Her Oxford

3. Plain Living and High Thinking

33 3 Plain Living and High Thinking T he women students at Oxford entered a very different world from the one inhabited by undergraduates (a designation reserved for male students in those days). Men lived in the Oxford most often featured in guidebooks—a magnificent architectural treasury of pinnacles , domes, and ancient quadrangles. Their colleges provided them with suites of rooms and menservants (“scouts,” in Oxford parlance) to look after their needs. Most of the college kitchens turned out an abundance of good food, and men could invite friends for breakfast or luncheon parties in their rooms at which a variety of tasty dishes could be ordered and brought up by scouts. Alcohol was never in short supply, and some of the colleges were famous for their ales and wine cellars. The women, in contrast, lived simply. An LMH student in the mid1880s , on rereading the diary she kept during her college years, was struck by “the secluded, almost nun-like life we led.”1 Their buildings had no architectural pretensions, and they felt fortunate, even delighted, to have a single bedroom to themselves, which also had to double as a sitting room. The food served at Lady Margaret Hall and Somerville was plain English fare, often indifferently cooked, and water was the customary drink at lunch and dinner. Two amusing articles were printed in Murray’s Magazine in 1888, written anonymously and in the first person, contrasting a day in the life of an Oxford undergraduate and a female student. The male is cheeky and irreverent , the female earnest and sober. The young man rarely notices the time; he follows his own schedule as much as possible. The young woman’s day is ruled by the clock, and she punctiliously notes where she is to be at almost any given moment. The male is awakened by his scout at whom he flings a boot. He has a hangover but goes to a breakfast party where he dallies until his lecture at 11 a.m. He complains that the lecture is very boring and takes no notes but spends the time doodling in his notebook. Afterward, he is summoned to his college dean, who questions him about the fines he’s accumulated for being outside the college gates past midnight. He lies his way out of the situation, saying later to a friend, “I tremble to think of the tortures that 34 Her Oxford old Dean will suffer in the next world for all the fibs he’s made me tell in this.” Then, he lunches on salmon, drinking cider from a silver tankard, which the college provides for all the men. He’s off to the cricket field after lunch, where he remains until almost the dinner hour in hall at 7:00 pm. When the rather raucous meal is over, he plays pool and finishes the evening with friends back in college drinking whisky and smoking tobacco. He finally stumbles off to his own rooms “to sleep myself fresh for a similarly improving day on the morrow.”2 The female student at a women’s hall rises at 7:00 am but feels guilty because she knows that other women are already up and at their books. Breakfast is taken communally after chapel, and the hours between 9:00 am and 1:00 pm are reserved for study and going to lectures. She attends two lectures, duly chaperoned, and spends the rest of her morning reading in the Radcliffe Camera at one of the tables reserved for ladies only. After lunch in hall at 1 pm, she devotes a few hours to recreation—maybe walking, boating, playing tennis, or attending late afternoon tea parties in friends’ rooms—but returns to her books around 5:30 before supper at 7:45. In the half hour between supper and chapel at 8:45, she may participate in one of the in-college literary societies or sit in on a committee meeting. After chapel, she is free to socialize with her colleagues or indulge in some light reading until the 10:30 curfew bell, upon which she must retire to her room alone. She admits at the end of the article that life in college may not seem very exciting to outsiders but adds that “it is full of occupation and interest to us . . . and opens out to most of us realms of thought and study which at home would be entirely closed.”3 These two articles, though exaggerated and no...