A Short History of Girton
Girton College : 1869-1932. By Barbara Stephen. (C'andiridge University Press. 3s. 6d.) AT the present time with the War and its consequences like great mountain that must be climbed before we can see any- thing that lies behind it, we are scarcely aware what a Rubicon was crossed when five young women, in the autumn of 1869, began to study for the:r Little-go in a college placed at the safe and dignified distance of thirty miles from Cambridge. But some idea of the ground that has been covered since that day is given by Mi...4s Emily Davies' letter to Miss Richardson on the subject of moving the college from Hitchin to Cambridge : "It takes a good deal of zeal and courage to speak of the College as it is. If the more extreme course were adopted [the removal of the college to Cambridge itself], a whole system of propaganda would be stopped. People like Mrs. Gurney and Lady Augusta would feel their mouths closed. As Mrs. Gurney said, they would be almost ashamed to speak of it. . . . We had two visits from brothers at Hitchin, and tho' everybody concerned behaved with the utmost propriety, we felt thankful that brothers did not live within thirty miles."
That was the attitude of the founders and supporters of Girton College, laughably timid and straight-laced, while those who opposed and discouraged have come to sound too ludicrous to be credible. Things have moved so quickly in sixty years that it is now possible to earn a reputation for anti. feminism merely by suggesting that women may never provide more than a small percentage of the world's genius—a sug- gestion which can hardly damage woman's claim for education, when the connexion between education and, genius is so slender. What Miss Davies and her friends believed was that women could be educated like men, and the belief was amply justified. Women have responded so well to college education, have dis- carded age-old conventions so quickly, and proved so apt to understand the aims and methods of modem scholarship, that it may be discovered in another generation or so that they an on the whole even more susceptible to education than men.
Girton College is a summary of Lady Stephen's earlier book, and at the same time something more as it gives the later history and development of the college after Miss Davies retired from official connexion with it. Since the space is lacking for detail about people or for full accounts of some of the early victories, this book is inevitably less interesting than Emily Davies and Girton College. But Lady Stephen has an excellent way with statistics, and the story remain§ a good one even when it is reduced to the bare plot of collecting money and spending it, or spending it before collecting it. There is a useful biographical index, specially to be recommended for giving the story of Miss Gamble, whose generosity to Girton was at least partly due to her distrust of men. At the age of forty-three she had been kidnapped and shut up in a Genoese palace until a kinsman came from England to deliver her.
This is a book which ought to be in every school library
particularly the libraries of boys' schools—and at so reasonable a price there can be no excuse for its absence.
LYN LL. IRVINE.
Previous page
