Bluestockings: by Jane Robinson

I got up at the absolute crack of dawn this morning, to go to an early morning gym class.  I can’t remember the last time I was up before eight on a Sunday.  I’ve been to the gym, come home, watched the tennis, been back to the gym to play squash.  Yesterday, cleaned the house, baked endlessly.  I have pretty much done all my weekend activities and still have half a day to go.  It’s weird.  I hardly know what to do with myself.

This week I read “Bluestockings” by Jane Robinson about the first women who went to university in the UK.  The mindless sexism and pernickerty rules are quite extraordinary.  You weren’t allowed to throw your hair out of the window.  At Durham, there were no ladies toilets, so the women had to leave chamber pots at strategic locations.  At Manchester, you were prohibited from doing the washing up in the bath.  (She doesn’t say whether people wanted to).  Some things did seem better though.  It was cheaper and more efficient to post your laundry home than do it yourself.  And as long as you missed the war years, the food seems pretty great.  Trifle with crystallised violets, anyone?  (Better than pasta and sauce, don’t you think, Chris?).

The best bits, though, were about the individual women.   Like Gwyneth Webb, who got a first class law degree but was not allowed to practice law because a woman could not be a ‘person’ in the legal sense.  After six years campaigning, the law was changed in 1919: the day after, she was admitted to read for the Bar, and gained a (nother) first class degree.  But she died two years later in childbirth.

Jessie Emerson was among the first woman to read science at Oxford.  She wasn’t allowed to study biology, in case it corrupted her morals to find out about the human body.  So she studied physics and chemistry instead.  They gave her a set of steps to be able to reach the lab equipment.  And when she came back years later, those steps were kept in her tutor’s office.  On them was written ‘Sacred to the memory of Miss Emmerson.  Never to be used again.’

We take it all for granted now.