Her Oxford

Epilogue

285 Epilogue F or the academic year 2006–2007, 6,371 men and 5,735 women were listed as undergraduates at Oxford. All Oxford undergraduate and graduate colleges now admit both men and women. Only two of the seven permanent private halls remain all male—Campion Hall and St. Benet’s Hall, which are Jesuit and Benedictine establishments, respectively . Clearly, the incorporation of women into the university, which began so modestly in 1879 with twenty-one female students entering unaffiliated halls—not colleges—was substantial by the start of the twenty-first century. Some saw the decade that followed the women’s colleges gaining full admittance to the university in 1959 as “a golden age for the women’s colleges ” in Oxford.1 The women’s colleges were encouraged to expand, they found benefactors to help pay for expansion, their numbers grew at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, and they responded to the climate of the times by easing the disciplinary strictures to which women students had been subject. Academically, women undergraduates more than held their own with men during the1960s. Women consistently performed well on final examinations, and their percentages of first and seconds combined often put their colleges toward the top of the Norrington Table (see Chapter 18). Within twenty years after the women’s colleges took their place alongside the men’s as full-status colleges of the university, a major transformation occurred within the Oxford college system. Most of the men’s and women’s colleges abandoned their single-sex status and began admitting undergraduates of both sexes. Such a transformation deserves comment. Mixed Colleges During the 1950s and 1960s, the men’s colleges were aware of women undergraduates ’ academic achievements, and it was no coincidence that, beginning in the mid-sixties, some men’s colleges began considering offering admission to women. New College first broached the idea of accepting 286 Her Oxford women in 1965, and supporters of the move conceded that they thought women could improve the quality of college admissions. They also put forth less self-serving arguments: to increase the ratio of women to men at Oxford and to promote the idea of mixed education generally, which they considered to be healthy and better preparation for the society that undergraduates would enter. Women constituted only about 16 percent of the student population at Oxford in 1963–1964 compared to almost 38 percent in the British university population as a whole. The Oxford women’s colleges had limited resources with which to expand, so they could not themselves significantly increase the proportion of women in the university . Those who supported coeducation, or coresidence as it was sometimes called, believed that the only way to bring Oxford into line with other universities was for the men’s colleges to accept women. Women at Oxford disagreed among themselves about the New College proposal. Some applauded it. They felt strongly that, because the women ’s colleges could not admit the number of women who wanted to attend , a large pool of desirable candidates was being turned away. Other women opposed it. Many worried that, if the men’s colleges began to admit women, they would skim the cream and leave the women’s colleges with fewer able applicants. They also feared that women candidates might prefer the ancient and prestigious men’s colleges to the recent and more modest women’s establishments, even if these same candidates might have doubts about the wisdom of trying to fit into colleges that had been exclusively male preserves for hundreds of years. In reply, those who supported New College admitting women accused opponents of putting the interests of the women’s colleges ahead of the interests of women’s education. The issue was clearly contentious. In the end, the New College scheme failed because the majority necessary to amend the college statutes was not achieved, but the issue of women’s admission to the men’s colleges did not fade away. In 1974, five of the twenty-three (at that time) men’s undergraduate colleges—Brasenose , Hertford, Jesus, St. Catherine’s, and Wadham—opened their doors to women on an experimental basis. The group of five was allowed to accept no more than approximately one hundred women among them annually , and the policy was to be subjected to an evaluation in 1977. The negotiations that led up the 1974 experiment were long and tortuous, and the women’s colleges played a considerable role in limiting the number of...