Her Oxford

Preface

xv Preface W alking around Oxford today, one sees what appear to be almost equal numbers of male and female students mingling easily together. Yet, until 1879, women had no share in what had been an exclusively male university since the Middle Ages. In that year, a small group of pioneering women practically crept into Oxford and quietly set about the business of becoming students. They had not come to storm the barricades, and they doubtless would have been repelled had they tried. Theirs was a policy of unobtrusive infiltration, and it paid off. Oxford slowly conceded to them its privileges, and in 1920, awarded the ultimate prize: full membership in the university. After that, women could be formally matriculated, take degrees, and sit on various legislative bodies . Almost forty more years would pass, however, before the five women’s societies—Lady Margaret Hall, Somerville, St. Anne’s, St. Hugh’s, and St. Hilda’s—were accorded the status of colleges of the university, self-governing entities with all the rights and obligations of the men’s colleges. In 1974, five men’s colleges admitted women on a trial basis, ending hundreds of years of tradition. Speedily, the barriers fell; all Oxford colleges are now mixed. Whether women have benefited from the trend toward coresidence is still being debated. Women students form such an integral part of Oxford today, however, that it’s hard to remember how their presence was so long ignored within the university. One reads with a jolt former prime minister Harold Macmillan’s account of his student days just before World War I, when women had been in Oxford for thirty-five years: There were no women. Ours was an entirely masculine, almost monastic , society. We knew of course that there were women’s colleges with women students. But we were not conscious of either. . . . For practical purposes they did not exist.1 When Vera Brittain, a former student of Somerville, wrote The Women at Oxford: A Fragment of History in 1960, she questioned why she would xvi Her Oxford write such a history and then proceeded to give an answer. To her, the story represented “the contest for the equal citizenship of the mind,” and the women involved in the contest deserved recognition.2 I can hardly improve on her statement. Yet, so many volumes—histories, novels, biographies , and autobiographies—have been devoted to men in Oxford and so few to women that another chronicle of their struggle for equality surely won’t be superfluous. ...