3 AUGUST 1996, Page 24

BOOKS

The women come and go

Mary Warnock

SOMERVILLE FOR WOMEN: AN OXFORD COLLEGE, 1879-1993 by Pauline Adams OUP, £40, £17.99, pp. 394

Pauline Adams is Librarian and Archivist of Somerville, and it is hard to imagine a better use of the archive than she has made in her history of Somerville. She has avoided the facetiousness and patronis- ing tone of some histories of the beginnings of university education for women; and, at the other end, her account of the abortive struggle to keep the college single-sex, more than a century later, is markedly judicious.

It is not surprising that the women's colleges have undergone more radical changes in a shorter time than any other institutions. (And nowhere is it most mani- fest how unhistorical most people are when they join these colleges. Each generation tends to assume that as things are now, so they have always been and will remain.) They started in the 1870s, at a time when middle-class women were probably more restricted than in any earlier or later period, locked up in the castles which were the Englishman's home. The family was their destiny, and if they did not marry and start their own, they had to make do with their old one. It was to relieve them of crip- pling boredom and enforced frivolity as well as to equip them to teach in the slight- ly older girls' schools, such as Cheltenham Ladies' College and the schools of the Girls' Public Day School Trust, that Emily Davies, the founder of Girton, first deter- mined to get a university education for girls.

She was so cautious that at first Girton (which in many ways resembled Somerville, and between which and Somerville there existed a long-standing 'alliance') was set up in Hitchen, Hertford- shire, the distance from Cambridge reduc- ing the risks to men foreseen by the universities. The risks to women were thought to be even more terrifying, risks especially to their health and marriageabili- ty. Emily Davies insisted, against tremen- dous opposition, that the Girton girls should take the very same examinations as men, rightly seeing that special women's examinations would have little value in the outside world. This battle was not won for Oxford women immediately, but gradual progress was made. Oxford, at any rate, was far quicker than Cambridge to admit women to degrees, all degrees except that of Doctor of Divinity being granted in 1920. Cambridge women had to wait another 20 years. All these battles were conducted with dignity and an admirable absence of triumphalism when they were won.

Each of the five women's colleges in Oxford had its own character, their reputa-

lions known by schools, as well as in the University. (The title of this book is taken from the 'saying', current in Oxford for years, in which 'women' are contrasted with the 'ladies' of LMH). Somerville was always held to be the most powerful and the most academic. I longed to go to Somerville, but my mother never even con- sidered it. The entrance examinations were divided, in those days, between a Decem- ber and a March examination; in my year (1941) the December examinations were for Somerville and LMH, and if you entered for one you could not enter for the other. I, by then, had a sister-in-law who had been at LMH and a sister who was there. It was considered respectable, and as near as could be to not going to university at all. (My two older sisters had 'done very well', as my mother told me, without going.

The service here is appalling.'

She never thoroughly believed that women's education at Oxford was as real as men's, and considered the only proper col- lege was Balliol, where my brother had been). As it happened, for my first few terms I was taught mostly by the Somerville Mods tutor, Mildred Hartley, and going into Somerville for tutorials always cost me a pang of envy.

Somerville, besides being academic, also had far more corporate spirit, and for longer, than LMH. On the whole, with notable exceptions, it appears that Somervillians liked their college and felt loyalty to it, in spite of the food. When in the 1970s I was briefly employed as a lecturer, I was amazed by how much the conversation at High Table turned on undergraduates, and how well the dons seemed to know their pupils, and how much they cared about them. At St Hugh's, where I had been a fellow for 15 years, conversation was mostly about gardening and pets. Indeed as the first fellow of St Hugh's to have children, discreetly born in long vacations, I did well out of the fact that my eldest two were called Kitty and Felix, and could therefore be politely enquired after as though they were cats. As for LMH, as an undergraduate I never felt that anyone minded whether I lived or died, and neither my sister nor I nor any of my friends felt the faintest loyalty to the college. I passed all my four years (split into two parts by the war) without ever once setting foot in the JCR.

Sadly, Somerville's reputation for high- powered academic excellence outlasted the facts. When all the men's colleges admitted girls, a process starting with five colleges in 1972 and gathering speed until, in 1984, Oriel was the last to succumb, applications for Somerville declined, and there were even some girls who, sent on to Somerville to be interviewed from colleges which could not fit them in, declared that they would rather go to another university than come to Oxford to a single-sex college. It was this decline in applications, together with the legal complications of remaining single-sex, that determined Somerville to change its statutes, to admit the fust men undergraduates in 1994. It is hard not to be sad. For 'going mixed' does not automati- cally restore academic excellence. It is still true that the cleverest girls (and men) will probably put some of the ancient founda- tions in the centre of Oxford as their first choice (though it must be noted that by the 1990s some 'green' candidates were choos- ing Girton because it was not in the centre of Cambridge). And, more important, what are rudely known as the Old Women's

Colleges are still impoverished compared with old foundations with endowments, and can do less for their members in the way of book allowances, travel grants and other perks.

Nevertheless, this book brings out, with- out boasting, the great distinction of Somerville and its tradition of remarkable principals — Emily Penrose, Margery Fry, Janet Vaughan, Daphne Park. It is much to be hoped that the newly mixed College will retain a pride in this tradition (as Girton has, and LMH has not), will be conscious of the splendid history of the College, and will continue to elect women as principals, refusing a total divorce from the past.

Mary Warnock was Mistress of Girton College, Cambridge, 1985-91.