Free Rosalind Franklin by Brenda Maddox

men’s lectures but, at least until the early 1930s, were expected to sit together in the front rows. If they came in late, they were liable to be pelted with paper or greeted with stomping feet.
    They were not offended by these restrictions. To the contrary, Newnham and Girton students considered themselves lucky to be among the chosen 500 (the quota set for women so that their numbers would not exceed 10 per cent of the male undergraduate body). They giggled to hear themselves addressed collectively as ‘Gentlemen’. They were delighted not to have to wear academic gowns, which, short as these were, might have got caught in their bicycle spokes, and to be free of the proctorial discipline enforced on the men. And they were all studying for honours degrees.
    Newnham, founded in 1871, was within easy walking distance of the Cam, the city centre and the splendour of King’s College. Its students were not isolated from male company. They had men as supervisors and often as research partners. Most of the university societies, and all lectures, were open to women and marriage was no bar to teaching. The second principal of Newnham, Mrs Eleanor Sidgwick who held the post from 1892 to 1910, lived in college with her husband Henry, philosopher and college founder.
    Women were nonetheless anomalies in a medieval institution to which the monastic tradition still clung. Even those of high rank had no say in the affairs of the university. The mistress of Girton and the principal of Newnham were not allowed to participate in university ceremonies and functions but were required instead to sit, in hat and gloves, with the wives of the faculty at the ritual occasions when the men wore their scarlet academic robes and black velvet doctors’ hats.
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    Few first-year university students could match Rosalind’s diligence in keeping in touch with home. The ‘Dear Mummy and Daddy’ of her schoolgirl years had long been replaced by ‘Dear Mother and Father’, but she shared with them the minutiae of her new existence, from studies to clubs to the Venetian print hung on the wall. She boasted of her small economies — buying a second-hand chair, a second-hand bicycle and used textbooks, and choosing life, rather than annual, membership of the Chemical Society because it saved 6 shillings over three years — or 7 shillings, if by any chance she should stay for four years. (This was the first hint to her parents that she might stay on at Cambridge for postgraduate work). She was also:
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    being dragged into the Jewish Society, which is very expensive (30 shillings, most others are 3/) and no use to me as I have neither Friday evenings nor Saturday mornings free, but I shall have to join as Grandpa has been writing to the professor in charge, and I have been asked to lunch there on Sunday. I went to a social evening of the society at a cafe last night — they are an awful crowd of people.
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    Newnham was in many ways like boarding school. ‘This evening there is an awful thing called the college feast in which the whole college dines together in a great crush in evening dress, and afterwards scholars etc. are solemnly “sworn in” in private.’ Rosalind groaned at having to participate in a fresher’s play in which her role was to walk across the stage on an evening when she had wanted to go to the Cambridge Union to hear talks by the geneticist J.B.S. Haldane and the chemist Alfred Noyes. Seeing that other girls had brought their gas masks with them, she asked to be sent hers but scoffed that the college was making ‘a ridiculous fuss about ARP’.
    Rosalind was not one to put up with silly rules in silence. An early victory was winning the principal’s permission to be away from college overnight to attend the Founders’ Night dinner at the Working Men’s College in London. The principal ‘happened to know about the Working Men’s College and