ABSTRACT
This chapter is an exercise in comparison, exploring the relationship between women and Classics within the institutional contexts that shape and color the relationship. Beginning with and centering on Cambridge, I place women’s experience of Classics there in a perspective gained by contrast with Oxford, and to a lesser extent with other institutions. In addition, I suggest possible comparanda for the terms “women” and “Classics” themselves. If women were, in nineteenth-century Britain and America, outsiders, then so were foreign nationals and Jews. If Classics was a body of knowledge subject to canon formation and commodification, in part via examinations and publishing, then so were vernacular literatures. As for the institutional contexts in which women (and others) learned Classics (and other subjects), these, too, differed in ways that significantly affected the nature and status of the learners and what they learned.
