"A COLLEGE FOR WOMEN"
By IVY PINCHBECK
BEDFORD COLLEGE, the oldest of the university colleges for women, is celebrating its centenary this month. A search through the more important newspapers of a hundred years ago shows that the Press made no reference to the founding of the Ladies' College in Bedford Square, though it may well be that the founders shrank from the idea of publicity for their astonish- ing new venture. The proper state for womankind at that time, however, is delightfully portrayed fii a large picture in the Illustrated London News for June r6th, 1849, of the bazaar opened under the patronage of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, to celebrate the opening and provide an endowment for an asylum for aged governesses in "the healthful locality of Kentish Town."
In the large tents erected in the grounds, aristocratic stall- holders are retailing elaborate feats of Berlin work, prints, trinkets and ornamental wares manqfactured in the drawing-room by the daughters of the wealthier classes. The band of the Scots Fusiliers entertains the crowds of elegantly dressed ladies in flounced skirts accompanied by swallow-tailed escorts, and standing demurely on the edge of the crowd is a small group of indigent governesses, recipients-to-be of this "benevolence of the public." Looking on that picture one might well regard the scene as the closing of one age for women and the founding of Bedford College a few weeks later as the beginning of a new one.
As part of the centenary celebrations there has been another garden-party this week in the grounds of the college. The guests were entertained by a play written especially for the occasion, but there was no bazaar, for the daughters at home, who in that earlier age produced the embroidered slippers and antimacassars in the drawing-room, have been transformed into students at college, read- ing for university degrees in preparation for a host of varied careers. The contrast denotes the changes that the last hundred years have produced in the lives of women.
Bedford College was founded in 1849 by Mrs. Elisabeth Jesser Reid, a benevolent widow of varied philanthropic interests and an earnest would-be social reformer. All her life she had dreamed of "a college for women or something like it," but not until she was sixty years of age did her dream begin to take shape. The college she visualised thus late in life had a moral purpose. It was to provide for the higher education of women, not that they might thereby prepare themselves to earn independence in careers, as was already being demanded by a few of her younger contemporaries, but' that a better education might result in "the elevation of the moral and intellectual character of women, as a means to an improved state of society." For it was her view that society could not be improved while one-half of it was kept in ignorance ; "we shall never have better Men till men have better Mothers."
The education of girls in the mid-nineteenth century, apart from a few notable exceptions, consisted of showy accomplishments designed to equip them for the marriage market. The evidence given before the Schools Enquiry Commission in 1867 showed an almost incredible lack of competence in the schools available for the girls of the middle and upper classes. The narrow range of subjects was taught in a slovenly and unsystematic fashion, thoroughness and accuracy were lacking, mental training was negligible. How could it be otherwise when the teachers and governesses themselves were untaught, and had for the most part been driven to their occupation ify domestic misfortunes ? The inveterate prejudice of parents was blamed for this state of affairs, since they insisted upckti accomplish- ments and what was "showy and superficially attractive," and believed more solid attainments to be actually disadvantageous from the point of view of marriage.
Towards the middle of the nineteenth century, serious attacks upon the follies and shortcomings of female education grew in number. Writers in Frazer's Magazine, the Edinburgh and Westminster ,Reviews demanded for girls some mental discipline that would not leave them children but would prepare them efficiently for life. Even more powerful attacks came from the novelists. Thackeray,
Dickens, Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot used ridicule and biting satire on the educational follies of schools and parents alike While these demands for improved schools were an essential preliminary to the better education of women, it is important to recognise how much more idealistic and visionary were the aims of Mrs. Reid in 1849. It was no mere school that she had in view, but a college for higher education, in which instruction would be given "on the same plan as in the public Universities" and which would lead "to the widening of women's lives and outlook and to giving them a new freedom and object in life." Such a vision as little short of revolutionary in the mid-nineteenth-century background. It is true that the idea of a ladies' college had been anticipated. Mary Astell as early as 5694 had proposed such a foundation, and in 1697 Defoe, in a now almost forgotten essay, wrote vigorously in favour of an academy for women. "I have often thought of it as one of the most barbarous customs in the world that we deny the advantages of education to women," he wrote, and "To such whose genius would lead them to it I would deny no sort of learning."
Midway between the century and a half which elapsed between these theoretical proposals and the actual founding of Bedford College, a practical scheme for the higher education of women almost materialised. In 1775 Elizabeth Montagu, the famous " blue- stocking " and leader of the intellectual society of London, inherited a huge fortune and large estates from her husband. Immediately she proposed to use her wealth to found and endow a college where women might receive a serious and scientific training, and offered the direction of it to Mrs. Barbauld. But, although highly educated herself, Mrs. Barbauld held the conventional view that learnihg, if acquired, must be concealed, by women. For it to be publicised by attendance at a college would never do. Mrs. Montagu thereupon abandoned the project, and seventy years elapsed before Mrs. Reid, another woman of energy and wealth, revived it.
In the mean time great changes in the external world prepared the way. The Industrial Revolution entirely altered women's position In society, while the French Revolution inspired and developed ideas of intellectual freedom, liberty and individualism. And although few contemporaries could accept Mary Wollstonecraft's advanced views in her Vindication of the Rights of Women, during the first half of the nineteenth century women writers increasingly asserted their own views and criticised women's education and their resultant position in society. The middle of the nineteenth century was there- fore a more auspicious time for Mrs. Reid's venture, but, even so, the difficulties which faced the college in its early years were enormous and progress was painfully slow.
• Dame Margaret Tuke's History of Bedford College describes in detail the bitter disappointments and misfortunes which more than once brought the college to the brink of failure. Thirteen professors, several of them men of distinction, were engaged for the opening, but the number of studenti was disappointingly low ; they came in tens instead of the hundreds expected. Although many of them were "ladies of mature age," they were ill-prepared by their previous education for the advanced courses offered. The lady members of the council were inexpert in matters of business and sometimes sadly inefficient in committee.; the finances proved inadequate for amenities and for the books and apparatus required for serious study. But gradually the college weathered the storm, and when in 1878 the University of London opened its examinations to women, the students of Bedford College were among the first to avail themselves of the privilege offered them.
When the jubilee was celebrated in 1899, Bedford had achieved the status of a university college, and was sharing in the funds assigned by Government to university education. The second fifty years have been years of consolidation and advance. They brought a Royal Charter in 1909, a new home for the college, with fine buildings and beautiful grounds in Regent's Park, increased revenues and, on the academic side, increased facilities for advanced study and research. Today the college celebrates its centenary with a total membership of nearly a thousand, and numbers among its past students many women who have distinguished themselves in careers undreamed of by the founder.
Previous page
