ABSTRACT
Sometime in 1895 or 1896, two women in their early twenties walked in the gardens of Somerville College, debating whether it was possible for them to reconcile their ambitions with their womanhood. The two were Eleanor Rathbone and Margery Fry, both born into wealthy, liberal, dissenting clansthe Liverpool Rathbones, the Bristol Frys-who dominated the economic and political landscape of their mid-Victorian towns. Families like the Rathbones and the Frys took the call to public service seriously, but they expected their daughters to express such service through voluntary and philanthropic activities and in concert with domestic duties. It was their sons who were able to mesh private ambition and public duty through careers in Parliament or the civil service. Such spheres were still closed to women, a fact that left Eleanor and Margery, on that unspecified day, wondering whether in fact “there was anything worthwhile to be ambitious about.” Eleanor, Margery remembered, thought that it might be worth wishing to be the Warden (or Principal) of Somerville, but Margery felt that just wasn’t good enough, and the two young women concluded that as “Parliament was shut to us, and practically everything was shut to us,” “[t]here was nothing worthwhile to be ambitious about.”1
