Free Bluestockings by Jane Robinson Page B

institutions in family form’. Somerville was rigorously non-denominational, while LMH embraced Anglican principles. St Hugh’s followed in 1886, and St Hilda’s, founded by Miss Beale, in 1893. 6 The local branch of the Association for the Education of Women administered a lodging-house system for local ladies, known as the Society of Home Students (later St Anne’s), to allow those who could not afford full-blown college accommodation, or did not need it, the chance to attend lectures and (after 1884) take finals. Not that college accommodation was very grand. Jessie Emmerson was one of the first girls at St Hugh’s, then housed in a semi-detached residence in Norham Road, and was bemused on her arrivalin 1886 by its spartan lack of charm. There was hardly any furniture, and nowhere quiet to work, since next door’s child seemed constantly to be practising the piano. Social interaction was awkward: there was only a handful of students, none of whom knew each other:
    We all felt rather shy… especially during the first meals in the little dining room which looked into a small back garden containing nothing in particular except grass. But next door there were some rabbits in a hutch, and they at once arrested our attention and naturally became a subject of conversation when other topics failed.
    One day someone’s undergraduate brother came to visit, ‘and looking out of the window exclaimed – “What a dull hole! I expect you have nothing to talk about except those rabbits”.’ 7
    Things were much more exciting in the provinces. At the time of its momentous announcement in 1878, London University was solely an examining body; this meant that any teaching institution with staff and students of sufficient intellectual calibre could apply to award its external degrees. All around the country, colleges of higher education realized that they could class themselves as vicarious universities, and attract undergraduates of both sexes, by subscribing to London’s matriculation and final exams. Thus Nottingham became a university college in 1881, Bristol in 1883, Reading in 1892, Sheffield in 1897, and Exeter in 1901. At several of them there were more women than men among the non-resident students.
    Back in 1868, a commissioner reporting on the state of secondary education for girls in England had made a bitter observation:
    Although the world has now existed for several thousand years, the notion that women have minds as cultivable and as well worth cultivating as men’s minds is still regarded by the ordinary British parent as an offensive, not to say revolutionary paradox. 8
    Now, apparently quite suddenly, that revolution was well under way. It was happening in the north of the country, too. The vigorous Ladies’ Educational Associations which had employed lecturers like James Stuart as part of the University Extension Scheme in Liverpool, Manchester, and Leeds in the 1870s helped galvanize the colleges already in place there to form their own collective degree-granting body in 1881. It was called Victoria University, refreshingly unencumbered by an arcane male provenance, and it declared itself proud to admit women as undergraduates on equal terms with men from the very beginning. Each of its constituent colleges admitted day-students, but also ran single-sex halls of residence which became the focus of under graduate life, much like the colleges of London, Cambridge, and Oxford.
    Durham University, founded in 1832, did not decide to award women degrees until 1895; once made, however, the decision was broadly welcomed, and there was obvious satisfaction at beating Oxbridge:
    Durham has come to the rescue where Cambridge and Oxford have failed. The little University nestling under the shadow of that great Cathedral of St Cuthbert which looks so majestically down upon the Wear, is chivalrously coming forward to allow the young ladies of the day to write the magic letters ‘BA’ after her [sic] name… And when the