learned women would not marry and that men would specially ‘fight shy’ of taking to wife women who had done the same work as themselves. It may therefore be recorded that the first Newnham student to take a tripos, who was also the first lecturer appointed at Newnham Hall, married the professor of Political Economy, and that they wrote a book on that subject together. That the first classical lecturer at Newnham married a well-known classic and classical tutor of his college (Trinity); that the next Moral Sciences lecturer married the distinguished psychologist who is now professor of Mental Philosophy; that the first historical lecturer, Ellen Wordsworth Crofts, married Darwin’s biologist son Mr. Francis Darwin; and that the first woman to come out senior classic (a Girtonian) married the Master of Trinity College, himself senior classic of his year.
Writing about the proposed Bedford College for women, in 1848, Frederick Denison Maurice had declared that “The least bit of knowledge that is knowledge must be good, and I cannot conceive that a young lady can feel her mind in a more dangerous state than it was because she has gained one truer glimpse into the conditions under which the world in which it has pleased God to place her actually exists.” So “ambitious” a name as “college” for a girls’ academy had a novel sound “to English ears.” To-day the words which excuse and explain its use sound strange and antiquated in ours. Many of the things about which men have fought and borne the heat of long days will seem incredible to posterity, and the refusal of a ‘college’ or of university education to women will no doubt be among them. No one else, nevertheless, had given to women the opportunity they wanted when Cambridge gave it. Cambridge returned affirmative answers to each request as it was preferred—in 1863, in 1865, in 1870, and in 1880 when in reply to a memorial signed by 8600 persons praying that the Senate would “grant to properly qualified women the right of admission to the examinations for university degrees, and to the degrees conferred according to the result of such examinations,” the Syndicate appointed to consider it returned the memorable answer: “The Syndicate share the desire of the memorialists that the advantage of academic training may be secured to women and that the results of such training may be authoritatively tested and certified.”[483] The irony of history required that this memorial, which led to the granting of the Graces, should be rolled and unrolled over the drawing room carpet of a vice-chancellor known to be hostile to the movement. Forty years after F. D. Maurice had penned the words already quoted women had come out at the head of the list in each of the principal triposes. The most striking instance of the misjudgment which it is possible to make about things simply because custom has allowed no one to try them, occurred at the dinner table of friends of the present writer when the late Professor Fawcett, in urging the claims of women to university education, said: “I don’t say that a woman would ever be senior wrangler, but women would take very good places.” His daughter was to be the first senior wrangler: but at no other period of English history would the comparison have been possible by which a parent could test such capacities in his own child. After this it is not surprising that lesser men were unable to gauge the unused powers of half the race; and when one spirited person declared he had no objection whatever to women competing with men but that he considered the air of Cambridge would not be beneficial to them, the argument was as reasonable as any other.
Character and choice of work.
As to the character of the work in which women do best. It had been said that they would not do well in “abstract” subjects. The tripos in which they have taken the highest distinction is the Moral Sciences,[484] where they have been at the top of the list or alone in the First Class five times, provoking Punch’s cartoon in the ‘eighties’ of a girl graduate entering a first class railway carriage marked “For Ladies only.” Their best work has been done in pure mathematics, and, agreeing in this with the men, it is these subjects which they choose for the Second Part of the tripos. In choice of subject the order is as follows (a) Mathematics (b) Classics (c) History (d) Natural Sciences (e) Languages (f) Moral Sciences. The scale of success has been highest in Moral Sciences, then in (b) Languages (c) Natural Sciences (d) Classics (e) History (f) Mathematics.[485] The classical and mathematical triposes lead to those general tuitional posts for which so many women seek a university education; the languages tripos is easier for those women who go up without the usual school preparation; while the lower places in the history tripos do duty for that “ordinary degree” which is not open to women. It is therefore in the moral and natural sciences that there is distinct evidence of choice of subject: the proportion of women who take the former is overwhelmingly greater than the proportion of men,[486] and the taste of women for the natural sciences is as marked, a fact which might have been foreseen by those who watched the signs of the times many years ago.
The degree.
The refusal of the degree, of the magic letters B.A. and M.A., to women, need not be discussed here. That women have the same use for the degree as men is obvious; that it strains their alleged liking for self-sacrifice too far to suggest that they prefer to forgo the legitimate rewards of their work, not less so; and it should not be regarded either as satisfactory or logical that when they do the same work the men only should have the recompense. Dublin university has just offered an ad eundem degree to all women who had qualified themselves for the degree at Cambridge or Oxford—187 have taken the B.A., 121 the M.A., and three have become doctors of letters or science. The credit of this act belongs to the gallant Irishman, and the coffers of Dublin university have thus been enriched, very warrantably, at the expense of the impoverished coffers of Cambridge which sent the far larger number of graduates.[487]
We have moved step by step from the cautious recommendation of the university that the names of the young girls examined for the Local Examination should not appear, and that no class lists should be published (1865) and the informal examination for the triposes, when for nine years (until 1881) the examiners in the classical tripos “objected to state” what class had been attained, to the present state of things when all the “publicity and intrusion” dreaded forty years back in the case of little girls being examined somewhere privately in the same town as little boys, is annually given to hundreds of women in the highest examination in the country in the midst of the university. There had been prophets who opined that under these circumstances Cambridge would be deserted by the other sex. Visions of the halls of Trinity and John’s empty and forsaken, while Girton and Newnham poured forth a ceaseless flow of undergraduates disturbed the sleep of these prophets and seemed worth putting on record in their waking moments. No sooner were the Local Examinations opened to girls in 1865 than the number of boys entered rose from 629 to 1217;[488] and the largest entry of undergraduates on record was that of this present year 1906-7. What has happened? Has a robuster generation of undergraduates arisen, or were the undergraduates of the “seventies” and “eighties” simply maligned?