ABSTRACT
For women’s colleges had a special atmosphere. There was something in the air at my own – St Anne’s, in the early 1970s. It was a compound of cosiness and idealism, earnestness and high spirits: a whiff of Margaret Rutherford and Joyce Grenfell, with darker, more powerful undernotes of Pankhurst and Iris Murdoch. It grew out of the history of women’s education, and the bitter struggles of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras. Women suffered insult, belittlement, and obstruction in their battle to win entry to the higher ranks of academe. A bishop preached in a sermon that bluestocking women would become infertile, because blood needed in the womb was diverted to the brain. When the Oxford Home Students began attending lectures (they were not allowed to take degrees) there was one occasion, not I think entirely legendary, when a don arriving for a lecture where only women had turned up sniffed, and said ‘Oh, nobody here’ and left.
