The prospect of further education for women was alarming to many eminent Victorians of both sexes. The Queen herself, who saw it as part of the "mad, wicked folly of 'women's rights' ", was reported to be "so furious" on the subject "she cannot contain herself". Where would it end, wondered Walter William Skeat, the philologist: "Even the BA would enable them to take 5 books out of the University Library . . . I am entirely opposed to the admission of women to 'privileges' of this character." The year before he made this anguished appeal, Skeat's daughter, Bertha, got a first in modern languages from Newnham, Cambridge, but like her fellow "undergraduettes" she was not awarded a degree or allowed to borrow any books. In 1939, the year that Jane Robinson's sprightly and original account of the battle for educational equality finishes, women still had nine years to wait before Cambridge would accept them on equal terms with men.
Elsewhere, in London, Leicester, Durham and Oxford, the cause advanced more rapidly. In effect, the prejudice of centuries was broken down in 70 years, but it was a hard fight, especially at the beginning, waged by a few determined women and some honourable men. It might be said to have begun one evening in 1860, when Emily Davies and Elizabeth Garrett Anderson were sitting by the fire discussing their futures. Before they parted, Davies announced that it was clear what had to be done: "I must devote myself to securing higher education while you open the medical profession for women." And so, eventually, they did.
The lives of the pioneers have been well told. Davies, who founded Girton College, Cambridge; Frances Buss and Dorothea Beale, who established the schools that would equip girls for university; Josephine Butler and Anne Jemima Clough all are heroines in the feminist pantheon. What makes Robinson's book compelling and thought-provoking is that she interweaves their stories with first-hand accounts by the early students, women who, if now forgotten, were then equally courageous in swimming against the tide. Their letters and diaries are full of the minutiae that make history vivid. Bessie Macleod, describing her day at Girton in 1881, evokes a hectic round of Latin prose, cocoa and, just when she was looking forward to a quiet evening's Greek, fire drill. Girton, like every women's college, had its own student fire brigade, who were photographed surrounded by ladders and hosepipes, ready, despite their bustles, to tackle any emergency.
The conventions imposed on female students were as crippling as the corsets. They were escorted everywhere, the clicking of chaperones' knitting needles a regular accompaniment to lectures. In the rare event of a man even a father or brother needing to come into a woman's room, the bed was removed and the door propped open. These constraints reflected not so much the prudery of the women as the prejudices of the outside world which were, like all prejudices, illogical. According to various objectors, higher education would make women frigid or promiscuous, dull-witted or overexcited. The eminent psychiatrist Henry Maudsley was convinced it would make them infertile, and an anxious male student at Leeds complained that long skirts spread germs. No wonder Jessie Emmerson at Oxford thought it wise to follow the rules: "One false step and for all I knew they would never allow another woman student."
Supporters, luckily, were as determined as opponents. Mothers such as Trixie Pearson's, a widow, endured real poverty to educate their daughters. A touching number of "grants" and "scholarships" that suddenly materialised were found only later to have come from teachers' own pockets. The nuns at the convent school where Daphne Hanschell was a pupil in the 1920s decided to put her in for Oxford, telling her nothing until the day of the exam, when they promised that "the Holy Ghost will fix it". It did. Edith Wood's father, who refused permission for her to take up a place she had been awarded, was summoned to an interview with her headmistress, after which he did as he was told.
The women who arrived at colleges by way of such random circumstances were a more socially mixed group than existed perhaps anywhere else at the time in Britain. The first female graduates from King's College London, included, among students from professional families, a labourer's daughter, a shopkeeper's daughter reading classics and, top of her year, a hatter's daughter from Crystal Palace. The experience was new for everyone, and not always easy. Robinson includes stories of illness and homesickness as well as women who were simply bored or could not fit in. They were a minority. For most, at a period when the only alternative was to be at home until they married, education offered intellectual companionship and personal privacy. Katie Dixon at Newnham remembered lying by the fire reading Aeschylus: "The silence, the being alone, and knowing everyone else was at it in the same way."
In an inspiring, funny and thoughtful book, Jane Robinson brings out the complexities of a story that is too easily told as a linear progress towards equality, and does it in brisk tones of which Miss Buss and Miss Beale would have approved. Apart from the occasional well-aimed blow at "gravy-stained male academics", she is charitable, as she can afford to be, for this is history written by the winners and by the foot soldiers as well as the generals.
Rosemary Hill's Stonehenge is published by Profile.
