Government.
The college is governed by its members,[454] from whom is drawn the Executive Committee, three members of which are indirectly chosen by the old students. The Executive Committee appoints the Mistress and college officers, but the Mistress nominates the resident staff with the exception of the bursar, junior bursar, librarian, and registrar. The fees for residence and tuition are thirty-five guineas for each of the three yearly terms, and they include “coaching.” Students may be in residence who are not reading for a tripos, the goal of the great majority. A great part of the preparation for triposes is done at the college by its own resident staff. The first Cambridge degree examination taken by women was in 1870 when five of the six Hitchin students were examined for the Previous Examination;[455] and the first tripos examination taken by women was two years later when three of these students passed in the classical and mathematical triposes.[456] In scholastic successes, Girton trained the first wrangler (Miss Scott, equal to 8th wrangler 1880), the first senior moralist (Miss E. E. Constance Jones, the present Mistress of Girton), and the only senior classic (Miss Agnata Ramsay, now wife to the Master of Trinity); and was the first to obtain first classes in the classical tripos.[457]
Among scholarships and exhibitions are six foundation scholarships the gift of private persons; the scholarships of the Clothworkers’, Drapers’, Goldsmiths’, and Skinners’ Companies and of the Honourable the Irish Society; in addition to which there are other valuable scholarships and studentships due to private benefactors, and the Gamble, Gibson, Montefiore, Metcalfe, and Agnata Butler prizes.[458]
Former Girton students.
Former Girton students not only fill posts all over Great Britain and Ireland as head or assistant mistresses in high schools, grammar schools, and women’s colleges, but they are to be found holding the professorship of mathematics and a classical fellowship at Bryn Mawr College Pennsylvania, in the high schools of Pretoria, Bloemfontein, and Moscow, in women’s colleges at Toronto and Durban, as mathematical or other tutors in Queen’s College London, Queen’s College Belfast, and Alexandra College Dublin. A Girtonian is vice-president of the British Astronomical Association, computer at Cambridge Observatory, assistant inspector to the Scotch Education Department, lecturer in modern economic history in the university of London, a fellow of the university of London, on the staff of the Victoria History of the Counties of England, assistant on the staff of the English Dialect Dictionary (just published); while one is secretary and librarian of the Royal Historical Society, and another (a D.Sc. of London) is a fellow of the same society. Old students are also to be found as educational missionaries in Bombay and Calcutta, as members of the Missionary Settlement for University Women in Bombay, and of the Women’s Mission Association (S.P.G.) at Rurki; as medical missionary at Poona, as missionaries at Lake Nyasa, and in Japan, and the principal of the North India Medical School for Christian Women is also a Girtonian. In special work, a Girtonian is H.M.’s principal lady inspector of factories, one of H.M.’s inspectors of schools, a Poor Law guardian, a deputy superintendent of the women clerks’ department of the Bank of England, and on the secretarial staff of the Tariff Commission. An old Girtonian is the only woman member of the Institution of Electrical Engineers, and the only woman to hold the Hughes Gold Medal of the Royal Society.
All other colleges which have been founded or will be founded for women owe a debt to Girton for upholding the principle of equal conditions and equal examination tests in the university education of women and men. Its promoters always kept steadily before them the two ends of women’s education, and never moved from the position that “what is best for the human being will be found to be also the best for both sexes.” To them it is mainly due that when Plato’s ideal of equal education of the sexes came at length to be realised, after women had waited for it more than two thousand years, it was not upon a basis of separate examinations for women, and separate tests so designed as to elude comparison.[459]
Newnham.
The village of Newnham which is approached from the “Backs” of the colleges, and