ABSTRACT
Four years ago I attended a reunion of those of us who had gone up to Girton College, Cambridge, in October 1943 as ‘freshers’. As we exchanged news about ourselves I was struck by how much the experiences of women graduates have changed. Very few of my generation had followed ‘careers’. Most had entered the teaching profession for a few years; most had married quite soon, had children and had then given up regular work until their middle age. Yet those women were clever; they were highly selected. There were only 50,000 university undergraduates in the country just before the Second World War, the number of women among them was minuscule; and access to Oxford and Cambridge very competitive. But it is clear that even clever young women graduates did not expect to have careers in the forties and fifties. I was no exception. The story of how I came to follow the career I did, first as a university professor, and then, for ten years before my retirement at 65, as the first woman head of a mixed-sex higher education institution (to all intents and purposes, a university although part of a federal system) is at one level the story of the broadening of educational access to include both more people of working and
lower middle class origin and also, of women. At another level it is a story of my personal response to these changing opportunities. I was myself of working class origin. My father was a craftsman, a joiner and cabinet maker. My mother was born in rural Norfolk, left school at 13 and entered domestic service first locally, and then in London in the household of a Church of England clergyman. She married my father at the age of 28 just before the First World War. I was the last of three children, born as a substitute for the oldest girl who died of rheumatic fever aged 13. The second child, my brother, was 10 when I was born. He became an important influence in my life. He was very clever and won a scholarship to Cambridge to read mathematics. In 1937 he went to Princeton to do research until the outbreak of the Second World War forced his return. After a significant contribution to the war effort as a statistician, he became an academic and gained an international reputation. It was he who supported me when I showed signs of wanting to go to university. He became my yardstick of intellectual achievement.
