17, 1896’, Papers of University Syndicates, Papers of the Degrees for Women Syndicate, Synd.II:2, University of Cambridge, p. 1. 40. B.  Turner, Equality for Some (London: Ward Lock Educational, 1974), p. 182. 41. Turner, Equality for Some, p. 182. 42. J.  Goodman, ‘Class and Religion: Great Britain and Ireland’, in J. Goodman, R. Rogers & J. C. Albisetti (eds.), Girls’ Secondary Education in the Western World: From the 18th to the 20th Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 16. 43. G. Clarence, ‘Women at Cambridge’, Echo, 10 May 1897, p. 3. 44. ‘Degrees for Women Syndicate’, p. 2. 45. Myers, University Coeducation, p. 34. 46. E.  E. R.  Mumford, Through Rose-Coloured Spectacles (Leicester: Edgar Backus, 1952), pp. 12, 15, 35. 47. Mumford, Through Rose-Coloured Spectacles, p. 61. 48. Mumford, Through Rose-Coloured Spectacles, p. 62. 49. Mumford, Through Rose-Coloured Spectacles, p. 62. 50. Mumford, Through Rose-Coloured Spectacles, p. 63. 51. Mumford, Through Rose-Coloured Spectacles, pp. 63–4. 52. F. Hunt & C. Barker, Women at Cambridge: A Brief History (Cambridge: Press and Publications Office, University of Cambridge, 1998), p.  7; S.  Rothblatt, The Revolution of the Dons: Cambridge and Society in Victorian England (London: Faber & Faber, 1968), pp. 231–2. 53. Hunt & Barker, Women at Cambridge, p. 7. 54. A. Lloyd, A Memoir 1837–1925 (London: Cayme Press, 1928), p. 60. 55. Lodge, Terms and Vacations p. 50. 56. Mumford, Through Rose-Coloured Spectacles, p. 47. 57. Lodge, ‘Growth, 1890–1922’, p. 64. 58. W. B. Hardy, ‘Mrs. G.P. Bidder’, Nature 130:3288 (1932), p. 689. 59. H.  H. Asquith et  al., Report of the Royal Commission on Oxford and Cambridge (Cmd. 1588, vol. 10, 1922), p. 175. 60. Lodge, Terms and Vacations, p. 108. 61. P.  Groenewegen, Alfred Marshall, Economist 1842–1924 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 48. 62. Marshall, What I Remember, p. 23.

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63. I. B. Horner & E. A. Haworth, Alice M. Cooke: A Memoir (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1940), p. 8. 64. Horner & Haworth, Alice M. Cooke, pp. 9–10. 65. Horner & Haworth, Alice M. Cooke, pp. 14, 16. 66. H.  D. Oakeley, My Adventures in Education (London: Williams & Norgate, 1939), p. 135. 67. ‘Meeting of the Council held in the Council Room on Wednesday the 7th March 1900’, Mason University College Council minute book (1898–1900), UB/MC/B/1/5, University of Birmingham, pp. 185–6. 68. A.  Burnside, A Palladian Villa in Bristol: Clifton Hill House and the People who lived there (Bristol: Redcliffe Press, 2009), pp. 49–59. 69. F.  Perrone, ‘Women Academics in England, 1870–1930’, History of Universities 12:1 (1993), p. 345. 70. Perrone, ‘Women Academics in England’, p. 340. 71. Perrone, ‘Women Academics in England’, p. 339. 72. Perrone, ‘Women Academics in England’, pp. 350–2. 73. A.  Bulley & M.  Whitley, Women’s Work (London: Methuen & Co., 1894), p. 20. 74. Bulley & Whitley, Women’s Work, p. 20. 75. ‘Notes’, Floreamus! A Chronicle of University College, Sheffield 3:36 (1909), p. 393. 76. Perrone, ‘Women Academics in England’, p. 347. 77. Perrone, ‘Women Academics in England’, p. 347. 78. R. Love, ‘Alice in Eugenics-Land’: Feminism and Eugenics in the scientific careers of Alice Lee and Ethel Elderton’, Annals of Science 36:2 (1979), pp. 147–8. 79. Love, ‘Alice in Eugenics-Land’, p. 148. 80. ‘Statutes’, University College of Sheffield, Calendar for the Session 1897–8 (Sheffield: Independent Press, 1898), p. 62. 81. ‘Prospectus of Day Classes in Arts and Science, and of the Evening Lectures, for the year 1882–1883’, University College Liverpool, Calendar for the Session 1882–1883 (Liverpool: Adam Holden, 1882), p. 5. 82. P.  J. Hartog, The Owens College, Manchester, (founded 1851) A Brief History of the College and Description of its various Departments (Manchester: Cornish, 1901), p. 88; Tylecote, The Education of Women at Manchester University, p. 51. 83. ‘Liverpool Letter’, Iris (July 1888), GB 133 UMP/2/5, University of Manchester, p. 7. 84. Hall of Residence for Women Students, Early brochures for 215 Hagley Road hostel (1904–1906), UB/HUH/A/5/1/4–6, University of Birmingham, pp. 2–3. 85. ‘Hall of Residence for Women Students’, pp. 2–3.

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86. Barnes, ‘Crossing the invisible line’, p. 75. 87. Report of the Hall of Residence Session 1899–1900 (University Press of Liverpool, 1900), Reports of Hall of Residence for Women Students (1899–1914), Archive of the University of Liverpool: Records of Halls of Residence, ULIV P7/16, University of Liverpool, p. 5. 88. Lang, ‘The Beginnings of the Women’s Department’, p. 56. 89. Hardy, ‘Mrs. G.P. Bidder’, p. 689. 90. B. Stephen, Emily Davies and Girton College (London: Constable & Co., 1927), p. 287. 91. Stephen, Emily Davies and Girton College, p. 287. 92. P. Gould, ‘Women and the culture of university physics in late nineteenth century Cambridge’, British Journal for the History of Science 30 (1997), p. 148. As Gould notes, an exception was made for researchers. 93. Gardner, A Short History of Newnham College, p. 37. 94. B.  Stephen, Girton College, 1869–1932 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933), p. 78. 95. M.  A. Wilcox (1880), in A.  Phillips (ed.), A Newnham Anthology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for Newnham College, 1979), p. 14. 96. Student Petition to the Council of Newnham College as to providing a laboratory in the town (date 1880 or 1881) also statement of the money collected by them for it, EC/1/6/1, Newnham College. 97. Student Petition. 98. Student Petition. 99. M.  Richmond, ‘“A Lab of One’s Own”: The Balfour Biological Laboratory for Women at Cambridge University 1884–1914’, Isis 88:3 (1997), p. 429. 100. Richmond, ‘“A Lab of One’s Own”, p. 424. 101. C. D. Holt, ‘Letter to mother, 12th October 1889’, in E. O. Cockburn (ed.), Letters from Newnham College 1889–1892 (Cambridge: Newnham College, Cambridge, 1987), p. 1. 102. The discourse of space and overcrowding was unique to Oxford and Cambridge—for the new, cash-strapped civics, the constant need to attract fee-paying students prevented any discussion of limiting the number of women students through quotas. 103. ‘Motley Notes’, Granta 10:205 (6 March 1897), p. 235. 104. ‘Women’s Degrees’, p. 264. 105. The question of limiting the ‘freedom of speech’ of lecturers referred to what several respondents termed ‘difficulty of subject matter’ in certain subjects, such as ‘science’ and ‘classics and literature,’ which were thought to be inappropriate for women. This would lead to ‘occasional slight omissions,’ it was argued, as well as ‘the occasional interpretation of a

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Greek word’ and ‘slight restriction of language.’ ‘Women’s Degrees Syndicate’, p. 1. 106. ‘Degrees for Women Syndicate’, p. 2. 107. Richmond, ‘A Lab of One’s Own’, p. 428. 108. Asquith et  al, Report of the Royal Commission on Oxford and Cambridge, p. 173. 109. J. Howarth, ‘Women’, in B. Harrison (ed.) The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 8 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), p. 356. 110. C. Dyhouse, ‘Troubled Identities: Gender and status in the history of the mixed college in English universities since 1945’, Women’s History Review 12:2 (2003), p. 172. 111. J. Harrison, Reminiscences of a Student’s Life (London: Hogarth Press, 1925), p. 44. 112. Harrison, Reminiscences of a Student’s Life, p. 44. 113. Hunt & Barker, Women at Cambridge, p. 21. 114. Hunt & Barker, Women at Cambridge, p. 11. 115. Hunt & Barker, Women at Cambridge, p. 18. 116. A. Manuel, Breaking New Ground: A history of Somerville College as seen through its buildings (Oxford: Somerville College, 2013), p. 15. 117. D. McKitterick, Cambridge University Library: A History: The Eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 8. 118. J. Thompson, ‘Introduction’, in J. Thompson (ed.), University Library History: An International Review (London: Bingley, 1980), p. 2. 119. R. S. Smith, ‘The history of academic library buildings’, in J. Thompson (ed.), University Library History: An International Review (London: Bingley, 1980), pp. 131, 133. 120. McKitterick, Cambridge University Library, pp. 8–9. 121. McKitterick, Cambridge University Library, p. 9. 122. McKitterick, Cambridge University Library, p. 10. 123. Manuel, Breaking New Ground, p. 15. 124. Manuel, Breaking New Ground, p. 15. 125. J. Jordan & I. Sharp (eds.), ‘Child prostitution and the age of consent’, vol. 4., Josephine Butler and the Prostitution Campaigns: Diseases of the Body Politic (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 280. 126. J. Sutherland, ‘A Girl in the Bodleian: Mary Ward’s Room of Her Own’, Browning Institute Studies 16 (1988), p. 173. 127. Two Fellows, ‘A Morning in the Bodleian’, The Dark Blue 2:12 (February 1872), p. 683. 128. Lady Undergraduate, ‘A Day of Her Life at Oxford’, Murray’s Magazine 3:17 (1888), p. 684. 129. Lady Undergraduate, ‘A Day of Her Life at Oxford’, p. 684.

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130. Lang, ‘The Beginnings of the Women’s Department’, pp. 56–8. 131. Lang, ‘The Beginnings of the Women’s Department’, pp. 56–8. 132. L. Schwartz, A Serious Endeavour: Gender and Community at St Hugh’s, 1886–2011 (London: Profile, 2011), p. 110. 133. L. R. Phelps (Provost of Oriel) to A.B. Gillett. Letter. 30 March 1915, SC/L7/AR/WWI/6: Move to Oriel 1915–16 & back in 1919. Somerville College. 134. W. Peck, A Little Learning or A Victorian Childhood (London: Faber & Faber, 1952), p. 157; Schwartz, A Serious Endeavour, p. 110. 135. Anderson’s article was in direct response to Henry Maudsley’s ‘Sex in Mind and in Education’, Fortnightly Review 15:88 (1874), pp. 466–83. 136. E.  G. Anderson, ‘Sex in Mind and Education: A Reply’, Fortnightly Review 15:89 (1874), p. 585. 137. Schwartz, A Serious Endeavour, p. 112. 138. C.  Otter, The Victorian Eye: A political history of light and vision in Britain, 1800–1910 (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 2008), p. 76. 139. M.  A. Quiggin, (Hingston, 1899), in A.  Phillips (ed.), A Newnham Anthology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 46. 140. Otter, The Victorian Eye, p. 255. 141. A. Chapman, The Story of a Modern University: A History of the University of Sheffield (Sheffield: For the University of Sheffield by Oxford University Press, 1955), pp.  211–12; ‘The University Library’, Floreamus! A Chronicle of University College, Sheffield 3:35 (1909), pp. 343–4. 142. Mathers, Steel City Scholars, p. 67. 143. Mathers, Steel City Scholars, p. 67. 144. J. Bentham, Panopticon: Or, the inspection-house (Dublin: Thomas Byrne, 1791), p. 3. 145. M.  Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. A. Sheridan (London: Penguin Books, 2019). 146. Foucault, Discipline and Punish. 147. D. Howard, Dorothy Howard to Rosalind Howard, Countess of Carlisle, 6 November 1901. Letter. Personal papers of Dorothy Howard (The Lady Henley), ‘First Term’, GCPP Howard 1/1, Girton College [my emphasis]. 148. Foucault, Discipline and Punish. 149. ‘Iterum’, Floreamus! A Chronicle of University College, Sheffield 1:4 (1898), pp. 65–6. 150. Chapman, The Story of a Modern University, p. 163. 151. Chapman, The Story of a Modern University, p. 164. 152. ‘Victoria University Degree Day’, Manchester Times, 5 November 1887, p. 5.

CHAPTER 6

Sport, Soirées, and Social Spaces

In March 1900, a breach of promise trial took place at University College Sheffield. The presiding judge was Mr Carsons, the plaintiff Miss McNicoll, and the defendant F. Broomfield. A panel of 12 men and women jurors were sworn in and five witnesses were called, all of whom were ‘subjected to a vigorous cross-examination by Mr. Hickmott’, the Counsel for the plaintiff.1 As described in Floreamus, the College magazine, The defendant, whose memory was very weak, did not materially improve his case in the witness-box, but created pity in the hearts of the jury women, and at 10.30 the judgment was given. Damages of 1s. and costs for the plaintiff, and defendant with all his witnesses to be arrested for perjury.2

As these meagre damages and overzealous arrests perhaps suggest, this was not a real breach of promise suit, but rather an entertainment put on by the students of the college on a Friday night.3 ‘This was a novel and most enjoyable evening’, declared Floreamus, ‘and our thanks are due to the jury, witnesses, and all who took part’, noting that 60 students had attended.4 Life at University College Sheffield at the turn of the century, it appears, was the ideal expression of a modern, coeducational institution. Men and women students alike could participate in a social activity together, unchaperoned, outside of classroom hours, without any hint of impropriety or scandal. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Oman, Higher Education and the Gendering of Space in England and Wales, 1869–1909, Genders and Sexualities in History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29987-2_6

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A medical school had been founded in Sheffield in 1828, but it was the opening of Firth College in 1879 that marked the beginning of higher education in the city in earnest.5 Its founder, Mark Firth, was the head of Thomas Firth and Sons, a steel manufacturing business, and a prominent figure in  local civic life, serving as both Master Cutler and Mayor of Sheffield.6 In 1887, Firth bought a plot of land and commissioned a local architect, T. J. Flockton, to design a building capable of accommodating the large crowds that came to hear the University Extension lecturers on their tours from Oxford and Cambridge.7 In 1897, Firth College merged with the local Technical College to become University College Sheffield, and in 1905, it received its royal charter and became the University of Sheffield. Like the other civic universities, Sheffield accepted women students alongside men from its foundation as Firth College in 1879, and to this day carries a sense of pride in its history of gender equality. In her 2005 centenary history of the university, Helen Mathers wrote that, while there were many ways women students at higher education institutions during this period could be treated as second-class citizens, for example, through the provision of separate entrances or different classes, ‘[t]here is no evidence to suggest that any of this happened at Firth College’.8 University life went beyond entrances to classrooms, however, with leisure activities occupying a significant amount of students’ time as they participated in athletics, clubs, and societies, spent time relaxing in common rooms, and attended dances, socials, and teas. In these informal settings, outside of the academic situations in which gender equality was formally enshrined and enforced, interactions between men and women students were less clearly defined. The spaces in which these interactions took place, from the sports field to the common room and the dance hall, were imbued with layers of both explicit and implicit regulation, enforced not only from above, via university authorities, but also from the students themselves. In 1910, the University of Sheffield held another mock breach of promise trial, wherein ‘Miss Clementina Evangeline Eversleigh sued Mr. Algernon Archibald Spondulic-Dibbs for Breach of Promise of Marriage’.9 Once again, the case was heard before ‘a crowded court’ in Firth Hall. This time, however, the backstories of the fictional characters were slightly more fleshed out, with both Clementina and Algernon described as students of the University. The latter was ‘taking a Pure Science Course at the Sheffield University’, where Clementina was ‘already a student’, and the

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proposal took place ‘at the University Dance at the Royal Victoria Hotel’.10 The engagement was called off when Clementina noticed ‘the defendant carrying on with a certain first year girl’ in the ‘photometry room’.11 While these mock breach of promise cases were meant to be satirical, they nevertheless highlight important aspects of the implicit gendering of social life and leisure activities that occurred in the universities and colleges of this period, while also revealing the sometimes contradictory and paradoxical nature of mixed-gender interactions. The fact that such entertainments could take place at all, involving both male and female students meeting unchaperoned in the evening, suggests a freedom and lack of official interference in student life that may seem unusual for coeducational institutions in this period. This is especially true considering the nature of the topic, which could be considered somewhat risqué for the time—Floreamus noted in their coverage of the 1910 trial, with a certain sense of mock outrage, that ‘some people on reading the above will be greatly shocked that such impossible things take place within the walls of the University’.12 At the same time, while the 1910 mock trial highlights the freedom afforded to male and female students to associate in informal social settings, the fictional narrative performed references situations that were very real fears for university officials, such as inappropriate conduct at dances and improper relationships between students. It is worth noting that University of Sheffield dances only took place at the Royal Victoria Hotel, as mentioned in the trial, because they were not permitted to take place on University property.13 Spaces of leisure, just as much as spaces of learning, were an integral part of student experiences of university life, and were shaped at all levels by the complicated dynamics that shadowed male and female social interaction in the late Victorian and Edwardian period.

Collegiate Life and Athletic Spaces In 1874, the Owens College Magazine printed a letter from a former student who had gone on to study at Cambridge. Of all the differences between the small, provincial college he had left and the world in which he now found himself, it seems that athletics made the greatest impression on him. ‘Cambridge and Oxford are at least as well known for the athletic education which can be obtained there, as for the learning which they impart’, he wrote, adding,

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So great is the amount of attention which is here devoted to athletics, that it may, without much exaggeration, be said that out of all those who come up to Cambridge with the intention of distinguishing themselves, nearly half hope to attain that end rather by success in rowing or running, than by carrying off any of the honours or rewards which are given to intellectual success.14

In 1882, another old Owens student at Cambridge wrote back to his alma mater about what he saw as the greatest difference between the two institutions. ‘One great feature of University life… almost totally absent at Owens’, he wrote, is ‘the general pursuit of some form of athletics’.15 Owens life would be made both ‘pleasanter and more profitable’, he argued, by ‘a considerable diminution in the number of lectures and a corresponding increase in the amount of time given up to exercise’.16 As these letters reveal, sports, athletics, and exercise were central to the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century university in England and Wales for many men. At Oxford and Cambridge, sport was not only a central part of masculine student life, but also a sustaining component of the mythos and reputation of these institutions. The extent to which this was true in practice, so far as sport penetrated the average students’ day-­ to-­day life, is debatable, with J. A. Mangan arguing that the ideology of athleticism was never as dominant in the universities as it was in schools, and varied in intensity dependent on specific colleges and at different times.17 For Sonja Levsen, however, sports ‘dominated the average students’ daily routine as well as their discourse and values’, while the ‘cult of athleticism’ and its ideology of manliness was ‘one of the most important aspects of the undergraduates’ group identity’.18 Paul Deslandes takes a slightly more nuanced approach, arguing that in the period after the arrival of women students, masculine athleticism took on a new significance as a means of allowing men ‘not only to reinforce gender difference but also to highlight the separateness and complementarity of the sexes’.19 Nevertheless, in the Oxbridge of the imagination—‘university life’, as it appeared in countless novels, stories, and cartoons—as much time was spent on the river or the rugby pitch as it was in the library or the lecture theatre. When the civic universities began to be founded in the second half of the nineteenth century, athletics unions were often among the first student societies formed, as students sought to emulate what they considered to be an essential part of the university experience. As non-residential

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institutions, without the features of college life so intrinsic to Oxford and Cambridge, athletics was seen as a way to foster a sense of community among the disparate students who travelled in to class from their respective homes each day. One way in which this program of identity formation was made explicit was through the adoption of college colours and songs. ‘The recent acquisition by the College authorities of a cricket and football field supplies a long felt want’, wrote the Owens College Magazine in 1898 on the occasion of the acquisition of Firs Estate in Fallowfield. Their hope, they continued, was that the addition ‘may be a valuable help to the development of the corporate existence of the College, as well as of the corporeal training of its individual members’.20 While sporting spaces could therefore be used as a means to bring students together, they also served to enforce gender difference. Mangan and Roberta Park have highlighted the extent to which sport in the nineteenth century served as ‘a major vehicle for defining and reinforcing gender differences’ among the middle and upper classes, as athletic prowess came to be depicted as the ‘natural’ province of males.21 As Kathleen McCrone notes, sport, ‘creates and reflects tensions surrounding definitions of sex and gender roles’, while also revealing how ‘status, functions and power are assigned on the basis of biological differences’.22 Sporting spaces at the colleges and universities of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries were explicitly gendered. Here, the separation that guided social interaction in these institutions in often informal or unofficial ways was made explicit and codified. Women played alongside and against women, and men with men. At the same time, women’s participation in sport was an intrinsic part of the wider movement for female emancipation taking place during this period, with the physical liberation of women through sport correlating with a wider liberation on a political, social, and economic scale. The rivers, tennis courts, and sports fields of universities and colleges across the country, from Oxbridge to Redbrick, became arenas in which the larger issues of gender and coeducation shaping these institutions were performed. The issue of sporting spaces highlights a central difference between the old and new universities in their provision of facilities for women. While, at the nascent civic institutions, athletic fields and tennis courts had to be built and created anew for both male and female students alike, Oxford and Cambridge already possessed sporting facilities for men. The carving out of sporting spaces for women at these institutions involved a process of both creating new areas exclusively for women, while also negotiating

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spaces shared with men. Girton College, located on the outskirts of Cambridge, had ample grounds able to be readily turned towards athletic use, and as such provides an excellent example of the creation of new sporting spaces that occurred at the women’s colleges. A gymnasium was opened in 1877, eight tennis courts had been built by the early 1890s, a nine-hole golf course was in operation between 1891 and 1902, and a swimming bath was opened in the 1890s.23 These were all new spaces created exclusively for the use of women students, far from the comparable facilities already in existence for the use of men. The negotiation of space in regards to existing facilities, on the other hand, was most commonly seen in relation to rowing, and the shared use of rivers such as the Cam in Cambridge and the Isis and Cherwell in Oxford. Clara Money-Coutts, who came up to Lady Margaret Hall in 1897, remembers that women students ‘were not allowed to go on the river on a Sunday’.24 Doris Maude Odlum, who came up to St Hilda’s in 1909, remembered that the river was ‘our great joy’, and that the college had its own boats, but that ‘we had to go in the early morning so as not to contaminate the river when the men were on it’.25 K. M. Rathbone, a Newnham student in the 1880s, recalled that women’s boats were not allowed to go beyond Jesus lock, as ‘just beyond the lock’ would be ‘the men getting into their eights for the afternoon’s work’.26 At Oxford and Cambridge, where women were already funnelled into separate colleges and barred from male student clubs and societies, the creation of exclusively female sporting spaces was not so much a choice as an inevitability. At the civic universities, however, where men and women students were admitted on an equal basis, the establishment of athletics unions and purchasing of land for sports fields forced these universities to confront just how coeducational they would be. Would women and men join the same athletics unions? Play on the same fields? Share the same pavilions and club houses? At University College Bristol, the decision was made to separate the two from the start, with priority given to the establishment of clubs for men students, for whom sport was seen as an essential part of college life. S. H. Reynolds recalled that, upon his arrival as Lecturer in Geology and Zoology in 1894, ‘although the number of students was comparatively small… [t]here were of course the usual student’s athletics clubs for cricket, Rugby and Association football and later for hockey and lawn tennis’.27 These were all, notably, men’s clubs. A ‘Women Students’ Games Club’ would not appear until 1899, playing tennis in the summer and

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hockey in the winter, with the new association coming in for some gentle mocking at the hands of the Magnet. We understand that the New Woman’s Games Club—No! This is a printer’s error. We mean the new Women’s—that is to say—the Women’s new Games club—or rather—the Women’s Games new Club—by which we mean the New Club for Women’s Games—Well—we understand that IT has now taken definite shape, in spite of the ambiguity of its name.28

The Women Students’ Games Club did not share the same grounds as their male counterparts, but rather secured their own tennis courts near Redland Station and held hockey practices during the winter ‘in a field near St. Alban’s Church’.29 The men’s club profited from more generous financial assistance from donors, and in 1911, a sports pavilion was built at the men’s sports grounds at Coombe Dingle with funds provided by the Wills family.30 At University College Liverpool, funds and benefactions were similarly directed towards the men’s athletic clubs, while the women students made their own arrangements. In 1891, ‘a field, eminently suitable for College Athletics, was generously placed at the disposal of the Athletic Club, free of rent, by Mr. Chas. W. Jones, of Wavertree, and prepared for the uses of cricket, football, and lawn tennis’.31 A women’s branch of the Athletic Union would not be founded until 1898, and not until 1907 would they receive their own hockey ground. It, too, was rented from Charles Jones, a mere 16 years after his gift to the men students.32 Not all institutions were divided to this extent. At University College Sheffield, the College Athletic Club was open to ‘all registered students’, both men and women, from 1898, and both shared the same ground, first at East Bank and later at Norton, about three miles from the centre of the city.33 However, at its core, the playing of sport was an implicitly gendered activity. The men and women did not play each other, but rather other single-sex teams from the surrounding area, or even local schools. In 1912, the records of University House, the women’s hall of residence at the University of Birmingham, note that the women’s hockey team played their ‘usual matches’ against ‘King Edward’s School and the Pupil Teachers’ Centre and the University’, while also managing to ‘fix up two matches with the staff of the Edgbaston High School’.34 These links between girls’ schools and women’s colleges existed in a sort of feedback loop. As organised team sports like hockey grew in

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popularity at the new girls’ high schools, they were transmitted to the women’s colleges when their students went up to study.35 Winifred Peck, who was one of the first students to attend Wycombe Abbey School, later wrote of her time at Oxford that, ‘[f]or my first year, at any rate, I looked upon Lady Margaret as a glorified Wycombe, and hockey and the river were main interests’.36 Women university graduates often then became teachers, bringing experience of organised sport into schools and perpetuating the cycle. The rise of women’s sport could only be made possible, argues Jennifer Hargreaves, precisely because they occurred in ‘separate spheres’ from the sports of men.37 As McCrone notes, women did not attempt to penetrate the masculine world of sports through direct competition, but rather challenged it by creating ‘parallel worlds of their own’.38 She further describes the irony that women, while not expected not to compete against men, were considered inferior precisely because they did not compete against men—it was male performance that was taken as the ‘absolute measure’.39 Women were not only required to practise sport separately from men, they were also expected to do so privately. While men’s sport was in one sense performative—what Roberta J. Park terms ‘intentionally a very public cultural performance’—women’s sport was not regarded in the same way.40 It was not for public consumption or display, but was instead largely justified for reasons of health. The benefits of men’s sport were in many ways external. A display of manliness and skill, men’s sport was something to be performed and watched by spectators. In particular, it was something to be watched by women, who were often framed as the passive observer of male activity. Deslandes has noted how, by the 1860s and 1870s, the annual boat races at Oxford and Cambridge had ‘become so important as to induce a near mania in the universities’, with the presence of female visitors (such as mothers, aunts, sisters, and cousins) a ‘central component of these rituals’.41 A humorous story featured in an 1897 feature of the Granta set during May Week, the name given to the week in May or June in which the ‘bumps’ races were rowed at Cambridge, encapsulates the stereotypes of the female spectator of male athleticism. “That little beast Henty has got his people up,” said Allerton. “Fat mother, frisky aunt, sister with spectacles, and a hat trimmed with Cambridge blue ribbon?” hazarded Fordyce.42

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Women’s sport, on the other hand, was largely internal. A benefit to their health, but not a public display in the way men’s sport was.

Women’s Health and Sporting Spaces While the movement for women’s higher education faced varied opposition from its inception, a notable shift in this rhetoric took place in the early 1870s, as the question began to be contested on medical and scientific terms.43 The 1874 publication of Dr Henry Maudsley’s article ‘Sex in Mind and Education’ in the Fortnightly Review, a popular literary journal, brought the issue of women’s physiological fitness for higher education to the fore of public consciousness.44 In a letter to the Times, Percy Gardner, Professor of Classical Archaeology at Oxford, justified his opposition of female degrees as ‘the fear of inflicting serious hardship on those women who study among us’.45 Such positions were supported by a commonly held belief that women were particularly susceptible to shocks during menstruation, a superstition that took on greater weight when claimed that such sensitivity would render them incapable of study.46 The acceptance of such ideas within the medical establishment is evident in the writings of Dr George Edward Shuttleworth, who in the Lancet described a 19-year-old patient studying at a women’s college: [Her] health completely gave way under pressure of the Christmas “trials” (as the terminal examinations are appropriately called) which unfortunately coincided with a menstrual period, and the patient being of neurotic tendency developed decided symptoms of nervous exhaustion.47

These concerns were exacerbated by the case of Annie Eastwood, an early female student at Owens College Manchester who died of tuberculosis.48 Following her death in 1884, all female students at the university were required to provide a written statement from their parent or guardian stating that ‘such course of study may be entered upon without the prospect of injury to her health’, a condition only abandoned in 1903.49 Prospectuses for women’s halls of residence, such as this one from University Hall in Liverpool in 1910, advertised themselves using the language of health, sanitation, and exercise.

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[The Hall] stands high, in a sunny position, about a mile from the University, in the quiet and healthy residential district of Fairfield. It is surrounded by a large garden, with lawns for tennis and croquet, and a hockey-field.50

Such precautions were an expression of what Barbara Harrison argues was a ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’ in which women were expected to lead retiring, largely sedentary lifestyles, only to find their supposedly languid nature used as justification for their exclusion from active social and political life.51 This was related to broader concerns about ‘overwork’ that characterised educational debates in this period. In 1873, the American physician E.  H. Clarke drew a link between mental overwork and the cessation of reproductive development, describing patients of his who had graduated ‘excellent scholars, but with undeveloped ovaries. Later they married, and were sterile’.52 While it might be all well and good for a lifelong academic to endanger her reproductive capabilities through strenuous mental activity—as she was surely unlikely to marry anyway—the real danger, according to Clarke and others, was in not knowing which students were destined for academia or motherhood. As the science writer Grant Allen declared in an 1889 article entitled ‘Plain Words on the Woman Question’, published in the Fortnightly Review, ‘you sacrifice the many to the few, the potential wives to the possible lady-­ lecturers. You sacrifice the race to a handful of barren experimenters’.53 For the supporters of higher education for women in its early stages, particularly in the women’s colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, physical exercise was therefore seen as necessary both to ensure students’ health and to ward off any potential criticism about the damaging effects of intellectual effort. Indeed, the colleges themselves were designed with the health of students in mind, with Blanche Athena Clough noting that the size of the bedrooms at Newnham College were ‘decided according to the advice of sanitary experts’.54 A gymnasium had been built in 1877, and even before that students were encouraged to use the gymnasium in town, albeit at certain set times.55 Mary Paley recalled that Millicent Garrett Fawcett escorted them once a week as a chaperon, ‘and she was the best climber of the long rope and could look out at the top window’.56 Barbara Bodichon, one of the early benefactors of Girton College, made a pledge of 1000 pounds to the college she had helped found on the condition that a Professorship of Hygiene be created with the funds as she wanted someone who had ‘studied the physical constitution of women’ to occupy a position of power at the college, although one was never appointed.57

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Aside from the sanitation and hygiene of colleges, however, physical exercise was seen as the most effective means of safeguarding woman students’ health in the pressure cooker of the university environment, as one particularly enthusiastic anonymous correspondent in the University College Bristol Magnet wrote in 1899. It is almost always the case that the girl who is first in the hockey-field and a champion player at tennis is also the most keenly intellectual, most interested in the things of the mind… The woman who hopes to keep abreast with modern thought, to train and cultivate every mental faculty, finds regular and active exercise a necessity if she is to bear the strain of the student’s life. The education of the mind is impossible if the education of the body is neglected. Athletics then form a part and a very important part of women’s education.58

While the debates concerning the physiological and medical effects of women’s education blazed most brightly during the earlier period of the establishment of the first women’s colleges in the 1870s, university authorities’ concern with the health of women students carried on into the twentieth century. As late as 1911, a female student at the University of Liverpool had to give up her position as ‘Senior Student’ in the women’s hall of residence, owing to ‘unavoidable absence (through brain-fag)’.59 Between 1904 and 1914, University House, the women’s hall of residence at the University of Birmingham, kept a ‘Report of Health of Students’ log, which was regularly updated with students’ medical issues. While a large number were simply labelled ‘no difficulty’, other entries included: ‘a good deal of ill health with fainting fits’, ‘tuberculosis’, ‘appendicitis’, ‘rather weakly always’, ‘poor constitution (or very fussy)’, and ‘delicate girl’.60 This log demonstrates the extent to which university authorities remained concerned with the physical health of their women students, even decades after the ‘overwork’ theories of Clarke, Maudsley, and others had fallen out of scientific favour. In some cases, they even recorded the health of students after they had left higher education, indicating an interest in how the period of higher education affected students in later life. One entry, which recorded a ‘[v]ery able but very delicate girl’ with a ‘tendency to melancholia’, noted she ‘[t]ook degree, but committed suicide after teaching for 1 year’.61

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In its public-facing documents, however, University House was keen to project a uniformly healthy image. The 1912 issue of the Hall’s alumnae newsletter boasted, The hostel has been taking an extremely active interest in its physical well-­ being, and the notice board was decorated with rival advertisements in Greek and Latin, extolling the respective virtues of Swedish Drill and Jujitsu as a means of physical culture.62

While women students at the civic universities could arguably choose to partake in these exercises or not, given that they did not fall under the same in loco parentis responsibilities that governed the residential colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, the reality of life at a hall of residence such as University House at Birmingham, or Clifton Hill House in Bristol, in many ways mimicked these institutions. J. Marguerite Bowie, a student at Clifton Hill House, remembered that, on the advice of the Warden, May Christophera Staveley, ‘[a]ll new students were advised to take a brisk walk daily between tea and dinner… to fit them for the serious study which would occupy their evenings’.63 The extent to which this action was voluntary or compulsory is unclear, but students in residence were certainly subject to a degree of oversight and control over their physical health that was not the case for those who lived with relatives or in lodgings. Paul Atkinson argues that the women’s schools and colleges of the late-­ nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries were subject to ‘the discipline and detailed surveillance of the body’.64 As the Birmingham ‘Report of Health of Students’ demonstrates, the body of the woman student was a site that was actively monitored, controlled, and corrected. Part of this surveillance was expressed through the regulation of women’s sporting dress, which, like the relegation of women’s sporting spaces to more private areas separate from the men’s, emphasised women’s sport as something to be practised in seclusion, unintended for public spectacle and consumption. Despite this, memoirs of women hockey players at Oxford and Cambridge abound with descriptions of the lengths of skirt permitted. ‘I was a keen hockey player and we had to wear navy blue serge skirts that must come down to within twelve inches of the ground, to hide our legs as much as possible’, recalled C.  Crowther, who came up to Newnham in 1896. ‘Tennis was played in long white piqué skirts that almost touched the ground’.65 Eleanor C.  Lodge, who studied at Lady Margaret Hall in the early 1890s, remembered how the ‘Miss Wordsworth

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and Miss Pearson used to kneel on the floor and measure us all with the greatest care lest [our hockey skirts] should be at all on the short side’.66 Though no one but their fellow women students would see them play, propriety still had to be maintained at all times. Jennifer Hargreaves contends that the development of women’s recreational wear during this period, from the ‘eroticism of the false contours of flamboyant dress’ worn for ‘conspicuous recreation’, through to the ‘blouses and skirts of the hockey era’, was linked to the more vigorous activities in which women could be expected to take part.67 The more women exerted themselves physically, the greater the need to maintain a modest demeanour, in which bodily display and sensual pleasure was avoided. Sporting attire for women, she argues, became ‘distinctly shapeless and sexless’, an opinion reinforced by Doris Maude Odlum, who came up to St Hilda’s in 1909.68 ‘Our dress was right to the ground. We had these long dresses with high-boned collars and our hair done in a peculiar sort of bun on the tops of our heads… it made us all look so old’.69 Sporting dress, of course, also held significance for male students, with college colours and its associated sporting paraphernalia conveying a sense of belonging and camaraderie that was especially sought after at the nascent civic universities. A note in the Liverpool Sphinx of 1896 alerted its readers that the Colours Committee had obtained estimates for ‘hat bands, ties, blazers, etc.’, and urged that, Every student ought to consider it his bounden duty to purchase all these commodities, not necessarily to wear daily on his person, but to have something to show that he belongs to the College on the athletic field, or wherever else students may have occasion to congregate.70

It is notable that the imagined student is designated ‘he’, as it was male students alone who were considered to have any business buying these items. Sporting spaces were sites of masculine bonding and identity formation at the civic universities, and were often held up in direct comparison to the ancient universities as markers of how the corporate life of the newer institutions was lacking and needed improvement. The Owens College Magazine of 1891 bewailed that, on comparing Owens and the other civic universities with Oxford and Cambridge, ‘one cannot fail to be struck with the almost total absence of patriotic feeling among the Undergraduates for their alma mater in the matter of athletics’.71 In 1889, another editorial hoped that, in the not too distant future, ‘it may be as

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much de rigueur for Manchester people to be present at the Owens College sports’ as it was for high society names to be seen the Oxford and Cambridge matches at Lords.72 The significance of sporting spaces as formative places in the development of institutional identity was further strengthened by the growth of inter-collegiate competitions. In 1908, the first British Inter-University Sports were held as part of the Congress of British Universities, with representatives from Birmingham, Durham, Leeds, Liverpool, King’s College London, and Queen’s College Belfast, among others.73 The first women’s inter-college tennis match was held between Girton and Newnham in 1878, while the first inter-university match between the Oxford and Cambridge women’s colleges followed in 1883.74 The enthusiasm with which women students approached these competitive encounters is highlighted by the reminiscences of Lilian Faithfull, who entered Somerville College in 1883. She recalled an incident that followed the first inter-­ collegiate hockey match with Lady Margaret Hall, the students of which, ‘in the flush of its victory had imitated the undergraduates and had a bonfire in the garden, with the result that hockey had been forbidden for the ensuing term’.75 The severity of this punishment emphasises the differing standards to which men and women students were held with regards to sport and their behaviour around it. Faithfull pointedly notes that the women students had merely ‘imitated the undergraduates’, and yet in women students such behaviour was deemed unseemly. Competitiveness and physical exertion in women were sanctioned when contained within the discrete boundaries of the sports field, but became inappropriate when this boundary was transgressed. McCrone has drawn attention to the ways in which the boundaries of women’s acceptable participation in sport were also temporal, as much as they were physical. Such behaviour was seen as appropriate in a school or university setting, but not beyond, with the result that ‘most women left their playing days behind them upon completion of their education’.76 ‘It was acceptable for females to play games at school’, wrote Hockey Field in 1904, ‘but after school they were expected to “become true graceful women ready to be good wives and mothers— not existing merely for the next hockey match”’.77 To eventually become wives and mothers, however, women students had to meet men, and sport could facilitate these opportunities as well. M. A. Quiggin, a Newnham student at the turn of the twentieth century, recalled that ‘one of the first breaks of strict segregation of men and

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women was made by the Tennis Club’, when they petitioned to be able to play mixed doubles. ‘We… were allowed to invite men on certain days, brothers, cousins or old family friends and of course carefully chaperoned’, Quiggin notes, before adding that the term ‘cousin’ was interpreted ‘rather liberally’.78 Sporting spaces could therefore also facilitate mixed-­ gender interaction, as much as they curtailed it, when it was contained within the boundaries of a court or field in which the normal rules of socialisation and propriety were superseded by the rules of the game. Men and women students at the universities were not completely isolated from one another through the control and regulation of leisure spaces, but rather their interactions were subject to a level of oversight and supervision that ranged from official chaperonage to more informal guidelines of behaviour.

Socialisation and Dances When examining the social interactions between men and women students at universities during this period, especially in the leisure spaces beyond classrooms and lecture theatres, the ever-present thread that runs through any exploration of mixed-gender socialisation in the university space presents itself once more: to what extent were behavioural norms imposed from above, by the dictums of university authorities, and to what extent did they emerge from the students themselves? Sonja Levsen presents a case for both, arguing that the separation of the sexes at Oxford and Cambridge in the period before the Great War was partly due to ‘rigid chaperone rules’, and partly due to ‘the attitude of the male undergraduates, who more often than not had looked down on the female students, clinging to the stereotype that intellectual women were unfeminine and ugly’.79 The use of the word ‘unfeminine’ reflects wider social attitudes towards intellectual women that equated learning and knowledge with masculinity. The epicene ‘Bluestocking’ trope represented the woman academic as an unfeminine figure, rendered almost genderless in her preoccupation with books and learning.80 M. A. Quiggin, as a Newnham student at the turn of the century, noticed a definite distinction in how students of the women’s colleges were treated, as opposed to the other young women of Cambridge. The male students were ‘terrified of us’, she recalled, adding that if you wanted to be a ‘social success’ as a young woman in the non-­ academic world of drawing rooms and dinner parties, ‘you concealed the

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fact that you came from Girton or Newnham’.81 The colleges themselves could even be seen as encouraging a policy of ‘de-sexing’ their students, in an effort to avoid any whiff of controversy. Barbara Megson and Jean Lindsay describe Girton students in the period 1875–1903 as ‘conventional in their dress and rather shabby’, adding that this ‘rather dull’ dress code was enforced for ‘fear of attracting any unnecessary criticism’.82 This unofficial policy was founded as a direct reaction against the conspicuous dress of the very first women students, most of whom ‘wore pre-­Raphaelite garments’ to the chagrin of Henry Sidgwick.83 For the founders of the early women’s colleges, whose survival was by no means assured, the strategy was for students to be as unobtrusive as possible, so as to not attract any undue attention. ‘I came up just after the first clear sign of the hostility of the University towards women students’, wrote Quiggin, ‘[s]o the chief aim of the College was to be as inconspicuous as possible. Anything conspicuous in dress or behaviour was strongly disapproved’.84 By some accounts, these measures were successful. Even of Oxford during the years immediately preceding the First World War, at which time women students had been resident in the city for 35 years and there were no less than five all-women residential colleges, future Prime Minister Harold Macmillan could recall in later life that ‘there were no women… We knew of course that there were women’s colleges with women students. But we were not conscious of either’.85 This does not represent a personal blindness on Macmillan’s part so much as demonstrate the extent to which women remained both technically provisional and socially marginalised students during this period, a time in which myths and traditions—both in life and in literary portrayals—continued to cultivate an image of Oxford and Cambridge as what Deslandes terms ‘an exclusively upper-class and male world’.86 At the civic universities, policies of segregation between men and women is less clear, but this does not imply its absence. Julie Gilbert takes the position that not only was gender division wholly effective at the women’s colleges of Oxford and Cambridge (‘women at the older universities formed communities largely separate from their male counterparts’), but that it did not exist at the civic universities, where women students ‘became active participants in and an integral element of the general university community’.87 Both situations were in fact more complicated and nuanced, with informal segregation on the part of the students endemic at the civic universities during this period. Mabel Tylecote has identified such a phenomenon at the University of Manchester, where she writes, ‘[a]part from

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their natural shyness, the theory of an unidentified yet effective separation between men and women students held sway’.88 A series of letters in the Mason University College Magazine in Spring 1899 reveals the attitudes of some men students towards the extent to which women students at coeducational institutions kept their distance. ‘We don’t see nearly enough of our lady students’, wrote in ‘Liberal’. ‘[D]o you not think a common “common room” would be a great boon? Or if these dreams are very aerial, why don’t the ladies have a series of “At Homes” and invite their admirers’.89 Frank E. Willcox wrote in to the next issue in agreement, adding that the situation could be ‘greatly remedied by the “Introduction Committee,” and by the Professors and their wives getting to know the students more, and thus affording greater facilities for introduction’.90 One means through which students at the civic universities could get to know each other was through social events such as dances and teas. Owens College held an annual ‘Soirée’, which threw open the doors of the university buildings to students, academic staff, and their guests. The 1885 event was held to be ‘a decided success’, despite the fact that ‘several people of both sexes were sorry not to have facilities for dancing’.91 Despite this freedom of interaction, however, traditional gender roles were still preserved. The decoration of the Botanical Laboratory was handled by ‘the women science students’, with the Union magazine making special mention of ‘the tasteful manner in which three lady students—Miss Hager, Hiles, and Pratt—arranged the cut flowers’.92 At Bristol, the ‘ladies’ of the college were responsible for ‘cutting sandwiches and making great jugs of lemonade’, while reports of a Social Evening at Sheffield in 1897 thanked ‘the ladies’ for their decoration of the Lecture Hall, ‘having adorned it with flowers and gipsy tables’.93 Women students, even at the coeducational universities, were still expected to perform traditional gendered roles in the decoration, catering, and planning of social events that were not expected of their male counterparts. The need to ‘feminise’ these spaces for social interaction between students also highlights larger underlying assumptions about the nature of the spaces in which it was thought acceptable for mixed-sex socialising, as well as the character of these spaces during the rest of the year. When men and women students attended lectures for academic purposes, no decoration was required. However, when the same students met in the same spaces for explicitly social purposes, ‘flowers and gipsy tables’ were deemed necessary. This distinction points to the extent to which women students

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could be stripped of their femininity to a certain extent when they occupied the role of ‘student’, rather than ‘woman’. In situations where this was reversed, such as dances, social conventions and niceties absent at other times returned in full force. At Bristol, dances were supervised by chaperones, a feature common to other civic institutions of this period. Edna Rideout, who became a student at the University of Liverpool in 1912, remembered ‘informal dances’ in the Union.94 We had dance programmes on which men asked for the honour of inscribing their names as partners, but to dance more than twice with the same partner was frowned upon. We were chaperoned by the wives of Senate and Staff.95

Women students at Bristol did not require formal chaperones at other times, but the arrangement was deemed necessary for the specific context of mixed-gender dances. In 1911, the Council of the University of Sheffield declared that they ‘do not view the proposition for dancing with favour’, adding that ‘[i]f it is to be entertained at all it must be under strict supervision and regulations’.96 The licensing of dances was eventually delegated to a Discipline Committee, and took place at the Royal Victoria Hotel, as they were prohibited on university grounds.97 In 1909, a Sheffield student described the formal procedures that still governed interactions between male and female students at these social occasions, the guests assembled in the ball-room, and at once the men were relentlessly handed over to the M.C’s., and were submitted to the process of i­ ntroduction to the charming representatives of the fair sex who graced the festivities with their presence.98

Even in the absence of formal introductions and chaperones, however, students in mixed social situations could find their behaviour constrained by less tangible forces. In his study of dancing and dance halls in Britain, James J. Nott described the ‘voluntary segregation of the dance hall into single sex groups coming together almost magically when the band began to play and then returning to their separate spheres’.99 At Manchester, the phrase ‘the invisible but impassable line’ was used to refer to what Mabel Tylecote terms the ‘well-observed custom that men and women should congregate at opposite ends of the room’ at the tea parties which preceded society meetings.100 The theory, according to I. G. Gregory, first evolved

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in 1913, and was noticed whenever a society held any kind of social meeting. ‘The principle of separation remained unbroken. Invariably, men talked and ate their teas at one end of the room, and the women at the other’.101 This divide most strikingly encapsulates the kinds of informal segregation that originated from the students themselves, rather than being imposed from above. ‘Although men and women tended to occupy their own distinct areas’, Nott notes of the dance hall, ‘this was done as a matter of choice and habit, rather than something that was prescribed by managements or dictated by architecture’.102

Common Rooms In July 1888, the magazine of the Owens College Department for Women, the Iris, published a letter from a former Owens woman student who was now studying at University College Liverpool. Liverpool, unlike Manchester, did not have a separate women’s department, and the correspondent noted how her fellow female students ‘by this means gain the advantage of a more extended and natural social University life’.103 It went without saying, as she further noted, that ‘we have, however, separate reading and luncheon rooms’.104 Even at the most coeducational of institutions, where ‘women students have their full share in the chemical laboratories, biological museums, &c.’, separate common rooms (or reading rooms, as they were also known) for men and women students were a non-negotiable necessity.105 The question of separate spaces for men and women is a complex one. Elizabeth Munson highlights the problematic nature of Victorian segregated public spaces (such as separate men’s and women’s waiting rooms and tea rooms), which she argues were progressive in that they acknowledged that women had a right to exist in public spaces, yet at the same time served to recognise and reinforce distinctions based on gender.106 At Oxford and Cambridge during this period, gender difference was made obvious by the separate women’s colleges, which acted as indisputable physical representations of women’s separate status. In the non-­residential civics, it was the common rooms that served as places for men and women to wait (separately) for their lectures and spend time during the day when they were not in classes. A. M. Tyndall at Bristol in the late 1890s, recalled that ‘there were rooms where the men and women students were segregated. I never entered the Women’s Common Room’.107

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In the papers of the University College Bristol, the Women’s Common Room (or Reading Room, as it came to be known) features much more prominently than its male counterpart. What also becomes apparent is the impetus on the part of the women students to make their allocated space their own. An article on the Women’s Reading Room in a 1900 issue of the Magnet strives to tell the grand history of ‘the most comfortable room in the building’, for which the women students of ‘some six or seven years ago, clubbed together, and with the help from some friends of the College, were able to purchase curtains, rugs, and other luxuries’.108 There emerges a sense that these spaces were jealously guarded—in the University of Birmingham Students’ Handbook for 1904–1905, the entry for the women’s common room quotes Tennyson’s Princess: ‘Let no man enter on pain of death’.109 The women student’s enthusiastic embracing of a space that was exclusively theirs echoes similar behaviour at other institutions. At Owens College, women students turned the old Professor’s Common Room into ‘a most artistic study’, having it ‘re-decorated, lighted, and furnished throughout’.110 An anonymous student writing in the Iris, the magazine of the Owens College Department for Women, boasted ‘we now rejoice in a room of our own—a delightfully mysterious apartment, far from the haunts of men’.111 At Liverpool, the women students fundraised to ‘further adorn and beautify’ the furniture supplied by the college authorities for the women’s common room, ‘under the conviction that fair and noble thoughts are best nurtured by fair and beautiful surroundings’.112 As well as suggesting a level of communal spirit felt by the women students of the college, the common rooms and reading rooms hinted at a sense of belonging to a greater community of women. In 1894, the noted campaigner for women’s rights and editor of the Englishwoman’s Review, Helen Blackburn, who had taken classes at University College Bristol in the late 1880s, donated ‘a large and valuable collection of portraits of eminent British women’ to the Reading Room.113 This collection was then added to over time, with Honorary Secretary of the Reading Room Committee, Lilian Voss Snook, singling out ‘the group over the mantelpiece’ (a collection including the Queen, Millicent Garret Fawcett, the actresses Ellen Terry and Sarah Siddons) for particular admiration, for it contains the portraits of the Pioneers in the Education of Women, and to these, more than to any others, do the girls of to-day owe a debt of loving

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gratitude, for it is they who fought for a woman’s right to be well educated, and who won the battle for her.114

Common rooms were significant for men students, too, who lacked the collegiate life typified by residential institutions like Oxford and Cambridge. In the early days of Owens College, a Students’ Common Room was established in the threshold of the library, ‘with a grand old fireplace, around which the men would sit and crack their jokes, and tell how exams were passed’.115 The first men’s common room at Bristol, according to former student A.  M. Tyndall, ‘consisted of a dozen cane chairs and a couple of card tables’.116 B. V. S., a student at Mason University College in 1899, described the men’s common room as ‘the only room in the College which is set apart for social intercourse with men’.117 However, like Tyndall, he commented on its sparseness (‘a badly-lighted basement room, permeated with tobacco smoke and provided with a few tables, chair and seats’) and compared it unfavourably with the women’s common room (‘the women, I believe, are better off’).118 In 1898, however, the members of the women’s common room complained of preferential treatment given to the men, who were provided with a common room attendant. ‘The ladies have no attendant to minister to their comfort’, they noted, and ‘[t]hey do not quite understand why they are thus distinguished from the gentlemen, for they would appreciate to the full the blessings of a boiling kettle, a good fire, and a tidy room’.119 That women students were so protective of these spaces can perhaps be explained by the sense that some sort of separate accommodation for men and women to spend their time when not in lectures and classes was seen as a necessary requirement on the basis of propriety. In 1900, 29 women students at Mason University College signed a letter addressed to the College Council, calling for various improvements and enlargements to the women’s common room. ‘We consider these matters of such great importance’, they wrote, ‘that we would urge that immediate steps be taken to remedy these grievances, not only for ourselves but for the good of the College’.120 Their reasoning, as they continued, was that ‘[w]e have reason to believe that several ladies have been deterred from becoming students of the College owing to the presumed lack of accommodation’.121 The use of ‘accommodation’ here did not refer to life in a women’s hostel or hall, as the college remained non-residential, but rather the women-­ only facilities available to women during the day, when they were at college but between classes.

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Common rooms therefore serve to highlight the extent to which leisure spaces at these institutions, outside of the formal strictures of lectures and classes, were gendered. Although they represent policies of official, university-sanctioned segregation in one sense, given that these rooms were provided and designed as single-sex spaces, their use was determined by the students themselves. Both men and women, according to the sources, appreciated having a dedicated room for homosocial socialisation and conversation. Women in particular identified particularly with the notion of an all-female space, reflected in the pride with which these rooms were decorated, furnished, and maintained. Spaces of leisure at the universities, as much as spaces of learning, were subject to subtle distinctions, boundaries, and rules—both formal and unwritten—that shaped how men and women students behaved and interacted with each other.

Conclusion Classes, lectures, and laboratory time only took up part of the average students’ schedule. Many took part in extra-curricular activities like joining sports teams, relaxed in common rooms between classes, and attended social events such as teas and dances. Men and women students’ use of these leisure spaces provides one of the clearest examples of how gender segregation in these institutions was at once both enforced from above, on the part of university authorities, and generated at a more local level via the students themselves. Athletic and sporting spaces represent one of the most explicitly codified forms, as men and women formed separate athletics unions and played in separate leagues, on separate grounds and courts. Sport served to highlight and enforce gender difference as much as it provided opportunities for women’s liberation through physical exercise, while also encoding men’s sport as a communal spectacle worthy of public consumption, as opposed to the privacy and seclusion in which women’s sport was played. Spaces for mixed-gender socialisation such as dances and teas, however, provide an example of how more informal behavioural choices from the students themselves could also result in segregation, epitomised by the ‘invisible but impassable line’ which defined social life. The provision of common rooms, furthermore, represent how institutional efforts at separation, through the provision of rooms deliberately intended for single-sex use, could be enthusiastically taken up by the students themselves, who strongly identified with and utilised these all-male or all-female spaces.

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Leisure spaces were significant both at the ancient universities of Oxford and Cambridge, where an emphasis on sport and extra-curricular activities had long been viewed as a necessary complement to intellectual endeavour, as well as the new civic universities that in many cases tried to model themselves in their image. However, levels of formal and informal segregation differed between institutions at different times, sometimes in a contradictory manner. The University of Sheffield might host light-hearted mock breach of promise trials, but it also hosted chaperoned dances in which male and female attendees had to be formally introduced. Both can be true, and both serve to highlight the extent to which gender relations at universities and their spatial dimensions were highly changeable and unfixed during this period.

Notes 1. ‘Social Clubs, &c.’, Floreamus! A Chronicle of University College, Sheffield 1:8 (1900), p. 177. 2. ‘Social Clubs, &c.’, p. 177. 3. Ginger S.  Frost has drawn attention to how, from at least the 1830s, breach of promise suits became targets for fictionalisation and satire, playing on ‘the inherent humour and drama of the action’. G.  S. Frost, Promises Broken: Courtship, Class, and Gender in Victorian England (Charlottesville & London: University Press of Virginia, 1995), p. 1. 4. ‘Social Clubs, &c.’, p. 177. 5. A. Chapman, The Story of a Modern University: A History of the University of Sheffield (Sheffield: For the University of Sheffield by Oxford University Press, 1955), p. 3. 6. H. Mathers, Steel City Scholars: A Centenary History of the University of Sheffield (London: James & James, 2005), p. 6. 7. Mathers, Steel City Scholars, p. 7. 8. Mathers, Steel City Scholars, p. 3. 9. V.  F. W., ‘Breach of Promise at University’, Floreamus! A Chronicle of University College, Sheffield 4:39 (1910), p. 101. 10. V. F. W., ‘Breach of Promise at University’, p. 103. 11. V. F. W., ‘Breach of Promise at University’, pp. 103–4. Saskia Lettmaier has drawn attention to how representations of breach-of-promise suits in the later Victorian period grew increasingly satirical in Broken Engagements: The Action for Breach of Promise of Marriage and the Feminine Ideal, 1800–1940 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 128–9. 12. V. F. W., ‘Breach of Promise at University’, p. 107. 13. Chapman, The Story of a Modern University, p. 244.

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14. A Resident Correspondent, ‘Cambridge Athletics’, Owens College Magazine (March 1875), p. 110. 15. ‘Cambridge Letter’, Owens College Magazine, May, Owens College Magazine 1883–1885, Reference GB 133 UMP/2/1, University of Manchester, p. 104. 16. ‘Cambridge Letter’, Owens College Magazine, p. 104. 17. J.  A. Mangan, ‘Lamentable Barbarians and Pitiful Sheep: Rhetoric of Protest and Pleasure in Late Victorian and Edwardian “Oxbridge”’, Victorian Studies 34:4 (1990), p. 477. 18. S.  Levsen, ‘Constructing Elite Identities: University students, military masculinity and the consequences of the Great War in Britain and Germany’, Past and Present 198:1 (2008), pp.  152–3. See also, P. Deslandes, Oxbridge Men: British Masculinity and the Undergraduate Experience, 1850–1920 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), p. 157. 19. Deslandes, Oxbridge Men, p. 157. 20. ‘The New College Cricket Ground’, Owens College Magazine 1879–1882, Reference GB 133UMP/2/1, University of Manchester, p. 53. 21. J. A. Mangan & R. J. Park, ‘Introduction’, in J. A. Mangan & R. J. Park (eds.), From “Fair Sex” to Feminism: Sport and the Socialisation of Women in the Industrial and Post-Industrial Eras (London: Cass, 1987), p.  3; R.  J. Park, ‘Sport, Gender and Society in a Transatlantic Victorian Perspective’, in J.  A. Mangan & R.  J. Park (eds.), From “Fair Sex” to Feminism: Sport and the Socialisation of Women in the Industrial and PostIndustrial Eras (London: Cass, 1987), p. 59. 22. K. E. McCrone, Playing the Game: Sport and the Physical Emancipation of English Women, 1870–1914 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1988), p. 1. 23. McCrone, Playing the Game, pp. 26–31. 24. Deposit 10, Clara Money-Coutts (1897–1898), MPP/Memorabilia and Personal Papers of College Members, Lady Margaret Hall, p. 95. 25. D. M. Odlum (St Hilda’s 1909), Sound Archive [SA 1 A5], St Hilda’s College. 26. K.  M. Rathbone (Dixon, 1880), in A.  Phillips (ed.), A Newnham Anthology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 22. 27. ‘From Professor Reynolds, U.C.B., 1894–’, Papers relating to the history of University College Bristol, and the University of Bristol, DM219/ series four, no. 32, University of Bristol, p. 3. 28. ‘Editorial’, Magnet 1:5 (1899), p. 120. 29. ‘Women Students’ Games Club’, University College, Bristol, Calendars for the Session 1899–1900, Calendars: University College, Bristol and University of Bristol, DM1191, University of Bristol, p. 271. Given the

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lack of other higher education institutions to compete against, students seemed to have largely competed amongst themselves or with teams from local high schools. 30. D.  Carleton, A University for Bristol: An informal history in texts and pictures (Bristol: University of Bristol Press, 1984), p. 36. 31. ‘Preface’, University College Liverpool, Calendar for the Session 1892–1893 (Liverpool: Adam Holden, 1892), p. xx. 32. ‘College Societies’, University College Liverpool, Calendar for the Session 1898–1899 (Liverpool: F & E Gibbons, 1898), p. 75; Report of University Hall for the Year Ending 30th September 1907 (Liverpool: C. Tinling & Co., 1907), P7/22, University of Liverpool, p. 6. 33. ‘General Information’, University College of Sheffield, Calendar for the Session 1898–9 (Sheffield: Independent Press, 1899), p. 300; ‘University College Athletic Club’, Floreamus! A Chronicle of University College, Sheffield 1:1 (1897), p. 17; ‘University Athletics Ground’, The University of Sheffield Calendar for the Session 1915–16 (Sheffield: Independent Press, 1916), p. 707. 34. University House Association Newsletters (1908–1919), University House Old Residents’ Association, 1912, UB/HUH/B/3/1, University of Birmingham, p. 2. 35. M. Constanzo, ‘“One Can’t Shake Off the Women”: Images of Sport and Gender in Punch, 1901–10’, International Journal of the History of Sport 19:1 (2002), p. 34. 36. W. Peck, A Little Learning or A Victorian Childhood (London: Faber & Faber, 1952), p. 157. 37. J. A. Hargreaves, ‘Victorian Familism and the Formative Years of Female Sport’, in J. A. Mangan & R. J. Park (eds.), From “Fair Sex” to Feminism: Sport and the Socialisation of Women in the Industrial and Post-Industrial Eras (London: Cass, 1987), p. 141. 38. McCrone, Playing the Game, p. 2. 39. McCrone, Playing the Game, p. 282. 40. Park, ‘Sport, Gender and Society in a Transatlantic Victorian Perspective’, p. 87. 41. Deslandes, Oxbridge Men, p. 159. 42. A.  H. Marshall, ‘Tales of Trinity: No. IV.  Miss Henty’s May Week’, Granta, 27 February 1897, p. 226. 43. K.  Rowold, The Educated Woman: Minds, Bodies, and Women’s Higher Education in Britain, Germany, and Spain, 1865–1914 (Hoboken: Taylor & Francis, 2009), p. 17. 44. A. Sullivan, ‘The Fortnightly Review’, in A. Sullivan (ed.), British Literary Magazines: The Victorian and Edwardian Age, 1837–1913, vol. 3 (Westport & London: Greenwood Press, 1984), pp. 131–5.

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45. P.  Gardner, ‘The Proposed Degrees for Women’, Times, 11 February 1896, p. 12. 46. E. Showalter & E. Showalter, ‘Victorian Women and Menstruation’, in M.  Vicinus (ed.), Suffer and Be Still: Women in the Victorian Age (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972), p. 40. 47. G. E. Shuttleworth, ‘Mental Overstrain in Education’, Lancet 148:3808 (1896), p. 529. 48. M.  P. Tylecote, The Education of Women at Manchester University, 1883–1933 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1941), p. 31. 49. Calendars of Owens College, session 1884–5, p.  104, cited in Tylecote, The Education of Women at Manchester University, p. 31. 50. Prospectus (1910), ULIV Halls P7/39, Archive of the University of Liverpool: Records of Halls of Residence, University of Liverpool, p. 3. 51. B.  Harrison, ‘Women and health’, in J.  Purvis (ed.), Women’s History: Britain, 1850–1945 (London & New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 158–9. 52. E. H. Clarke, Sex in Education or, A Fair Chance for Girls (Boston: James R. Osgood & Company, 1873), p. 39. 53. G.  Allen, ‘Plain Words on the Woman Question’, Fortnightly Review 46:274 (1889), p. 456. 54. B.  A. Clough, A Memoir of Anne Jemima Clough, First Principal of Newnham College, Cambridge (London: E. Arnold, 1903), p. 163. 55. A. Gardner, A Short History of Newnham College (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1921), p. 31. 56. M.  P. Marshall, What I Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1947), p. 15. 57. P. Hirsch, ‘Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon: Feminist Leader and Founder of the First University College for Women’, in M.  Hilton & P.  Hirsch (eds.), Practical Visionaries: Women, Education and Social Progress 1790–1930 (Harlow: Pearson Education Limited, 2000), p. 96. 58. ‘Athletics for Women’, Magnet 1:4 (1899), p. 103. 59. D. Johnson, ‘To all past and present Members of the Association—especially past’, University Hall Association (July 1911), P8/6–26: Newsletters (1911–1946), University of Liverpool, p. 1. 60. Report of health of students of University House (1904–1914), UB/ HUH/A/7/2, University of Birmingham. 61. Report of health of students of University House. 62. University House Association Newsletters (1908–1919), University House Old Residents’ Association, 1912, UB/HUH/B/3/1, University of Birmingham, p.  2. Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska discusses the rise of Swedish Drill as the dominant method of female physical education in Britain in Managing the Body: Beauty, Health, and Fitness in Britain 1880–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 110.

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63. J. M. Bowie, ‘Recollections of May C. Staveley, First Warden of Clifton Hill House, 1909–1934’, DM2227/6/1, University of Bristol, p. 30. 64. P.  Atkinson, ‘The Feminist Physique: Physical Education and the Medicalization of Women’s Education’, in J.  A. Mangan & R.  J. Park (eds.), From “Fair Sex” to Feminism: Sport and the Socialisation of Women in the Industrial and Post-Industrial Eras (London: Cass, 1987), p. 54. 65. C. Crowther (Kenyon, 1896), in A. Phillips (ed.), A Newnham Anthology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 39. 66. E.  C. Lodge, Terms and Vacations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1938), p. 57. 67. Hargreaves, ‘Victorian Familism and the Formative Years of Female Sport’, p. 136. 68. Hargreaves, ‘Victorian Familism and the Formative Years of Female Sport’, p. 136. 69. Odlum (St Hilda’s 1909). 70. ‘S.R.C. Notes—Men’s’, The Sphinx 3:26 (1896), p. 151. 71. ‘College Patriotism’, Owens College Magazine, 24:1 (1891), p. 30. 72. ‘Athletic Sports’, Owens College Magazine 21:3 (1889), p. 219. 73. ‘Inter-University Sports’, Mermaid, 5:1 (1908), p. 21. 74. McCrone, Playing the Game, p. 27. 75. L.  M. Faithfull, In the House of my Pilgrimage (London: Chatto & Windus, 1924), p. 62. 76. McCrone, Playing the Game, p. 127. 77. Hockey Field (8 December, 1904), p. 117, cited in McCrone, Playing the Game, p. 127. 78. M.  A. Quiggin (Hingston, 1899), in A.  Phillips (ed.), A Newnham Anthology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 46. 79. Levsen, ‘Constructing Elite Identities’, p. 163. 80. T. Hendrey-Seabrook, ‘Spinster of arts—the terrible result of higher education for women’, Popular Narrative Media 2:1 (2009), p. 64. 81. Quiggin, p. 46. 82. B. Megson & J. Lindsay, Girton College 1869–1959: An informal history (Cambridge: W. Heffer & Sons, 1960), p. 43. 83. H.  M. Kempthorne (Peile). Extract from a notebook, c. 1869, in A.  Phillips (ed.), A Newnham Anthology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 1. 84. Quiggin, p. 45. 85. H.  Macmillan quoted in J.  Morris (ed.), The Oxford Book of Oxford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 361. 86. Deslandes, Oxbridge Men, pp. xi–xii. 87. J.  Gilbert, ‘Women Students and Student Life at England’s Civil Universities before the First World War’, History of Education 23:4 (1994), p. 405.

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88. Tylecote, The Education of Women at Manchester University, p. 33. 89. Liberal, ‘The Ladies’ Common Room’, Mason University College Magazine, 17:4 (1899), p. 112. 90. F.  E. Willcox, ‘Social Life’, Mason University College Magazine, 17:5 (1899), p. 134. 91. ‘The Soirée’, Owens College Union Magazine 2:11 (1885), p. 61. 92. ‘The Union Soirée’, Owens College Union Magazine 3:21 (1896), p. 53. 93. ‘Reminiscences Mrs Barrell’, Reminiscences: Papers relating to the history of University College Bristol, and the University of Bristol, DM219/ series five, University of Bristol. p. 2; ‘Social Clubs, etc.’, Floreamus! A Chronicle of University College, Sheffield 1:2 (1897), p. 36. 94. Carleton, A University for Bristol, p. 103; T. Kelly, For Advancement of Learning: The University of Liverpool 1881–1981 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1981), p. 169. 95. Kelly, For Advancement of Learning, p. 169. 96. Chapman, The Story of a Modern University, p. 244. 97. Mathers, Steel City Scholars, p. 55. 98. Rosapaen, ‘The Dance’, Floreamus! A Chronicle of University College, Sheffield, 3:35 (1909), p. 358. 99. J. J. Nott, Going to the Palais: A Social and Cultural History of Dancing and Dance Halls in Britain, 1918–1960 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 3. 100. Tylecote, The Education of Women at Manchester University, p. 73. 101. I.  G. Gregory, In Memory of Burlington Street: An appreciation of the Manchester University Unions 1861–1957 (Manchester: Manchester University Union, 1958), p. 80. 102. Nott, Going to the Palais, p. 163. 103. ‘Liverpool Letter’, Iris (July 1888), GB 133 UMP/2/5, University of Manchester, p. 7. 104. ‘Liverpool Letter’, p. 7. 105. ‘Liverpool Letter’, p. 7. 106. E.  Munson, ‘Walking on the Periphery: Gender and the discourse of modernization’, Journal of Social History 36:1 (2002), pp. 63–75. 107. ‘60 years of academic life in Bristol: Except for a few minor changes, a verbatim record of a talk (around slides) to the Forum of the Senior Common Room, Bristol University, on March 10th, 1958, by Emeritus Professor A.M. Tyndall’, Reminiscences: Papers relating to the history of University College Bristol, and the University of Bristol, DM219/series five, University of Bristol, p. 1. 108. L.  B. Voss Snook, ‘The Women’s Reading Room’, Magnet 2:5 (1900), p. 161.

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109. ‘Women’s Department’, University of Birmingham Students’ Handbook (1904–1905), UB/GUILD/E/3/8, University of Birmingham, p. 1. 110. ‘Department for Women—Debating Society Soirée’, Owens College Union Magazine 5:40 (1898), p. 44. 111. ‘College Life’, Iris (March 1894), GB 133 UMP/2/5, University of Manchester, p. 10. 112. ‘The Women’s Section’, Sphinx 1:1 (1893), p. 12. 113. ‘University College’, Bristol Mercury and Daily Post, 22 November 1894, p. 3. 114. The Editors, ‘Editorial’, Magnet 2:1 (1899), p.  6; Voss Snook, ‘The Women’s Reading Room’, p. 162. 115. ‘Student Stories’, Owens College Magazine 21:3 (1889), p. 218. 116. ‘60 years of academic life in Bristol’, p. 1. 117. B. V. S., ‘A Causerie on Social Life at Mason’s’, Mason University College Magazine 17:3 (1899), p. 70. 118. B. V. S., ‘A Causerie on Social Life at Mason’s’, p. 70. 119. ‘The Ladies’ Common Room’, Mason University College Magazine, 17:2 (1898), p. 44. 120. Letter from women students, Mason University College Council minute book (1898–1900), UB/MC/B/1/5, University of Birmingham, pp. 186–7. 121. Letter from women students, pp. 186–7.

CHAPTER 7

Unions, Guilds, and Extra-Curricular Spaces

In November 1911, the student magazine of the University of Liverpool ran a column entitled ‘Chats with Celebrities,’ in which prominent students were interviewed in a mildly satirical vein about their life, studies, and extra-curricular involvements. For this issue, the subject was Miss Harriet E. Hudson, third-year Science student and Lady President of the Guild of Undergraduates alongside her male counterpart, Alec M. Kininmouth. The Sphinx extolled her various achievements, noting her time as President of the Education Society and her prominent connection with the Women’s Science Club.1 However, her ‘most reassuring features,’ according to the Sphinx, were that ‘she is neither a suffragette nor a teetotal fanatic.’2 Rather, she was—‘in the best sense of the word’—a thorough ‘sport,’ a personality trait that ‘endears her especially to the men undergraduates of the University.’3 The Sphinx clearly saw popularity with the male portion of the student body as a valuable asset for the Lady President of the Guild of Undergraduates, and for them her election to the position was fortuitously timed. As the profile explained, She has come at a critical moment in the history of the relationship between the men and women students of the University, which recently seemed strained and in danger. No one could be more fitted to weld together the cleaving parties; since no one can command in so high a degree at once the respect, the obedience and the confidence of both.4 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Oman, Higher Education and the Gendering of Space in England and Wales, 1869–1909, Genders and Sexualities in History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29987-2_7

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Upon its foundation as a University College in 1881, the nascent University of Liverpool had enshrined the equal access of male and female students into its charter. All day and evening classes were open to men and women equally, with only the medical faculty imposing a bar on female students, a prohibition that was in line with other higher education institutions of this period, and one that was finally removed in 1903.5 As the case of Harriet Hudson shows, however, male and female students engaged with university life outside of the classroom, forming and becoming members of various clubs, societies, unions, and guilds. These extra-curricular spaces comprised areas where non-academic activities took place, such as Students’ Unions and Guilds, Student Representative Councils (SRCs), and debating and other clubs and societies. In extra-curricular spaces, members could exercise power, explicitly engage with the topical political questions of the day, and otherwise socialise in a space that was outside the bounds of the lecture theatre and classroom, but still subject to a degree of formality and structure. The extra-curricular spaces of universities and colleges during this period highlight the gap that existed between equal admission and true coeducation. As society at large grappled with the complicated questions of women’s rights, enfranchisement, and role in government, the student clubs and societies of universities and colleges provided an arena for these issues to be contested in miniature. Relations between men and women students in student government and political societies during this period were not uniform across institutions, however. In 1894, the rules of the Mason College Union in Birmingham, which was open to men and women students alike, required at least ‘six Ladies’ sit on the General Committee, to ensure the representation of women students.6 Meanwhile, six years later in 1900, the women students of Owens College in Manchester finally gave up on waiting to be admitted to their college’s Union—‘which can hardly bear the name with justice, while the women students are excluded from it’—and founded their own.7 The path towards gender equality in these spaces was also not a teleological march towards progress. Advances could be made towards more equal representation, then just as easily walked back. The calendar of University College Bristol for the session 1885–1886 lists separate men’s and women’s debating societies, but by 1890–1891 a joint society was in operation.8 The Social and Debating Society, as it was known, actively sought ‘the promotion of intercourse amongst its members by means of meetings for debates and discussion of subjects of general interest, and of

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occasional social evenings,’ indicating that the social function of the society was not insignificant.9 It is therefore notable that they advertised as ‘open to men and women,’ and that three members of the five-person committee—including the vice-president, ‘Miss W.  E. Walker’—were women.10 Ten years later, however, separate men’s and women’s branches had returned, although ‘one in each term is a joint meeting.’11 The reasons for this separation are not clear, but are perhaps related to the ‘social’ aspect of the Social and Debating Society. In 1909, the year before the separation of the debating society, an article in the student magazine of Aberdeen University, Alma Mater, referred to ‘a certain society at Bristol that has become so very social that it finds it impossible to debate on any subject whatever.’12 The gendering of extra-curricular spaces was not clear cut, therefore, but was defined by division, unification, co-operation, and even gendered-quotas, with these policies often haphazardly applied or relaxed and re-exerted over time.

Students’ Unions On 3 November 1911, the new Students’ Union building of the University of Liverpool had its formal opening ceremony. ‘At last our dream has come true,’ rhapsodised the Sphinx, ‘and we now have a Union and Debating Hall of which any University could be proud.’13 Such exclamations were slightly premature, however, as the building that was unveiled on 11 November was only half completed. Designed by Charles Herbert Reilly, the university’s own Professor of Architecture, the Union building was envisioned as two distinct halves that would form a complementary— yet separate—whole. One wing for the men, and one for the women, connected in the middle by Gilmour Hall.14 The two sides would have separate entrances, and even fronted onto two different streets, with Bedford Street for the men and Mount Pleasant for the women. Even the architectural style of each façade reflected the innate gender distinctions of the building, with William Whyte noting the use of Baroque features for the men’s wing, while the women’s had ‘a more refined Regency.’15 The choice to so clearly delineate the boundaries between the men’s and women’s Union was not merely an architectural and stylistic one, but rather reflected a firmly held and explicitly articulated belief on the part of university authorities that the Unions should be kept separate. In the two years between the completion of the men’s side and that of the women’s

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side, some female students requested permission to use the new building until their own became available. The minutes of the Students’ Union Building Committee reveal that, although this arrangement was officially presented to the Committee, ‘the question of temporarily dividing the men’s wing of the Union has been definitely abandoned.’16 For many women, who had contributed to the construction of the Union via subscription, the two-year delay in being able to use it seemed unfair. Even the use of the refectory was denied them, despite the fact that the old refectory that both men and women students had previously shared had already been knocked down. The Sphinx addressed the issue in its usual satirical tone, taking on the persona of an irritated female student. We women feel highly aggrieved to know that we are excluded from all share in the Union except by act of courtesy from the men. We feel that as our subscriptions have largely gone to its construction we should be sharers in its privileges. Above all, sir, we feel that the practice of the Union Committee in refusing the use of the building for mixed socials is pernicious— abominable—villainous—.17

While the women waited for their own wing to be constructed, the male students comfortably settled into ownership of the new building. With women denied even temporary access, a belief that the Students’ Union was a male space, whose goings on were beyond the remit of female students, began to emerge. Even if the women students of Liverpool belonged to the Students’ Union as an organisation, as they did, their exclusion from the physical space in which it was represented, the Students’ Union as a building, served to weaken their claim to authority. This attitude came to a head over a 1911 vote over whether or not to sell beer in the new Union dining room. This ‘very moderate proposal,’ as it was described in a Sphinx editorial, was ultimately defeated, an outcome angrily attributed to ‘the strength of the women’s vote.’18 The resentment of what was seen as women meddling in men’s affairs was clear, with the editorial declaring that ‘the women were ill-advised to vote upon a question which so little concerns them.’19 The Janus-faced design of the Liverpool Students’ Union reflects the separate but equal ethos that defined many universities’ attitudes to coeducation during this period at institutions across England and Wales. Through informal systems and procedures such as the planning of buildings, authorities could regulate and shape how men and women students

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interacted with each other, while still adhering to official policies of coeducation and equal access. By controlling the spaces through which students moved and inhabited, via their design and construction, institutions aimed to control behaviour and contain mixed-gender socialisation. The Liverpool Students’ Union building was not alone in its design rationale. Sir William Fletcher Shaw, Chairman of the Owens’ College Students’ Union for the session 1906–1907, remembered the physical separation of the men’s and women’s unions during that period. The University lent a plot of land to accommodate both the Men’s and Women’s Unions, and plans were secured for these to be under one roof, but otherwise completely separate. Not only was each Union completely self-contained, but their entrances were separated as far as possible, one in Lime Grove and the other in Burlington Street.20

These separate entrances remained for a time the only access to either side of Union, with not a single interior door to link them. Though one was later installed, I. G. Gregory notes in his history of the Manchester University Unions that it was ‘kept strictly locked and barred.’21 Although both men and women students made use of a shared refectory at mealtimes, ‘even here the suggestion was made that women students should be screened from view behind a curtain,’ according to Mabel Tylecote.22 Julie Gilbert argues that the existence of divided men’s and women’s unions at the English civic universities before the First World War paints a misleading picture of mixed-gender interaction and female participation at these institutions. Separate facilities did not equal separate activities, she contends, positing that unions and student councils ‘tended to adhere to a general pattern of gender segregation while in fact fostering contact and co-operation between male and female students.’23 This idea of contact and co-operation can be complicated somewhat by a closer examination of the relations between single-sex unions at different institutions, which poses the question to what extent were interactions between men and women students shaped by forces from above, through the decisions of university administrators and the regulation of space, and to what extent were they determined by the attitudes of students themselves. As Carol Dyhouse notes, the existence of separate societies for men and women students may reflect policy on the part of university authorities, but it may also have represented student choice, and ‘a pattern of normative expectations about the ordering of social life.’24 Christine D. Myers

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argues that it is the ‘extra-academic life’ of students at coeducational universities, such as unions, clubs, and societies, that ‘provides some of the most compelling evidence that students themselves wished to maintain separate spheres of activity despite working toward the same degrees.’25 Socialisation of men with men and women with women was not always dictated from above, but often came from the students themselves. This process is revealed most clearly at University College Bristol, which began proceedings to establish a Union in 1906. The minutes of the Union Committee reveal that, in November 1907, a Dr Walker proposed allowing women students to become members of the Union, ‘on payment of the ordinary subscription.’ The motion was approved and passed, and Dr Walker and Professor Cowl were tasked with negotiating the amalgamation with the Women’s Union. 26 However, the following February, the Secretary of the Committee read out a resolution received from the Women’s Union, in which, despite ‘appreciating the principle of equality,’ they ‘deeply regret that they cannot avail themselves of the men’s kind proposal to amalgamate with the Women’s Union.’27 It appears that this decision was at least partly financial. The women students were ‘unable to pay the full subscription’ required by the men’s Union, and a proposal to let them join at the reduced rate of fifteen shillings per annum was defeated.28 One member of the sub-committee formed to discuss the terms of amalgamation with the Women’s Executive felt that ‘it would be contrary to the best interest of the Union to admit women at reduced terms,’ and so, being unable to pay, the women were prevented from joining.29 Separate unions remained at Bristol until 1924, and the policy of electing separate presidents (one man and one woman) endured until 1971.30 Conversely, the women students at Manchester resisted forming their own Union for years, in the hope that the men would allow them to join theirs. ‘They feared lest the establishment of any new Union among the women might delay their admission to the larger Union,’ read an article in the Owens College Union Magazine in 1900, ‘and they disliked the appearance of any separatist tendencies.’31 It was only in 1900, nearly forty years after the formation of the men’s Union in 1861, that they reluctantly established their own. In the end, single-sex Unions emerged at both institutions, but as a result of different factors. Financial considerations at Bristol was matched by deliberate exclusion at Manchester, with both forces shaping how men and women students inhabited and enacted the political spaces of their institutions.

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Debating The Students’ Unions of the civic universities during this period served a myriad of functions. At these non-residential institutions, they provided essential spaces for students to eat, study, and relax between lectures, through the provision of refectories, common rooms, and even temporary accommodation—spaces that would have traditionally been provided by a student’s college in the residential model of a university. However, they maintained some links with the original sense of the word that had originated with the Oxford and Cambridge unions: they were debating societies. Debating has a long and storied history at the ancient universities, where the unions were (and remain) among the oldest and most prestigious of all student organisations. They were also inherently masculine spaces. Dyhouse notes how their very purpose was to allow men to ‘sharpen their wits in political argument,’ and to ‘practise and perfect those skills in oratory that would stand them in good stead for public positions in later life. They were quintessentially areas of masculine performance.’32 These institutions excluded women from their proto-governmental playing, just as women were excluded from full citizenship and the right to vote in the real world of British politics. 33 ‘Of course we weren’t allowed,’ recalled Doris Maude Odlum, who came up to St Hilda’s College in 1909, of joining the Oxford Union. ‘That was entirely male at that time.’34 However, the political rights of women were not the only factor keeping women students out. Both the Oxford and Cambridge Union Societies would not officially admit women until 1963, decades after women had received the vote and the fight to be awarded degrees had been won.35 David Livingston has written on the connections between what he terms ‘location’ and ‘locution,’ namely ‘in what ways particular settings confine or facilitate oral exchange.’36 Social spaces, he argues, shape—and are shaped by—speech, with different spaces having their own protocols for its management.37 This is particularly true of educational spaces, such as universities, as Livingstone elaborates. It strikes me that understanding how different educational establishments manage their speech spaces, how they are policed, who is allowed access to key conversations in different settings, have all shaped—and continue to shape—the ways in which teaching and learning have changed over time.

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This speaks to wider themes of boundaries, transgression, and the regulation of space, but also takes on a very literal resonance when applied to the space of the debating hall. As a space, whether specifically designed and built as such or simply a spare classroom, the debating hall exposes many of these issues regarding the management and policing of speech, and how this speech is shaped by its setting. This is particularly true for women, and even more so for women during this mid-to-late nineteenth and early twentieth-century period. The Victorian prohibition on women speaking in public, Dyhouse notes, remained in force even in the middle part of the nineteenth century, with the papers and articles of female writers having to be read out by sympathetic men in public settings, while the author sat in the audience—even Emily Davies’ famous lectures on women’s education ‘were always read out by a man.’38 The honing of debating skills as preparation for active (and therefore male) political life, combined with nineteenth-century ideas about the appropriateness of women speaking in public, served to shape the establishment of debating societies at both the new coeducational institutions of the second half of the century, and the women’s colleges of Oxford and Cambridge. At Oxford and Cambridge, excluded from the unions, students at the women’s colleges quickly realised they were provided with a rare all-female environment in which they could speak and debate without fear of public censure. The establishment of the first women’s colleges in the 1870s also coincided (and was a product of) the increasing involvement of women in public life and political issues. The foundation of debating societies at Girton, Newnham, Somerville, and Lady Margaret Hall, argues Wiggins, was a result of female students taking advantage of the space provided by their colleges to ‘[form] a political identity based upon their collegiate political experience,’ and mirrored the real world intensification of women’s participation in politics. 39 It is important to note, however, that debating societies did not confine their discussions to merely high politics. Motions such as ‘that the Rational Costume fully justifies its name,’ ‘that Platonic Friendships are undesirable,’ and ‘that there is no good reason why women should not smoke’ demonstrate how the first generations of female students and academics were engaging with what it meant to live a life of the mind as a woman.40 When Mary Paley, a former student of Newnham College, went to teach at University College Bristol, she established a debating society for the women students there. That the society mirrored the explicitly political concerns of the men’s clubs, rather than confining itself to what might

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be considered ‘women’s issues,’ was clear from the start. As Marian Pease, who started at Bristol as a student in 1876, remembered in later life, ‘the society was so lively that on one occasion at least the debate had to be adjourned—the subject was Irish Home Rule.’41 At the Oxford women’s colleges, this political focus was made more explicit by the holding of mock parliaments. The following description of one such meeting appeared in the Fritillary, the joint magazine of the Oxford women’s colleges, in November 1913. Parliament met on Friday, November 7th. The Liberals were in power. A Bill for the Reform of the House of Lords was read for the second time and passed by a large majority42

These mock parliaments, along with the more standard debating societies of the Oxford women’s colleges, were exclusively female spaces, and zealously guarded as such. In 1910, the Oxford Students’ Debating Society (O.S.D.S.), which comprised members of all the women’s colleges, proposed to hold a debate on ‘the admission of women to the franchise.’ The Honorary Secretary of the society wrote to Charlotte Anne Moberly, Principal of St Hugh’s Hall, requesting permission to ask the Anti-Suffrage Society to ‘send a good man down to speak at the debate.’43 The heads of the five women’s halls discussed the issue, and ultimately decided that gentlemen would be able to take part in O.S.D.S. debates on the condition that (a) it happened no more than once a year; (b) the name of the man be submitted to the principals for approval before being invited; (c) that no undergraduates of the university be invited; and (d) that no men form part of the audience.44 As it turns out, the Society was ‘able to secure a good woman speaker,’ and would ‘not after all be under the necessity of inviting a man to speak on that occasion.’45 At the new, coeducational civic universities, however, the separation between the men’s and women’s debating societies was more fluid. Bristol was rare in having a completely mixed society, a fact acknowledged in the student magazine, the Magnet, which in 1899 declared ‘[i]t is not every Debating Club that possesses the privilege of hearing the views of both sexes on any question, a privilege that adds to the value of the debates for listeners and speakers alike.’46 At Bangor, a debating society had been founded by the University College’s second session, in 1885–1886.47 The society was mixed, and as such was subject to strict regulations aimed at safeguarding student conduct. An 1888 rule that ‘no mixed meeting of

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students may be held in the College after 5:30 p.m., or continued after that hour’ was relaxed the following year so that the rule would not apply to the debating society, but severe chaperonage rules were nevertheless enforced. As usual, the onus was placed on the women students, rather than the men, with the rules stating that ‘the attendance of Women Students at evening meetings of the Choral and Debating Societies is dependent upon the following conditions’: that ‘each student must come and return in the company of her own parent or guardian,’ and that ‘at least one of the ladies thus escorting students must have undertaken to be present during the whole meeting.’48 To read the minutes of the Debating Society, therefore, in which the six-person committee was split evenly between men and women students and lists of supporters and opposers of each debate reveal that men and women debated each other, does not tell the whole story. While a mixed group of men and women students may have debated topics such as the motion that ‘Shakespeare’s women are weaker creations than his men,’ they did so in a space which the women students had to be escorted to and from by a parent or guardian, and in which a chaperone had to be present at all times.49 While the other civic universities may not have gone so far during this period as to amalgamate their debating societies completely, there was at least some interaction between the men’s and women’s sides. In Manchester, the men’s society held ‘ladies’ nights,’ which were ‘thrown open to the lady friends of members and to the members of the Lady Students’ Social Debating Society,’ while Liverpool held their first ‘United Debate’ in 1893.50 However, reactions to these joint events serve to highlight the discrepancies between men and women debating in public. In 1892, J. Harold Bailey complained in the Owens College Magazine about what he saw as the women students’ lack of enthusiasm for college life. The lady students—unlike their sisters at Mason College, Birmingham—do not join any of the Union Societies, and such subjects as Women’s Suffrage and Education for Women are discussed at the Debating Society without the ladies having any say in the matter.51

When women students did attend events such as one of the debating ‘ladies’ nights,’ they were criticised for not speaking up and being more involved. The Owens College Magazine, describing one such night in 1895, wrote,

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The speeches of two ladies present—Miss Cook and Miss Winstanley—were listened to with much interest and pleasure. We could only wish that more of the ladies present had followed their excellent example.52

What the men students saw as lack of interest and ‘retiring modesty,’ however, the women students themselves saw as caution in entering the male space of their brother society.53 One anonymous female debater at Manchester wrote of a ‘policy of caution’ which characterised their behaviour whenever they attended an open meeting with the men, but urged her fellow women that ‘[e]ven caution should have its limits, and it is time that our attitude of critical reserve or respectful admiration was exchanged for a more active part.’54 The segregation of university and collegiate debating societies can therefore be seen as an example of how separate spaces for women could be nurturing and protective, rather than purely exclusionary. When attending mixed debates with the men, women could be overshadowed and overawed, resulting in limited participation and literal, as well as figurative, silencing. Women-only debating societies, on the other hand, allowed women to develop their skills and confidence in a supportive setting. At Birmingham, the Ladies’ Debating Society of Mason College urged all women students to join their club for precisely these confidence-­ building reasons. ‘[M]any still stay away because they “cannot speak,”’ they wrote in their college magazine. ‘[And] those are the very ones who should come and practice.’55 At Newnham, the Political Debating Society met once a week to give students practice in ‘ready impromptu speaking’ to build confidence.56 At the same time, for men and women students at the civic universities who had very little social interaction outside their classes, mixed debating societies or occasional joint debates provided a space for men and women students to speak to each other and exchange opinions, albeit in a highly regulated and supervised space. Spatially, the ability of debating to perform this function—as a bridge between two often disparate halves of the student body—is epitomised by the design of the Liverpool Students’ Union building, in which the debating hall served as the only shared space between the men’s and women’s sides.

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Student Government While debating societies and mock parliaments may have given men and women students the opportunity to play at government, the election of Student Representative Councils (SRCs) at the civic universities from the late nineteenth century allowed students to practice politics in a more formalised way. Fitzroy Bell inaugurated the first ever SRC in Britain when he founded one at the University of Edinburgh in 1884, the three functions of which were defined as the following: (a) To represent the students in matters affecting their interests (b) To afford a recognised means of communication between the students and the university authorities (c) To promote social life and academic unity among students57 While the remaining Scottish universities had all founded their own SRCs within two years, student government in England took a little longer to get off the ground.58 While some civic colleges founded ‘unions,’ such as Owens College in 1851, these were essentially debating societies, rather than bodies formed to represent student interests.59 As Eric Ashby and Mary Anderson notes, ‘there were many active student societies’ in English colleges and universities, but ‘no effective machinery for representation of the student view, such as existed in Scotland.’60 It was not until Ramsay Muir, the son of a Scottish Presbyterian Minister, entered University College Liverpool that this began to change. In 1889, he inaugurated the first Student Representative Council at an English university, writing later in life that when he first arrived at Liverpool, such bodies ‘existed in the Scottish Universities, but not, as yet in any of the English Colleges.’61 The idea proved to be a popular one, however, and ten years later, in 1899, the Magnet at University College Bristol wrote of the need to have a Students’ Representative Council ‘on lines similar to those adopted in the Scottish Universities and in many of the University Colleges in England.’62 By 1909, three English universities—Birmingham, Liverpool, and Bristol—had statutory provision for undergraduates to participate in university government by membership of their courts.63 As with the Students’ Unions, there was the question of whether these SRCs would be segregated or mixed. Gilbert argues that ‘unlike the unions, student governing bodies were not formally divided between male and female students.’64 On the contrary, she argues, student councils ‘were

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founded in the early twentieth century to unify the newly chartered civic universities.’65 This was certainly true for some institutions. Indeed, many civic universities implemented quotas, to make sure that there was an even split between male and female representatives. At Bangor, an SRC was founded in the 1899–1900 session, with the rules of the new council mandating that the General Committee consist of ‘four men and three women students.’66 In 1906, the first Executive Committee of the new SRC at Sheffield included three women.67 However, this attempt at equality was by no means uniform across institutions. In 1894, the Mason College Magazine ran an article criticising University College Liverpool for having separate SRCs for men and women. One of the founders of the Liverpool SRC wrote back, defending their position. ‘There would, of course, be advantages in a united Council,’ they wrote, ‘but with us, at least, the interest of the men and women, are, in many cases, quite distinct.’68 This was despite one of the stated aims of the Liverpool SRC being ‘to promote academic and social unity among the students.’69 At the most basic level, of course, the purpose of all clubs and societies at the civic universities, political or otherwise, was to promote unity among the students. As non-residential institutions, where students did not live together but rather travelled to and from their own homes at the beginning and end of each day, corporate life was somewhat lacking. This was a concern for many early students, whose ideas of university life had been shaped by imaginings of the collegiate camaraderie of Oxford and Cambridge. The foundation of college clubs and societies was seen as a way to replicate this sense of community in a non-collegiate institution, giving students a place to meet and mingle when not in lectures or classes. However, this distinction was often temporal rather than spatial, as out-of-­ hours lecture halls and class rooms often provided the sites for clubs and societies to gather. A social evening for Arts and Science students at University College Sheffield in 1897, for example, was ‘of course’ held in the Lecture Hall.70 Clubs and societies did not inhabit their own specially constructed spaces, but rather provide evidence of how material spaces become different places at different times, based upon how they are occupied and used. Ramsay Muir, whose desire for collegiate life led him not only to found the Liverpool SRC, but also become editor of the Sphinx, such pursuits were of as much importance as the academic work involved in taking a degree. ‘The college was no more than a mere knowledge-­ shop’ he wrote, of the state of University College Liverpool when he arrived. ‘[It] had not begun to become a living society.’71

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Similar anxieties were present at institutions all over England and Wales. The University of Birmingham Students’ Handbook, distributed to all new students for the 1904–1905 session, implored its readers to get involved in extra-curricular activities.72 In ‘A Word to Freshman,’ instructions included, ‘every student, of whatever department, should join the union’; ‘everyone, of course, will subscribe to his or her magazine’; ‘everyone should also find time to join at least one society’; and ‘if you play [athletics], play for your University and not for outside clubs.’73 At Bristol, the Nonesuch of 1913 wished to impress upon all freshers that they have entered the University not merely to attend lectures, take their degrees, and go down, but to form part of the corporate life of the institution… We strongly advise the freshers to join as many clubs, both literary and athletic, as possible.74

While the foundation of clubs and societies could serve to unite the student body, they could also serve to exclude elements of it, particularly along gender lines. Dyhouse uses the term ‘a heightening of boundaries’ to refer to ‘assumptions about the membership of certain societies, or about the nature of male fellowship’ that were suddenly made explicit at the time when women were beginning to make their presence felt in university communities.75 The list of college clubs and societies in the calendar of University College Liverpool for the session 1898–1899 reveals that, in addition to separate SRCs and debating societies, men and women also had separate athletic clubs and separate branches of the Christian Union.76 While this could be read as an act of exclusion, the development of separate associations for men and women also provided space for women students to form clubs and societies that addressed issues that pertained directly to them. In the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century period, one such issue was the question of votes for women.

The Suffrage Question In the late Victorian and Edwardian period, the suffrage question made its presence felt in higher education institutions across England and Wales, and particularly within the political spaces of the campus. That the movement to educate women equally with men would intersect with the campaign for enfranchisement is not surprising, and indeed several figures in the suffrage movement were among the early wave of women to receive a

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university education. Christabel Pankhurst received a law degree from Owens College, Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) activist and organiser Florence Macaulay went to Somerville on a scholarship, Emily Wilding Davison studied at both Royal Holloway and St Hugh’s, and Rona Robinson, the industrial chemist and suffragette hunger striker, achieved a first class science degree from the Victoria University of Manchester.77 Even earlier than this, however, the cause of women’s education had been entwined with the question of suffrage—sometimes against its will. The rising middle classes described in Chap. 1 who were so instrumental in the founding of the civic universities were often involved in radical politics, including suffragism. Jane Rendell has drawn attention to how the growth of new forms of liberalism, ‘especially among the civic elites of mid nineteenth-century Britain,’ encouraged a degree of political understanding, consciousness, and engagement among certain middle-class women.78 In 1858, Bessie Rayner Parkes and Barbara Bodichon established the Englishwoman’s Journal in Langham Place, which was to become a centre for like-minded women concerned with a cross section of women’s rights, including female employment and the legal position of married women.79 Both Unitarians from politically radical middle-class families, Bodichon went on to be one of the earliest and greatest supporters of Girton College, while the founding principal of that college, Emily Davies, was a member of the Langham Place group and briefly edited the Journal.80 This is not to say that the women’s colleges and those involved with the fight to expand women’s education elsewhere were uniformly supportive of the suffrage cause. Indeed, Laura Schwartz and Julia Bush in particular have drawn attention to the complicated relationship between the women’s educational movement and that for women’s rights more broadly. ‘The relationship between feminism and women’s education was by no means straightforward,’ argues Schwartz, while Bush notes that leading female educators consciously distanced themselves from the suffrage movement to avoid controversy and potential damage to their cause.81 Once Emily Davies concentrated her efforts upon the admission of women to Cambridge, for example, her work for the wider cause of women’s rights had to be put aside, or at least kept quiet. Performing secretarial work for the Women’s Suffrage Committee upon its formation, Davies stipulated she not be named ‘to avoid the risk of damaging my work in the education field by its being associated with the agitation for the franchise.’82

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The idea that women’s education could—and should—remain separate from the political question of women’s rights was given a thorough airing during the controversy surrounding the 1897 vote to admit women to degrees at Cambridge.83 Even the Chairman of the London Committee for Promoting the Admission of Women to the Titles of Degrees, Professor John Westlake, commended Cambridge’s proposal, which stopped short of awarding full membership of the university, for ‘[drawing] the line with precision between women’s education and women’s rights.’84 Bush has drawn attention to how the cause of women’s higher education found ‘varied champions’ among suffragists, non-suffragists, ‘or even convinced anti-suffragists,’ such as Mary Augusta Ward, whose support for women’s higher education and opposition to women’s suffrage both fit, as Emily Colt argues, ‘within her historically specific difference feminism.’85 Nevertheless, by the first decade of the twentieth century, the spectre of suffrage became more prominent in both the women’s colleges of Oxford and Cambridge and the coeducational civic universities. In 1906 Charlotte Stopes visited the University of Liverpool to address their Women’s Suffrage Society, and in 1909 a student named Margaret Ker from the same institution was arrested for setting fire to a pillar box in the city.86 She was sent to prison for three months but was not expelled from the university, although she did lose her scholarship valued at £30 a year.87 This sort of militancy was rare among university women, however, with Dyhouse pointing out that many women students consciously avoided militant action, regardless of their views on the matter, purely because of a need to protect their reputation for a future career in teaching.88 Suffrage societies were established early at the women’s colleges, with Annie Rogers, a prominent figure in the initial movement for women’s education at Oxford and one of the founders of St Anne’s College, writing in later life that ‘nearly all the educational women were moderate but convinced suffragists.’89 However, as at the civic universities, association with militancy was consciously avoided. Alice Gardner, who went up to Newnham in 1876 and later wrote a history of the College, notes that among the staff and students there were ‘several who felt much disgusted with the lawlessness and general want of reason and sobriety with which, in some quarters, the political cause of women was associated.’90 Rogers described a similar situation at Oxford, where, so strong was the fanaticism of certain anti-suffragists that the holding of a meeting by non-militants at Somerville led to the resignation of the secre-

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tary to the Council of the college, the loss of her husband’s subscription, and the withdrawal of a scholarship given by an Oxford resident in memory of his first wife.91

St Hugh’s College represented a rare bridge between the women’s education movement and militant suffragism, given its most generous benefactor was Clara Evelyn Mordan, a prominent supporter of the WSPU.92 Mordan spoke at, as well as contributing financially to, the 1908 WSPU procession—to which St Hugh’s sent a contingent, having advertised the event on the college notice board—and also contributed £200 in June 1912 specifically to support the renewal of militancy.93 At the coeducational civic universities, however, the relationship with the suffrage question was even more complicated. More so than at the women’s colleges, the establishment of suffrage societies and speaking visits from prominent figures in the movement could highlight the differences in opinion between men and women students that divided these supposedly harmonious institutions. At the University of Bristol, this gulf was revealed in 1913 when suffragettes burned down the men’s sports pavilion in an arson attack, leading to a group of male undergraduates attacking the WSPU shop and office on Queen’s Road. This retaliatory action was described playfully in the student magazine, the Nonesuch, which declared ‘we may congratulate ourselves on the completeness of our revenge on the “Suffs.”’94 In the same issue, they ran a satirical piece in the voice of the suffragettes involved, titled ‘How We Did It.’ Interestingly, the invented character responsible for the arson, imaginatively named ‘Milly Suffragan,’ is depicted as a woman student of the university—she had ‘just begun to study medicine’—rather than an unknown assailant from outside.95 Although clearly tongue in cheek, the article nevertheless hints at the discord that existed between men and women students over the suffrage issue. This is further indicated by the presence of a poem submitted by ‘Suffragist’ which ran on the very next page, and which described the undergraduate attack on the WSPU shop in less jocular terms. Would you hear how on a Friday, After lectures were all over, Rushed some students madly yelling Rushed as one down ’Varsity roadway, Rushèd to the “Women’s Vote Shop,”

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Smashed the windows with their hammers, With their brickbats and their hatchets, Smashed the stairway into matchwood […] How they piled up all the wreckage, Lit a mighty, glorious bonfire, Danced around it yelling war-songs, Linked together arm in arm, Shouting for their ’Varsity…

The reaction of students to both events can only be hinted at from the available sources, but the editors the Nonesuch clearly felt deeply aggrieved by the attack on the pavilion, which they felt had made them ‘the object of ridicule of the whole educational world.’96 Of the attack on the WSPU branch, they wrote ‘[w]e do not attempt to defend the wreck of the shop in Queen’s Road from the moral point of view, but under the circumstances the students’ action was justifiable.’97 Perhaps coincidentally (or perhaps not), the very next issue reported that the latest meeting of the Women’s Debating Society had chosen as their topic ‘that the political function belongs to the male’—a motion that, when put to the House, ‘was rejected by an overwhelming majority.’98 It is too simplistic to suggest a binary split on the issue between male and female students, with the women in favour of suffrage and the men against. Indeed, Elizabeth Crawford notes that the suffragette Millicent Browne, a transient helper at the Bristol WSPU branch under organiser Annie Kenney, met her future husband, Reginald Charles Price, when he defended the suffragettes from abuse while an undergraduate at the university.99 However, an element of masculine hostility to suffrage activism can be felt in the student press of the period, pithily epitomised by the Sphinx’s relief, in the article that opened this chapter, that the Lady President of the Liverpool Guild of Students is ‘neither a suffragette nor a teetotal fanatic.’ It is made even more evident by an incident that occurred at the University of Sheffield in 1907, when the noted suffragette Mary Eleanor Gawthorpe visited the city. Gawthorpe had come to protest the War Secretary, Richard Haldane, who was visiting the university, but found herself ‘cornered outside the entrance doors’ by a crowd of male students who had come to hear Haldane speak at the Albert Hall.100 She was persuaded to address the crowd, interrupted by ‘shrieks, groans, [and] hootings’ from the men.101

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One student boasted that they had been so chivalrous as to not throw ‘eggs and other articles of diet’ at Gawthorpe, although ‘a chorus of disapprobation often drowned her remarks.’102 By contrast, after this display the women students took her to tea in the Refectory, where, ‘amid expressions of goodwill for the cause, and repeated requests to come again, Miss Gawthorpe departed to fortify herself for the battle of the evening.’103 In October 1909, Gawthorpe would again find herself in a university setting, when she protested Lord Morley’s dedication of a new chemical laboratory at the Victoria University, Manchester.104 Gawthorpe, who had passed the Government Teachers’ Certificate with a first-class degree, was arrested along with Dora Marsden, B.A., and Rona Robinson, M.Sc., while dressed in their university robes, for creating a disturbance outside the Whitworth building while Lord Morley delivered his address inside.105

Networks of Educated Women While Gawthorpe, Marsden, and Robinson had not studied together, they were nevertheless linked by being university educated in a time when very few women were. In the same way, through involvement in suffrage marches and processions, the political space of women students opened up beyond the boundaries of the college or university. Suffrage societies united educated women from across institutions, fostering connections and building relationships that transcended the issue of votes for women. Academic women were particularly encouraged to attend the 1908 and 1910 suffrage marches—wearing academic dress, if possible, as a visual marker of their status—representing the solidarity felt by college women as women, regardless of their institutional affiliation. A Somervillian who attended the 1908 procession wrote an account for the alumnae newsletter, in which she described the sensation of being surrounded by university women from all manner of institutions. ‘There was an odd feeling of homeliness,’ she wrote, in ‘being surrounded by people who looked as if one ought to know them.’106 While university educated men might identify as ‘an Oxbridge man’ or ‘a Cambridge man,’ or even more specifically by their college, the rarity of women’s tertiary education during this period elevated any member to a very rarefied club. This sense of identification as a university woman led to the development of a network of educated women that transcended the physical space of the campus. To borrow from Benedict Anderson, an ‘imagined community’ existed among university educated women, in which women

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across institutions, from the all-female colleges of Oxbridge and Cambridge to the coeducational civic universities, found a sense of belonging from being a minority group within the world of higher education.107 Women students at the new civic universities kept abreast of developments at the women’s colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, which were seen as the vanguard of the fight for women’s education. Marian Pease remembered the anticipation with which the women students of University College Bristol looked forward to the arrival of Marley Paley, as ‘to us she represented Newnham and the cause of the higher education of women.’108 On 27 January 1900, the first hall of residence for women students at Manchester, Ashburne Hall, was officially opened by Eleanor Sidgwick, principal of Newnham, who hailed the hall as a ‘younger sister’ of her own college.109 Indeed, many of the women at the civic universities looked towards the women’s colleges of Oxford and Cambridge as inspiration, keeping diligent tabs on their developments. An article in the Mason College Magazine in 1896 covered the vote for women’s degrees taking place at Cambridge, featuring an interview with ‘A Newnhamite.’110 In 1900, over hundred women students from the college gathered to hear an address from Sara Annie Burstall, former Girton student and current headmistress of the Manchester High School for Girls, on ‘the Position of Women in the New University.’111 The following year, the new University of Birmingham sent ‘lady representatives’ to a weekend at Newnham, where they were entertained ‘in a most hospitable and cordial manner,’ introduced to ‘the chief glories of Cambridge,’ taken out on the river, and watched ‘an interesting lawn tennis match between Newnham and Girton.’112 In 1892, the ‘Department of Women’ section in the Owens College Magazine mourned the passing of Anne Jemima Clough, the first principal of Newnham, writing that the news of her death ‘was received here, as everywhere where there are women students, with the greatest regret.’113 From the beginning, these networks were also maintained by the employment of women graduates as both teachers at the new girls’ schools, and staff members at the women’s colleges and new universities. As the number of new girls’ schools expanded in the latter decades of the nineteenth century, with ninety new endowed grammar schools for girls established between 1889 and 1990, as well as a number of larger reformed boarding schools based on the leading boys’ public schools, not only did the number of girls aspiring to tertiary education grow, but so too did the market for university educated teachers to staff them.114 It was a reciprocal, self-perpetuating relationship, as high achieving students from Girton,

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Newnham, Somerville, and Lady Margaret Hall went to teach in the new girls’ schools and encouraged their best students to apply to their old colleges. Some links were particularly strong. Dilys Glynne Jones had been a student at the North London Collegiate School, and briefly attended Newnham College before returning to her former school as a teacher. Later, as one of the founders of the Association for Promoting the Education of Girls in Wales, Jones was instrumental in the establishment of the University College of North Wales at Bangor, and when its women’s hall of residence opened in 1886, eight of the thirteen students were former North London Collegiate School students.115 Similar links and networks existed at the tertiary level. In the archival documents of the women’s colleges and civic university halls of residence, certain names crop up again and again, as women who were students at one institution move on to become staff members at another. For example, the first warden of the women’s hall of residence at the University of Liverpool, Margaret Tabor, had been educated at Newnham.116 Her successor, May Christophera Stavely, studied at Somerville before becoming the first warden of the women’s university settlement at Birmingham. After leaving Liverpool, she would become the tutor to women students at the University of Bristol.117 Her replacement was Gertrude Mary Butler, who had attended Girton, and was in turn replaced by Dorothy Chapman, former warden of women students at University College of North Wales.118 The alumnae newsletters of the women’s colleges and residential halls took great pleasure in announcing the after-careers of their graduates. The 1913 newsletter of University Hall, the women’s hall of residence of the University of Liverpool, noted five former residents had obtained teaching positions at the secondary level, while two were taking diploma courses in Oxford, and two were lecturing at tertiary level.119 A report prepared at St Hugh’s College proudly declared that ‘several old students have held or are holding posts as tutors in Oxford,’ while three others ‘hold lectureships in connection with the University of London.’120 When it came to secondary teaching, Of other former students who have taken up teaching as their profession 114 have been appointed assistant-mistresses in public schools in England and the Colonies, 19 appointments have been made to Headmistress-ships […] five are or have been Heads of private schools.121

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In the early years of the twentieth century, these informal networks of educated women were solidified by organisations such as the British Federation of University Women (BFUW), which was founded in Manchester in 1907.122 The University Club for Ladies (known as the University Women’s Club since 1921) opened its first premises in London in 1886, and had 450 members by 1904.123 The development of these bodies supports Dyhouse’s argument that the small number of women graduates in the early decades of the century led these women to develop ‘close-knit, purposive networks based on an awareness of themselves as pioneers.’124 There was a consciousness of shared experience, which she argues existed not only at the women-only spaces of colleges and halls of residence, but was also engendered by ‘the very masculine culture which pervaded the “co-educational” universities,’ around which women students existed on the margins.125 This community existed both within physical spaces, such as the University Club for Ladies, but was more often imagined, supported mainly by the written word through student periodical press and old students’ newsletters. The magazine of the Birmingham women’s hall of residence, the Dolphin, was explicitly founded as a means to maintain this connection with old students. ‘It is hoped that this paper,’ the editors wrote in the first issue, ‘will act as a bond of union between those of us who are still pursuing our different courses of study here, and those who have finished their course and have left us.’126 This network, therefore, need not be confined by national borders: The Girton Review of the 1880s, for example, carried letters describing life at the women’s colleges of Vassar, Bryn Mawr, and Smith in the United States.127 The University Hall letter at Liverpool received updates from Catherine Dakin (née Lewis), who became a science lecturer at the new University of Western Australia in Perth upon her husband’s appointment as Chair of Biology.128 Perhaps the most obvious physical expression of this imagined community of university women, whose networks transcended the physical space of university campuses and a sense of identification with specific institutions, was the short-lived phenomenon of crossing the Irish Sea to take degrees at Trinity College Dublin. In 1904, women students were finally admitted to degrees at the College, and arrangements were put in place for women who might have benefitted from receiving their degree there but had instead been forced to study elsewhere, such as the Royal University of Ireland. As a temporary measure, the Board of the College and Senate of the University set the deadline of Michaelmas 1907 (the

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time when a woman admitted in 1904 would have been able to qualify for a degree in the regular way) for women students who had qualified at other universities to have their degrees recognised ad eundem at Trinity College Dublin.129 The scheme had not been intended to target English graduates of Oxford and Cambridge, but when an Irish student at Cambridge wrote to the Board and asked to be granted a degree, the Board consented and the floodgates opened. Between 1904 and 1907, nearly 700 women made the trip across to Dublin, earning the nickname ‘Steamboat Ladies’ in the process.130 The scheme was publicised in the Somerville alumnae newsletter of 1905, outlining the fees incurred, the price of travel, accommodation, and academic dress hire, and recommendations for hotels and sightseeing. ‘Even allowing for this,’ the author noted, ‘the expedition need not take more than three days, while for those who do not object to night travelling, thirty-four hours will suffice.’131 To be a women university student or graduate during this period did not mean confinement to a single campus or college building, but rather granted membership to a worldwide network that transcended the British Isles.

Conclusion In 1896, the annual calendar of University College Bristol published the rules of the college’s Union Society. The first was that ‘Every Male Member of the College or of the Staff of the College can become a member on payment of the prescribed subscription.’132 On the following page, readers were informed of the newly formed Women’s Union, which welcomed ‘all Women Members of the College willing to comply with the regulations.’133 The distinction between men and women students is clear, printed in black and white on facing pages. That this occurred at Bristol, which upon its foundation as a university college in 1876 became one of the first institutions to educate women alongside men, is indicative of the distinction many still held between equal education as it took place in the classroom, and the socialisation of men and women in other aspects of university life. This was especially true of the extra-curricular spaces that existed on university and college campuses, from students’ unions and guilds, to student representative councils, and debating and suffrage societies. These specifically designated places gave both male and female students arenas in which to engage with politics, contest elections, and exercise power.

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Performed in addition to classwork and lectures, participation in these political spaces occupied a unique place within the larger university. At the women-only colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, debating clubs, suffrage societies, and mock parliaments were exclusively female spaces, formed in emulation of the prestigious men’s clubs and societies from which they were denied entry. In creating their own spaces, women students were able to practice the traditionally male skills of political debate and also to connect with a wider community of women and the political issues that concerned them, via the formation of suffrage societies. At the coeducational civic universities, men’s and women’s use of extra-­ curricular space was more complicated. Although women were admitted to these colleges and, later, universities alongside men on equal terms, this understanding of coeducation did not universally extend to student life outside the boundaries of classrooms, lecture theatres, and laboratories. In many cases, this segregation was formalised by the built environment, via Students’ Unions and guilds that catered for separate entrances and segregated communal spaces. However, this was not true of all institutions. Instead, the gendering of political space was highly localised and dependent on individual colleges and universities. Both the Students’ Unions and Student Representative Councils of Sheffield and Birmingham were mixed, for example, with gendered quotas ensuring a certain number of women on their committees, while the Universities of Liverpool and Manchester remained steadfastly separate on both fronts. Separation in one area of political space also did not automatically imply separation in all others. The University of Bristol, for example, was known for its mixed debating society, and yet maintained distinct Unions until 1924. Mixed Unions did also not automatically imply free and easy mingling between the sexes, as the draconian chaperonage rules of the Bangor debating society show. The extra-curricular spaces of universities in England and Wales during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century were explicitly gendered, but in complex ways that varied across institutions and time. It is not the case that the Oxford and Cambridge women’s colleges alone were ruled by segregation and chaperonage, while the coeducational civic universities left their charges largely unsupervised. But it is equally wrong to speak of a uniform attitude of ‘the civic universities’ at all, given how widely they themselves differed in regulating these spaces. These discrepancies also highlight the extent to which the will of university authorities existed in conversation with the will of students themselves, who made decisions regarding whether or not to socialise with

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members of the opposite sex. While the Manchester Students’ Union remained divided because of an official policy to not admit women, the Bristol Union remained divided because of the women students’ refusal to join, choosing instead to maintain their own all-female space. Separation could be a choice as much as an infliction, and the case of political spaces in particular highlight how women-only spaces could choose to be maintained for their nurturing and protective qualities, especially in the world of debating where women’s voices were often talked over or silenced. The physicality of these spaces formed one aspect of this division, explored through the architecture and design of Students’ Unions and debating halls, but another, equally important aspect of political space is the way it could exist in an intangible, abstract sense through the communities that it created. Through periodicals and employment networks, a community of educated women was established that united women across institutions, most notably through associations such as the British Federation of University Women and involvement in the suffrage cause. Imagined space, as much as the physical reality of university buildings, shaped how men and women students during this period engaged with political space, and each other.

Notes 1. ‘Chats with Celebrities II. Miss E. Hudson’, Sphinx 19:1 (1911), p. 11. 2. ‘Chats with Celebrities’, p. 11. 3. ‘Chats with Celebrities’, pp. 11–12. 4. ‘Chats with Celebrities’, pp. 11–12. 5. ‘Prospectus of Day Classes in Arts and Science, and of the Evening Lectures, for the year 1882–3’, University College Liverpool, Calendar for the Session 1882–1883 (Liverpool: Adam Holden, 1882), p. 5. 6. ‘Rules of the Mason College Union, 1894’, Mason College Union minute book/Birmingham University Union minute book (1896–1905), UB/GUILD/A/1/2, University of Birmingham, p. 5. 7. ‘The Owens College Women’s Union’, Owens College Union Magazine 7:60 (1900), p. 8. 8. ‘Clubs and Societies’, University College, Bristol, Calendars for the Session 1885–1886, Calendars: University College, Bristol and University of Bristol, DM1191, University of Bristol, pp. 23–4; ‘Clubs and Societies’, University College, Bristol, Calendars for the Session 1890–1891, Calendars: University College, Bristol and University of Bristol, DM1191, University of Bristol, p. 213.

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9. Clubs and Societies’, p. 213. 10. ‘Clubs and Societies’, 1890–1891, p. 213. 11. ‘Clubs and Societies’, University College, Bristol, Calendars for the Session 1910–1911, Calendars: University College, Bristol and University of Bristol, DM1191, University of Bristol, p. 243. 12. E. A. Walker, ‘Co-Education: The Experience of Aberdeen University’, Bristol University College Gazette 1:5 (1909), pp. 157–8. 13. ‘Editorial’, Sphinx 21:2 (1913), p. 35. 14. T.  Kelly, For Advancement of Learning: The University of Liverpool 1881–1981 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1981), p. 167. 15. W. Whyte, Redbrick: A Social and Architectural History of Britain’s Civic Universities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 146. 16. Minute book of the Students’ Union Building Committee, 23 February 1911, SEN/5/1, University of Liverpool. 17. ‘Editorial’, The Sphinx 19:2 (1911), p. 29. 18. ‘Editorial’, The Sphinx 18:8 (1911), p. 233. 19. ‘Editorial’, The Sphinx 18:8 (1911), p. 233. 20. I.  G. Gregory, In Memory of Burlington Street: An appreciation of the Manchester University Unions 1861–1957 (Manchester: Manchester University Union, 1958), p. viii. 21. Gregory, In Memory of Burlington Street, p. 80. 22. M.  P. Tylecote, The Education of Women at Manchester University, 1883–1933 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1941), p. 74. 23. J.  Gilbert, ‘Women Students and Student Life at England’s Civil Universities before the First World War’, History of Education 23:4 (1994), p. 414. 24. C.  Dyhouse, No Distinction of Sex? Women in British Universities, 1870–1939 (London: UCL Press, 1995), p. 7. 25. C. D. Myers, University Coeducation in the Victorian Era: Inclusion in the United States and the United Kingdom (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 119. 26. Minutes, Annual General Meeting, 19 November 1907, Minute Book, DM 2062/2/1, University of Bristol, p. 16. 27. Minutes, Committee Meeting, 21 February 1908, Minute Book, DM 2062/2/1, University of Bristol, p. 64. 28. Minutes, Annual General Meeting, 19 November 1907, p. 15. 29. Minutes, Committee Meeting, 12 December 1907, Minute Book, DM 2062/2/1, University of Bristol. 30. D.  Carleton, A University for Bristol: An informal history in texts and pictures (Bristol: University of Bristol Press, 1984), p. 105. 31. ‘The Owens College Women’s Union’, Owens College Union Magazine 7:60 (1900), p. 8.

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32. Dyhouse, No Distinction of Sex?, p. 206. 33. S. Wiggins, ‘Gendered Spaces and Political Identity: Debating Societies in English Women’s Colleges, 1890–1914’, Women’s History Review 18:5 (2009), pp. 737–8. 34. D. M. Odlum (St Hilda’s 1909), SA/1/A5, St Hilda’s College. 35. Wiggins, ‘Gendered Spaces and Political Identity’, p. 738. 36. D. Livingstone, ‘Keeping knowledge in site’, History of Education 39:6 (2010), p. 784. 37. Livingstone, ‘Keeping knowledge in site’, pp. 784, 743. 38. C.  Dyhouse, ‘Miss Buss and Miss Beale: Gender and Authority in the History of Education’, in F. Hunt (ed.), Lessons for Life. The Schooling of Girls and Women 1850–1950 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), p. 27. 39. Wiggins, ‘Gendered Spaces and Political Identity’, pp. 738–9. 40. Topics taken from ‘The Ladies’ Debating Society’, Mason University College Magazine 18:3 (February 1900), pp. 76–7. 41. M.  F. Pease, ‘Some Reminiscences of University College, Bristol’, in J.  Jerrard (ed.), Reminiscences: ‘University College Bristol and The University of Bristol’ (Bristol: The University of Bristol Women’s Club, 1997), p. 11. 42. M. C. W., ‘Parliament’, Fritillary, 60 (1913), p. 99. 43. Letter from M.  Spencer-Smith to Miss Moberly, 26 April 1910, SHG/C/1/1: Minutes of Principals Meetings, St Hugh’s College Archive. 44. Letter from Miss Moberly to M.  Spencer-Smith, 28 April 1910, SHG/C/1/1: Minutes of Principals Meetings, St Hugh’s College Archive. 45. Letter from M.  Spencer-Smith to Miss Moberly, 9 May 1910, SHG/C/1/1: Minutes of Principals Meetings, St Hugh’s College Archive. 46. The Editors, ‘Editorial’, Magnet 2:1 (1899), pp. 6–7. 47. ‘College Societies’, University College of North Wales Calendar for the year 1886–7 (Manchester: J. E. Cornish, 1886), p. 244. 48. ‘Rules for students’, University College of North Wales, Calendar for the year 1888–9 (Manchester: J.  E. Cornish, 1889), p.  52; ‘Rules for Students’, University College of North Wales, Calendar for the year 1890–1 (Manchester: J. E. Cornish, 1890), p. 38. 49. Literary & Debating Society, University College of North Wales, Bangor, Session 1897–1898, Bangor Mss 31129, University of Bangor. 50. ‘Debating Society’, Owens College Union Magazine 3:27 (1896), p. 46; Our Own Representative, ‘The First United Debate’, Sphinx 1:1 (1893), p. 3.

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51. J. H. Bailey, ‘Types of College Men—and Women. No. VIII. The Lady Student’, Owens College Magazine 25:1 (1892), p. 25. 52. ‘Debating Society’, Owens College Union Magazine 2:13 (1895), p. 102. 53. ‘Debating Society’, Owens College Union Magazine 3:24 (1896), p. 100. 54. ‘The Department for Women’, Owens College Union Magazine 2:20 (1895), p. 36. 55. ‘The Ladies’ Debating Society’, Mason University College Magazine 18:3 (February 1900), p. 76. 56. A. Gardner, A Short History of Newnham College (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1921), p. 124. 57. E.  Ashby & M.  Anderson, The Rise of the Student Estate in Britain (London: Macmillan, 1970), pp. 22–3. 58. Ashby & Anderson, The Rise of the Student Estate, p. 25. 59. D. Jacks, Student Politics and Higher Education (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1975), pp. 73–4. 60. Ashby & Anderson, The Rise of the Student Estate, p. 43. 61. R. Muir, An Autobiography and some Essays (London: Lund Humphries & Co., 1943), pp. 28–9. 62. The Editors, ‘Editorial’, Magnet 2:2 (1899), p. 45. 63. Ashby & Anderson, The Rise of the Student Estate, p. 51. 64. Gilbert, ‘Women Students and Student Life’, p. 413. 65. Gilbert, ‘Women Students and Student Life’, p. 413. 66. ‘College societies’, University College of North Wales, Calendar for the year 1900–1 (Manchester: J. E. Cornish, 1900), p. 223. 67. H. Mathers, Steel City Scholars: A Centenary History of the University of Sheffield (London: James & James, 2005), p. 54. 68. ‘The Liverpool Students Representative Council, by One of its Founders’, Mason College Magazine 13:1 (1894), p. 4. 69. ‘College Societies’, University College Liverpool, Calendar for the Session 1893–1894 (Liverpool: Adam Holden, 1893), p. 54. 70. ‘Social Clubs, etc.’, Floreamus! A Chronicle of University College, Sheffield 1:2 (1897), p. 36. 71. Muir, An Autobiography, p. 24. 72. The first hall of residence for women at Birmingham, University House, opened in 1904. In 1907 an attempt was made to open a similar hall for men, using the buildings of the old Queen’s College medical school, but the experiment proved unsuccessful and was abandoned the following year. There remained no hall of residence for men students until the foundation of Chancellor’s Hall in 1922. M.  Cheesewright, Mirror to a Mermaid (Birmingham: The University of Birmingham, 1975), p.  48; ‘The New Hostel’, Hall of Residence for Women Students at the Birmingham University, UB/HUH/A/1/1/1/138, University of

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Birmingham; E. W. Vincent & P. Hinton, The University of Birmingham: Its History and Significance (Birmingham: Cornish, 1947), p. 207. 73. ‘A Word to Freshmen’, University of Birmingham Students’ Handbook (1904–1905), UB/GUILD/E/3/8, University of Birmingham, pp. 10–11. 74. ‘Editorial’, Nonesuch 3:8 (1913), p. 2. 75. Dyhouse, No Distinction of Sex?, p.  200; P.  Deslandes, Oxbridge Men: British Masculinity and the Undergraduate Experience, 1850–1920 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), p. 186. 76. ‘College Societies’, University College Liverpool, Calendar for the Session 1898–1899 (Liverpool: F & E Gibbons, 1898), p. 75. 77. K. Cowman, Women of the Right Spirit: Paid Organisers of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), 1904–18 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), p.  24; E.  Crawford, The Women’s Suffrage Movement: A Reference Guide 1866–1928 (London & New  York: Routledge, 1999), p. 159. 78. J.  Rendall, ‘John Stuart Mill, liberal politics, and the movements for women’s suffrage, 1865–1873’ in A. Vickery (ed). Women, Privilege, and Power: British Politics, 1750 to the Present (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), p. 170. 79. L.  Schwartz, ‘Feminist thinking on education in Victorian England’, Oxford Review of Education 37:5 (2011), p. 670. 80. Rendall, ‘John Stuart Mill’, p.  172; A.  Rosen, ‘Emily Davies and the Women’s Movement, 1862–1867’, Journal of British Studies 19:1 (1979), p. 105. 81. Schwartz, ‘Feminist thinking on education in Victorian England’, p. 670; J. Bush, “Special strengths for their own special duties’: Women, higher education and gender conservatism in late Victorian Britain’, History of Education 34:4 (2005), p. 389. 82. B. Stephen, Emily Davies and Girton College (London: Constable & Co., 1927), p. 115. 83. The controversy over awarding women degrees highlights how the higher education debate cannot be separated from wider reform movements occurring in late nineteenth-century Britain. Completion of a degree at Oxford and Cambridge conferred membership of the university, with a vote in university affairs. The anxiety over granting this power to women is imbued with greater meaning when viewed in the context of the suffrage movement that was occurring simultaneously. R.  McWilliamsTullberg, ‘Women and Degrees at Cambridge University, 1862–1897’, in M. Vicinus (ed.), A Widening Sphere: Changing Roles of Victorian Women (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), p. 118. 84. J. Westlake, ‘University Degrees for Women’, Times, 19 May 1897, p. 16.

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85. Bush, ‘Special strengths for their own special duties’, p.  388; E.  Colt, ‘Mary Augusta Ward’s “Perfect Economist” and the logic of anti-­ suffragism’, ELH 82:4 (2015), p. 1216. 86. Kelly, For Advancement of Learning, p.  168; Crawford, The Women’s Suffrage Movement, p. 323. 87. Crawford, The Women’s Suffrage Movement, p. 323. 88. Dyhouse, No Distinction of Sex?, p. 218. 89. A.  M. A.  H. Rogers, Degrees by Degrees: The Story of the Admission of Oxford Women Students to Membership of the University (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1938), p. 108. 90. Gardner, A Short History of Newnham College, p. 131. 91. Rogers, Degrees by Degrees, p. 108. 92. Crawford, The Women’s Suffrage Movement, pp. 427–8. 93. B. Kemp, ‘The Early History of St Hugh’s’, in P. Griffin (ed.), St. Hugh’s: One Hundred Years of Women’s Education in Oxford (London: Macmillan, 1986), p. 32; Crawford, The Women’s Suffrage Movement, p. 427. 94. ‘Editorial’, Nonesuch 3:8 (1913), pp. 2–3. 95. ‘How We Did It’, Nonesuch 3:8 (1913), pp. 8–9. 96. ‘Editorial’, Nonesuch, p. 2. 97. ‘Editorial’, Nonesuch, p. 2. 98. ‘The Wrecking “Rag.”’, Nonesuch 3:8 (1913), pp.  9–11; J.  M. Bowie, ‘Women’s Section’, Nonesuch 3:9 (1914), p. 90. 99. Crawford, The Women’s Suffrage Movement, p. 82. In yet another amorous connection between the university and suffrage movement, Lilias Ashworth, prominent suffragist and sister of Liberal politician Jacob Bright, was married in 1877 to Professor Thomas George Palmer Hallett, who taught political economy at University College, Bristol. 100. She presented him with a pamphlet entitled ‘The Women’s Case Against the Government.’ Mathers, Steel City Scholars, p. 55; One of the Quiet Ones, ‘Votes for Women!’, Floreamus! A Chronicle of University College, Sheffield 3:31 (1907), pp.  202–3; ‘Mr. Haldane’s Visit to Sheffield’, Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 21 November 1907, p. 9. 101. One of the Quiet Ones, pp. 202–3. 102. ‘Students’ Night at the Theatre’, Floreamus! A Chronicle of University College, Sheffield 3:31 (1907), p. 204. 103. One of the Quiet Ones, pp. 202–3. 104. C. Franklin, ‘Marketing Edwardian Feminism: Dora Marsden, Votes for Women and the Freewoman’, Women’s History Review 11:4 (2002), p. 633. 105. Crawford, The Women’s Suffrage Movement, pp.  242, 379; B.  Clarke, Dora Marsden and Early Modernism: Gender, Individualism, Science (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), p. 50; E. M. Arnold, ‘The Woman Suffragists’, Times, 6 October 1909, p.12; E. S. Pankhurst,

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The Suffragette: The History of the Women’s Militant Suffrage Movement 1905–1910 (New York: Sturgis & Walton, 1911), p. 446. 106. S., ‘The Suffrage Procession’, Somerville Students’ Association: Twenty-­ First Report and Oxford Letter, October 1908, pp. 45–6. 107. B.  Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London & New York: Verso, 2006). 108. Pease, ‘Some Reminiscences of University College, Bristol’, pp. 10–11. 109. Tylecote, The Education of Women at Manchester University, p. 87. 110. Mrs Sonnenschein, Miss F.L. Jones, Miss Newey, Miss Twigg, and Miss Wood, ‘Degrees for Women’, Mason College Magazine 14:6 (1896), pp. 87–92. 111. ‘Miss Burstall’s Address to Women Students’, Mason University College Magazine 18:4 (1900), pp.  115–16. Miss Burstall had been invited to speak by her brother, Frederick William Burstall, who had been appointed Chair of Civil and Mechanical Engineering at Mason College in 1896. 112. ‘Corridor Notes’, University of Birmingham Magazine 1:6 (1901), p. 213. 113. ‘The Department of Women’, Owens College Magazine 24:3 (1892), p. 93. 114. J.  Goodman, ‘Class and Religion: Great Britain and Ireland’, Girls’ Secondary Education in the Western World: From the 18th to the 20th Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 13. 115. J.  G. Williams, The University College of North Wales: Foundations 1884–1927 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1985), p. 106. 116. Report of University Hall for the Session 1900–1 (Liverpool: D. Marples & Co., 1901), P7/17, University of Liverpool, p. 6. 117. Report of University Hall for the Year Ending 30th September 1905 (Liverpool: D.  Marples & Co., 1905), P7/22, University of Liverpool, p. 3. 118. Report of University Hall for the Year Ending 30th September 1907 (Liverpool: C.  Tinling & Co., 1907), P7/24, University of Liverpool, p. 5; Report of University Hall for the Year Ending 30th September 1911 (Liverpool: C. Tinling & Co., 1911), P7/28, University of Liverpool, p. 6. 119. Newsletters (1911–1946), University Hall Association, July, 1913 (Liverpool), P8/6–26, University of Liverpool, p. 3. 120. Principal and Committee Reports, St Hugh’s College Oxford, SHG/B/1/2/1/1/9, St Hugh’s College, pp. 1–2. 121. Principal and Committee Reports, pp. 1–2. 122. C. Dyhouse, ‘The British Federation of University Women and the status of women in universities, 1907–1939’, Women’s History Review 4:4 (1995), p. 468. 123. ‘University Women’s Club’, in P.  Gordon & D.  Doughan (eds.), Dictionary of British Women’s Organisations, 1825–1960 (London: Woburn Press, 2001), p. 147.

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124. Dyhouse, ‘The British Federation of University Women’, p. 479. 125. Dyhouse, ‘The British Federation of University Women’, p. 479. 126. The Dolphin, University House Magazine (1914), UB/HUH/A/10/3, University of Birmingham, p. 1. 127. M. C. Bradbrook, ‘That Infidel Place’: A Short History of Girton College 1869–1969 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1969), p. 101. 128. ‘News of Old Members and “gone down” students’, University Hall Association, July, 1913 (Liverpool), P8/6–26: Newsletters (1911–1946), University of Liverpool, p. 3. 129. L. E. Haigh, ‘Degrees ad eundem at Trinity College, Dublin’, Somerville Students’ Association: Eighteenth Report and Oxford Letter, October 1905, S.S.A. Reports, 1888–1914, Somerville College, pp. 26–8. 130. F. Hunt & C. Barker, Women at Cambridge: A Brief History (Cambridge: Press and Publications Office, University of Cambridge, 1998), p. 15. 131. Haigh, ‘Degrees ad eundem at Trinity College, Dublin’, pp. 26–8. 132. ‘Clubs and Societies’, University College, Bristol, Calendars for the Session 1896–1897, Calendars: University College, Bristol and University of Bristol, DM1191, University of Bristol, p. 326 [my emphasis]. 133. Clubs and Societies’, p. 327.

CHAPTER 8

Conclusion

By 1918, the daily journey of a female university student through the streets of Bristol had changed dramatically from Marian Fry Pease’s passage from her home in Westbury-on-Trym to the new University College at the top of Park Street over forty years before. While the tram line had been extended and the boundaries of the city expanded in the inexorable march of suburban sprawl, the bucolic idyll of grazing sheep and Hawthorne trees had been interrupted by another, rather more martial, sight. Every morning on arriving post haste at 8.57 at the bottom of University Road you encounter in the middle of the road a line of white bands, khaki, pink faces and hands. At intervals along the pavement stand a few individuals who are evidently somewhat superior to the others. This formidable array has to be passed. You cross to the left-hand pavement and survey them from the rear. Suddenly the gentlemen along the pavement simultaneously raise their voices in shrill cries of “SHUN!” “Stand at EASE!” “Form FOURS!” Poor men! What will they do? But, on watching more closely you find that each order has a special attraction for a small group of men, who respond nobly to it. You tear yourself away from this interesting spectacle, having suddenly remembered a 9 o’clock at the top of the hill.1

The onset of the First World War completely inverted the gender and spatial dynamics of Britain’s universities overnight, as the mass call-up of © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Oman, Higher Education and the Gendering of Space in England and Wales, 1869–1909, Genders and Sexualities in History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29987-2_8

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soldiers depleted what had previously been majority-male institutions. Eleanor Marguerite Verini, who came up to St Hilda’s in 1914, remarked in later life of the gender balance at Oxford that ‘the men all vanished… It was really only when someone’s brother was on leave and came up to see them.’2 Chaperones were no longer required for women students to attend lectures because the lectures themselves were being held in the women’s colleges—a result of the examination schools being turned into a war hospital. Somerville College also became a hospital, and its students relocated to Oriel College for the duration of the war, where they remained segregated from the few remaining male students by bricking off St Mary Hall Quad.3 At the University of Birmingham, the entire campus at Edgbaston was requisitioned for the War Office, while the women’s hall of residence was turned into a home for nurses.4 At the University of Bristol, one student remembered ‘the stormy Long Vacation of 1914’ in which ‘the men students were being called up or enlisting.’5 Whereas men had previously dominated the social and athletic life of the university, ‘in the almost complete absence of men students, the women had to keep the student societies and sports going as far as possible.’6 These shifting demographics were also made clear at the University of Bristol Degree Day of 1917, of which the following description appeared in the Nonesuch. In past years the attempts of the women to applaud their fellow-students have been somewhat feeble in comparison with those of the men, whose vigorous cheering has drowned out all other sounds. This year the women, of course, comprised the majority of students, and they decided to give full vent to their enthusiasm when candidates were admitted to degrees. During the proceedings the noise was loud and almost incessant, and mingled with it “were sudden vocal outbursts, the purport of which,” the newspaper says, “was difficult to understand.” This may have been so in the cases of some present, but we have no doubt that the graduands in question fully understood the purport.7

Women staff members also benefitted from the exodus of male teachers called away by the war, with the vacancies created providing opportunities for professional advancement that would have been unthinkable just a few short years before, when the idea of women lecturing to mixed classes would have been viewed as suspect. ‘Miss Mabel M.  Barker, B.Sc. (London), has been appointed Temporary Assistant Lecturer in Geography

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during Dr. Rudmose Brown’s absence on war-work,’ read the student magazine of University College, Sheffield, in March 1916. ‘Miss Constance Styring, B.Sc. (London and Sheffield), Temporary Junior Lecturer and Demonstrator in Physics, during the absence of Mr. Jevons.’8 Just as quickly as the tide had receded, however, did the cessation of hostilities bring men students flooding back. ‘An enormous number of men were coming back as soon as they could,’ remembered Frances Irene Wintersgill, who came up to St Hilda’s in 1918.9 This influx was not unique to Oxford and Cambridge, but also occurred at the civic universities. ‘With the cessation of war, men students, fresh and seasoned, have been flocking to the University in their pre-war numbers to gladden the hearts of all Society committees,’ reported the Nonesuch in 1919.10 The following year, they asserted that, ‘[t]his session has witnessed a marked advance in our numbers. Always well patronised by the “beau sex,” we have now succeeded in raising the number of men students to two figures.’11 While celebrating this milestone, they also noted that, ‘we should like to see the men taking rather more interest in the social activities of the University,’ a poignant counterpoint to the light-hearted ripostes of student newspapers and magazines across the country in the years before the war, which often featured complaints of the sort that ‘the lady students… do not join any of the Union Societies.’12 In many accounts of women’s higher education, particularly at Oxford and Cambridge, the First World War is cast as a watershed moment in the transformation of the lives of women at the universities. Strict chaperonage rules were cast aside overnight, while newly liberated undergraduettes bobbed their hair and danced in the streets. While it is true that chaperonage rules began to loosen considerably after the war, Laura Schwartz and Kathryn Eccles have argued that homosociality continued to shape life at the women’s colleges in Oxford well into the 1920s, as these institutions remained ‘locked in’ to the separatist culture that had been a defining feature since their establishment.13 Change in some areas did not translate to change in all, as while the proposal to admit women to degrees at Oxford may have passed in 1920 a similar bid at Cambridge failed the following year. It would take until 1948 for women to be made official members of the university, nearly eighty years after the first women began studying there. The teleological narrative of women’s continuing advancement also fails to hold up to the significant backlash to women’s higher education that followed the war, at both the ancient and civic universities. Gemma

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Bailey, looking back at Lady Margaret Hall from 1923, wrote of the immediate post-war years that, After the war came the reaction. At first surprise was felt at attending a lecture where men were more numerous than women. Then came the time when it was necessary to go well before the time to secure a place at a lecture at all, and sometimes that place was the floor, or a step, or a window-sill.14

At the University of Liverpool, the immediate post-war boom in enrolments for male students was followed by almost continuous growth over the next two decades, but the same was not true for women students. As Thomas Kelly notes, after reaching a peak of one-third of total students in the mid-1920s, by the eve of the Second World War the number of women students constituted a smaller proportion than they had in 1913–1914.15 At Sheffield the decline was particularly dramatic, with the 1936–1937 session having only half as many women students as there had been in the mid-1920s.16 The great gains of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century did not translate into long-term sustained growth for women. The story of coeducation at the universities of England and Wales over the course of the period is therefore one of irregular change over time. In 1869, when Girton College was founded at the University of Cambridge, there was no widespread system of secondary schooling for girls. Queen’s College and Bedford College in London sought to educate girls to become better governesses, the only profession open to women at the time. There were four universities in England, none of which allowed women to take degrees. Forty years later, in 1909, there were eleven universities across England and Wales, all but two of which admitted women to degrees. Not only was the development of women’s education not straightforwardly positive during this time, however, but it was not uniform across institutions. The development of coeducation, and of higher education during this period more broadly, was a much more local story than it was a national one. The civic universities in their earliest iterations were largely idiosyncratic and informal establishments, local to their area and composed of relatively small student numbers. These conditions led to little institutionalised regulation of student behaviour, with few formal rules governing the movement and interaction of male and female students. This state of affairs shifted dramatically over just a few decades, as these institutions grew in both size and importance in their community, and also as the

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provision of halls of residence for non-local students began to imbue administrators with a sense of pseudo-parental responsibility. Rules and practices governing the management and behaviour of female students became formalised and entrenched as these institutions themselves became formalised and entrenched within the academic landscape. Purpose-built campuses enshrined these attitudes in a spatial sense, while the increasingly national scope of the universities moved them all towards a more singular expression of the idea of a modern university. Looking beyond the First World War and into the future also reinforces how the intersection of gender and space at the universities of England and Wales was—and remains—subject to continual change. An examination of contemporary university culture in Britain today shows how the modern university has both developed and stayed the same. The non-­ residential nature of the civic universities, which was such an integral part of their identity as new, progressive institutions, has been replaced by a strong residential ethos at institutions across the country. The Commemoration and May balls of Oxford and Cambridge, respectively, which originated as the one time a year when female guests could be invited to breach the all-male enclave of the homosocial university, remain important annual social events to this day, despite the fact that both institutions are now fully coeducational. Some colleges even maintain the custom of selling tickets in pairs, a practice which originates from the idea that an undergraduate would purchase a ticket for himself and an outside (female) guest. It is perhaps not surprising that some of the features of an earlier time still linger, since in many cases the university students of today are inhabiting the same physical spaces in which their predecessors would have lived and work. The period in which women began to enter universities was one in which the face of higher education more broadly was being transformed, and the introduction of women as a new category of student was inextricably bound up in these transformations. The growth of a handful of local tertiary colleges into the first wave of civic universities by the first decade of the twentieth century established the template of a modern university, one that is still with us to this day. The outline that these universities provided, however, was a spatial one as much as it was intellectual. Buildings erected in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries remain in daily use, designed as they were with the regulation and segregation of men and women students in mind. Newnham College still has its old laboratory buildings, a reminder of

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when women students were prevented from using the men’s laboratories in town. Sir Josiah Mason’s crest remains carved into stone at the University of Birmingham, despite the college that bore his name being torn down. The Guild of Students building at the University of Liverpool maintains its two façades—male baroque and feminine regency—fronting two different streets, despite a fully integrated interior. Sloping lecture theatres still proliferate at campuses across the country, allowing the teacher or lecturer to maintain sightlines of surveillance, while libraries are designed to allow attendant libraries to keep a watchful eye. The centrality of Students’ Unions and Guilds to modern student life, recreation, and socialisation is a relic of the original non-residential nature of the civic universities, whose students sought to recreate the conviviality and sense of belonging engendered by collegiate life. Whether or not they are still used in the same way, the physical fabric of our buildings has a long memory. The understanding of space as constitutive of gender has ramifications far beyond the history of universities, with wider lessons about the intentionality of architecture and the role of physical space in the implicit shaping of gender difference able to be applied to a variety of institutions beyond the educational. Women’s movement into political spaces such as the Houses of Parliament, artistic spaces like the Royal Academy of Arts, scientific spaces like the Royal Society, or professional spheres such as the London Stock Exchange, hospitals, or Inns of Court provide examples of how previously all-male institutions were adapted to admit women, and in doing so grappled with the modification of physical space. The growing presence of women in public life at all levels necessitated a carving out of space that at once both reinforced gender difference and facilitated their involvement. The contradictions inherent in this position was not unique to educational spaces but permeated all aspects of society. Understanding the university as a space in which the patterns of gender segregation and interaction played out is crucial to recognising how gender bias is implicitly enforced through our environment, encoded in the architecture and planning of the spaces we move through daily. The practice of looking beyond formal prohibitions of gender to less tangible factors, such as those present in the design and use of physical space, allows us to more readily access the everyday experience of men and women students at the colleges and universities of England and Wales in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Notwithstanding their divergent historical legacies, educational aims, and institutional structures, these higher education institutions functioned as gendered spaces that shaped

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student experiences through both formal and informal segregation. The depth of similarities that existed between the two distinct models of a university discussed in this dissertation—collegiate Oxford and Cambridge versus the non-residential civics—reveals, regardless of their differences, the extent to which wider cultural attitudes towards gender shaped the provision of higher education in England and Wales. The development of higher education in England and Wales as it underwent such momentous changes in the decades around the turn of the twentieth century is reflected neatly by the career of Hilda D. Oakeley. Entering Somerville College as a student in 1894, she later became Tutor to the women students at the University of Manchester and Warden of their hall of residence before being appointed Vice-Principal of the Women’s Department of King’s College London in 1907. From Oxbridge to redbrick, women’s college to non-teaching hall of residence, dreaming spires of Oxford to industrial north to London metropolitan, student to tutor and warden and, eventually, vice-principal, her story reflects the wider changes that were shaping higher education more broadly and the education of women in particular. Having witnessed and experienced all this, the conclusions she drew looking back on her life as she wrote her memoirs on the eve of the Second World War were fairly ambivalent. [T]he result of my experience at four universities and many opportunities of contact with the various types of colleges in London and elsewhere does not admit of any dogmatic view on the general question of university coeducation. It depends on the character of the students individually whether they are more stimulated to make the most of their university life under a fully co-educational or a partly separate college system.17

This equivocation on the subject of coeducation in many ways still persists to this day, as the perceived benefits and drawbacks of single-sex versus mixed schooling at all levels of the education system are periodically debated and discussed. Her thoughts upon arriving in Manchester to take up her new position as tutor in 1905, and the possibilities that lay before both her and the women under her charge, were more positive, however, and reflect the attitude of those early figures whose words and actions shaped the development of the modern, coeducational university over the course of the nineteenth century: ‘There was much scope for going ahead.’18

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Notes 1. D.H.F., ‘Campus Martius’, The Nonesuch 5:21 (1918), p. 65. 2. E. M. Verini (St Hilda’s 1914), Sound Archive [SA 1 A9 A&B], St Hilda’s College. 3. P. Adams, Somerville for Women: An Oxford College, 1879–1993 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 89. 4. War Office circular, Correspondence of Margery Fry (1905–1914), UB/ HUH/A/3/1/1/26, University of Birmingham. 5. E.  C., ‘Old Students Look Back: War-Time Memories’, In Memoriam, May C. Staveley, Clifton Hill House 1909–1934, DM2227/6/1, University of Bristol, p. 13. 6. A. Burnside, A Palladian Villa in Bristol: Clifton Hill House and the People who lived there (Bristol: Redcliffe Press, 2009), p. 51. 7. ‘Degree Ceremony’, Nonesuch 5:20 (1917), p. 9. 8. ‘Notes’, Floreamus! A Chronicle of University College, Sheffield 8:56 (1916), p. 219. 9. F. I. Wintersgill (St Hilda’s 1918), Sound Archive [SA 1 A2], St Hilda’s College. 10. ‘The Guild Concert, February 22nd 1919’, Nonesuch 6:24 (1919), p. 159. 11. J. H. Bailey, ‘Types of College Men—and Women. No. VIII. The Lady Student’, Owens College Magazine 25:1 (1892), p. 25. 12. H. B., ‘Faculty of Arts’, Nonesuch 6:27 (1920), p. 31. 13. L. Schwartz, A Serious Endeavour: Gender, education and community at St Hugh’s, 1886–2011 (London: Profile Books, 2011), p.  55; K.  Eccles, ‘Women Students and the University of Oxford, 1914–39: Image, Identity and Experience’ (University of Oxford, unpublished doctoral thesis, 2007), pp. 6, 26. 14. G.  Bailey (ed.), Lady Margaret Hall: A Short History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1923), p. 88. 15. T.  Kelly, For Advancement of Learning: The University of Liverpool 1881–1981 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1981), p. 188. 16. A. Chapman, The Story of a Modern University: A History of the University of Sheffield (Sheffield: For the University of Sheffield by Oxford University Press, 1955), pp. 369–70. 17. H. D. Oakeley, My Adventures in Education (London: Williams & Norgate, 1939), p. 153. 18. Oakeley, My Adventures in Education, p. 134.

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Index

A Aberdare Report, 27 Academic Dress, 55, 111, 112, 116, 209, 213 Allen, Grant, 170 Anderson, Elizabeth Garrett, 148, 202, 209 Associationism, 37 Athleticism, see Athletics Athletics, 151, 162–166, 173, 182, 204

Bell, Amy, 87 Bell, Edward Ingress, 20, 36, 37 Blackburn, Helen, 180 Bluestocking, 175 Bodichon, Barbara, 170, 205 British Federation of University Women, 212, 215 Brougham, Henry, 88 Brown, E. G., 99, 225 Browne, Millicent, 208 Butler, Josephine, 126, 146, 211

B Balliol College, Oxford, 129 Bangor University University College of North Wales, 6, 11, 25, 27, 28, 30, 37, 40, 52, 56, 69, 70, 72, 73, 93, 106, 110–112, 128, 211 Barrell, Edith, 59 Barry, Alfred, 96 Baxter, Mary Ann, 25 Bedford College, 25, 226

C Campbell, Thomas, 56, 88, 97 Campus, 11–13, 20–23, 33–38, 42, 43, 53, 63, 77, 88, 106, 109, 115–117, 127, 132, 151, 204, 209, 213, 224 Chamberlain, Joseph, 20, 21, 24, 36 Champneys, Basil, 66, 144 Chaperonage, 68, 96, 101, 102, 104, 112–114, 147, 175, 178, 200, 214, 225

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 G. Oman, Higher Education and the Gendering of Space in England and Wales, 1869-1909, Genders and Sexualities in History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29987-2

259

260 

INDEX

Civic universities, 1, 3, 4, 6, 7, 10–12, 21, 22, 25, 27, 29, 30, 32–44, 52, 53, 56, 58–61, 63, 65, 70, 72–77, 88, 91, 92, 94, 103–106, 108, 112, 114, 116, 127–130, 135, 136, 139, 141, 147, 152, 162, 164–166, 172, 173, 176–178, 183, 195, 197, 199–203, 205–207, 210, 211, 214, 225–228 Clare College, Cambridge, 41 Clarke, E. H., 170, 171 Clough, Anne Jemima, 61, 170, 210 Coeducation, 2–5, 7, 8, 12, 13, 22, 37, 38, 44, 112, 127, 132, 141, 151, 152, 161, 163, 165, 166, 177, 179, 192, 194, 196, 198, 199, 206, 207, 210, 214, 226, 227, 229 Common rooms, 38, 51, 63, 96, 129, 151, 162, 177, 179–182, 197 Commuting, 12, 88, 89, 116 Cooke, Alice, 136 Cossins, Jethro Anstice, 19–21, 37 Cowper Eaves, Elizabeth, 138 Crowther, C., 115, 172 Cycling, 99, 100, 102, 168 D Dances, 12, 150, 162, 163, 175–179, 182, 183 Davies, Emily, 30, 65–67, 98, 107, 198, 205 Debating, 6, 8, 12, 131, 151, 192, 193, 197–202, 204, 208, 213–215 Domesticity, 37, 42, 53, 54, 61–65, 67–69, 72, 73, 76, 77, 88, 95, 101, 106, 146–148 Double-bind, 64, 77 Durham University, 4–6, 11, 24, 37, 55, 174

E Eastwood, Annie, 169 Edgbaston, 20, 34–36, 91, 92, 167, 224 Evening classes, 91, 105, 106, 112, 113, 135, 139, 152, 192 F Fawcett, Millicent Garrett, 170, 180 Femininity, 64, 175 First World War, 22, 39, 43, 63, 73, 75, 135, 136, 175, 176, 195, 223, 225, 227 Firth, Mark, 21, 24, 162 Flockton, T. J., 37, 41, 162 Fowle, Mildred, 69 Frances Hughes, 71 Fry family, 223 G Gardner, Alice, 131, 169, 206 Gawthorpe, Mary Eleanor, 208, 209 Gibbs, E. M., 41, 42 Girton College, 4, 11, 65–68, 72, 98–100, 102, 103, 133–135, 138, 141, 142, 150, 166, 170, 174, 176, 198, 205, 210–212, 226 Gothic Architecture, 5, 19, 20, 26, 41 Gough-Calthorpe, Augustus, 20, 36 Greenwood, Marion, 135, 141 H Halls of Residence, 26, 51, 52, 60 Clifton Hill House, Bristol, 60, 63, 172 Hagley Road Hostel, Birmingham, 92 University Hall, Liverpool, 51, 52, 65, 70, 169, 211, 212

 INDEX 

University House, Birmingham, 63, 167, 171, 172 Women’s Hall, Bangor, 95 Hamilton, Mary Agnes, 64 Hansom, Charles Francis, 31, 37 Hare, Henry T., 38, 40 Harrison, Jane, 144, 170 Henley, Dorothy, 150 Hickie, Grace, 98, 103 Hockey, 166–168, 170–174 Howard, Dorothy, 99 Hudson, Harriet E., 191, 192 I In loco parentis, 55, 59, 104, 172 J Jones, Dilys Glynne, 211 K Ker, Margaret, 206 King’s College London, 11, 24, 64, 93, 96, 97, 104, 174, 229 Ladies’ Department, 64, 97, 104 L Laboratories, 12, 31, 53, 127, 138–144, 152, 179, 214, 228 Balfour Laboratory, 142, 152 Lady Margaret Hall, 2–4, 11, 62, 65, 68, 102, 103, 114, 129, 131, 134, 135, 147, 148, 166, 172, 174, 198, 211, 226 Lang, Edith, 6, 125, 126, 129, 140, 151 Langham Place, 205 Lecture theatres, 5, 12, 57, 128, 129, 131, 133, 164, 175, 192, 214, 228

261

Libraries, 12, 26, 27, 43, 53, 127, 131, 144–150, 152, 228 Bodleian Library, 146, 147 Edgar Allen Library, 149, 150 Radcliffe Camera, 147 Lloyd Morgan, Conwy, 59 Lodge, Eleanor C., 114, 129, 131, 134, 135, 172 London University, 11, 24, 54, 56, 74, 88, 97 See also University of London M Manchester High School for Girls, 125, 136, 140, 210 Margery Fry, 63 Marshall, Alfred, 66, 69, 105, 113, 133, 135 Marshall, Mary Paley, 61, 66, 101, 113, 131, 135, 136, 170, 198, 210 Masculinity, 8, 37, 57, 58, 76, 103, 109, 113, 133, 146, 148, 164, 168, 173, 175, 197, 208, 212 Mason, Josiah, 19–21, 23, 24, 105, 228 Mason Science College, 20, 21, 28, 35, 37, 75, 92, 128, 129, 137, 192, 200, 201, 203, 210 Mason University College University of Birmingham (see Mason Science College) Maudsley, Henry, 169, 171 Medical education, 26, 42, 94, 101, 138–140, 142, 148, 162, 169, 171, 192 Menstruation, 148, 169 Middle Class, 10–12, 21, 23–26, 32, 35, 43, 58, 61–64, 69, 70, 77, 89, 91, 104, 106, 108, 110, 111, 116, 148, 165, 193, 198, 205 Moberly, Charlotte Anne, 199

262 

INDEX

Modern university, 2, 3, 11, 13, 21, 22, 37, 39, 40, 43, 54, 76, 227 Money-Coutts, Clara, 102, 166 Mordan, Clara Evelyn, 207 Muir, Ramsay, 39, 58, 94, 130, 202, 203 N Newman, John Henry, 54, 55, 57 Newnham College, 4, 11, 61, 64, 66, 67, 72, 98, 99, 101–103, 113, 115, 131, 135, 137, 138, 141, 142, 144, 149, 166, 170, 172, 174–176, 198, 201, 206, 210, 211, 227 Nonconformist, 23–25, 106 North London Collegiate School, 70, 133, 211 North of England Council for Promoting the Higher Education of Women, 126 O Oakeley, Hilda D., 42, 65, 68, 136, 137, 229 Oatley, George, 26 Odlum, Doris Maude, 166, 173, 197 Osborn, Violet, 71, 72 Owens, John, 21, 26, 125 P Pakeman, Emily, 87 Parkes, Bessie Rayner, 205 Pease, Marian Fry, 87, 88, 104, 115, 116, 199, 210, 223 Peck, Winifred, 2–4, 65, 148, 168 Peers, Edgar Allison, 92 Pembroke College, Oxford, 41 Penrose, Emily, 98

Physical space, 8–10, 12, 13, 110, 150, 194, 209, 212, 228 Public transport, 89–92, 95, 96, 98–100, 107, 116 Q Queen’s College, 4, 11, 115, 174, 207, 208, 226 Quiggin, M. A., 100, 149, 174–176 R Rags, 109, 116, 117 Rathbone, K. M., 166 Read, Edith E., 133–136 Redbrick, 37, 43, 92, 165, 229 Regulations, 108, 127, 147 Reichel, Henry, 72, 73, 106 Reid, Elizabeth, 25 Reilly, Charles Herbert, 8, 193 Residence, 5, 12, 22, 51–54, 56, 58–77, 88, 91, 92, 96, 97, 110, 114, 116, 127, 134, 137, 148, 151, 167, 169, 171, 172, 210–212, 224, 227, 229 lodgings, 53, 55, 59, 60, 69–74, 76, 77, 88, 106, 116, 172 Respectability, 102–104 Rideout, Edna, 178 Rogers, Annie, 206 Rowing, 164, 166 Royal University of Ireland, 212 Ruskin, John, 144 S St Anne’s College, 206 St Hilda’s College, 166, 173, 197, 224, 225 St Hugh’s College, 100, 101, 147, 199, 205, 207, 211

 INDEX 

Selwyn College, Cambridge, 98 Shuttleworth, George Edward, 169 Sidgwick, Henry, 66, 176, 210 Snook, Lillian Voss, 180 Somerville College, 4, 11, 62, 63, 68, 96, 98, 103, 110, 114, 136, 144, 145, 147, 148, 174, 198, 205, 206, 211, 213, 224, 229 Sporting dress, 172, 173 Sporting grounds, 12, 165 Sporting spaces, 165, 166, 169–175, 182 Sports, see Athletics Staveley, May Christophera, 63, 137, 172 Steamboat Ladies, 213 Stephen, Barbara, 141 Stopes, Charlotte, 206 Student Guilds, 12, 192, 213, 214 Student Representative Councils, 12, 192, 202, 203, 213, 214 Students’ Unions, 26, 41, 60, 100, 109, 167, 177, 178, 192–197, 200–202, 204, 213–215, 225 Suburbs, 2, 21, 22, 27, 33, 35, 36, 39, 43, 61, 87–96, 105, 116, 223 Suffrage, 204–209, 213–215 Anti-Suffrage Society, 199 Women’s Anti-Suffrage League, 147 Women’s Suffrage Committee, 205 WSPU, 205, 207, 208 Surveillance, 53, 74, 149, 172, 228 Panopticon, 149 T Teaching, 133–138 Temporality, 10, 102, 109–116, 127, 129, 150, 174, 203 Curfews, 74, 107, 113 Tennis, 51, 165–167, 170–172, 174, 175, 210

263

Thomas, G. M. L., 19, 56, 88, 97, 162 Tilden, William Augustus, 5, 28 Torchlight Procession, 109, 110 Trinity College Dublin, 212 Trinity College, Cambridge, 128, 145 Truscot, Bruce, see Peers, Edgar Allison U Unitarianism, 24, 25, 205 University Club for Ladies, see University Women's Club University College Dundee, 25 University College London, see University of London University Extension Movement, 26, 31, 32, 106, 113, 128, 133, 138, 162 University of Birmingham, 1, 11, 19–21, 29, 34–36, 40, 52, 58, 59, 63, 92, 140, 167, 171, 180, 204, 210, 228 Mason Science College, 5–7, 11, 19, 35, 127 Mason University College (see Mason Science College) University of Bristol, 1, 9, 11, 26, 34, 60, 207, 211, 214, 224 University College Bristol, 8, 11, 24, 31, 59, 66, 88, 92, 104, 105, 112, 113, 115, 116, 128, 135, 137, 152, 166, 171, 180, 192, 196, 198, 202, 210, 213 University of Cambridge, 1, 3–8, 11, 12, 22–24, 29, 33–35, 37–41, 44, 53–61, 63, 64, 66, 67, 70, 72–76, 87, 88, 95–108, 111, 112, 114, 115, 125, 127–135, 137–147, 150, 152, 162–166, 168, 170, 172–176, 179, 181,

264 

INDEX

183, 197, 198, 203, 205, 206, 209, 210, 213, 214, 225–227, 229 University of Leeds, 11 Yorkshire College, 11, 151 Yorkshire College of Science, 11 University of Liverpool, 1, 8, 11, 92, 137, 171, 178, 191–193, 206, 211, 226, 228 University College Liverpool, 11, 24, 25, 30, 39, 51, 58, 94, 112, 130, 139, 140, 167, 179, 202–204 University of London, 1, 4, 6, 64, 111, 211 University of Manchester Department for Women, 126, 127, 151, 179, 180 Manchester and Salford College for Women, 126 Owens College, 6, 8, 11, 21, 22, 24, 26, 31, 32, 35, 39, 41, 53, 56, 60, 65, 89, 92, 100, 109, 113, 114, 125–127, 129, 130, 136, 139, 140, 147, 151, 163, 165, 169, 173, 174, 177, 179–181, 192, 196, 200, 202, 205, 210 Victoria University of Manchester, 1, 6, 11, 22, 25, 27, 114, 136, 151, 205, 209 University of Oxford, 1–8, 11, 12, 22–24, 29, 33–35, 37–42, 44, 53–59, 61, 63, 65, 67, 72–76, 88, 95–98, 100, 103–108, 111, 112, 114–116, 126–129, 131, 133–135, 137, 139–141,

143–147, 150–152, 162–166, 168–170, 172–176, 179, 181, 183, 197–199, 203, 206, 207, 210, 211, 213, 214, 224, 225, 227, 229 University of Sheffield, 11, 22, 41, 76, 108, 109, 139, 149, 162, 163, 178, 183, 208 Firth College, 11, 21, 24, 41, 106, 128, 139, 162 Sheffield Medical School, 139 Sheffield Technical School, 139 University College Sheffield, 25, 29, 59, 138, 139, 150, 161, 162, 167, 203 University of Wales, 11 University Women’s Club, 212 Upper Classes, 10, 54, 58, 176 V Victorian family, 26, 54, 55, 61–66, 68–70, 77, 101, 102, 104, 167, 175 Victoria University of Manchester, see University of Manchester W Wallace, Ethel, 101 Ward, Mary Augusta, 146, 147, 206 Waterhouse, Alfred, 32, 37 Webb, Aston, 20, 36, 37, 40, 42 Wills family, 26, 167 Wolstenholme, Elizabeth, 126 Wordsworth, Elizabeth, 62, 172