THE foundation of the women’s colleges is of sufficient importance to call for a chapter in any history of the university, even if they did not in themselves awaken so much general interest. Cambridge cannot be otherwise than proud of its position as pioneer university in the higher education of the women of the country; the women’s colleges count as one of its glories and stand to it in the relation which Spenser gave to the river Ouse:

They belong to its atmosphere of vitality and growth, their presence adds something to that air of newness and renewal which has never been absent from the university town.

Etheldreda of Ely and Hild of Whitby were of the same blood, kin to Edwin and Oswy. They founded two of those famous double monasteries for women and men, one of which became the greatest school in England, the other the nursing mother of the university of Cambridge.[441] The histories of the School of York and of the School which was to rise on the banks of the Granta had therefore been linked together since the vii century by Hild and Etheldreda. Was any prevision vouchsafed to Hild, that mother of scholars, of the day just twelve hundred years later when two women’s colleges were to rise by the side of the great school in the diocese of Ely? The centre of learning which had Etheldreda of Ely for one of its patrons was certainly propitious to women; but Cambridge had another patroness—whose name was among the earliest to be invoked in the town after the coming of the Normans—that Rhadegund who ruled the first nuns and the first double monastery in France, who was ordained a deacon by S. MÉdard, in whose convent study came next to prayer, who lectured each day to her spiritual children, and whose learning is recorded with admiration by one of her monks, the poet-bishop Venantius Fortunatus.[442]

Perhaps there is no country with a long history where women have played a smaller part on the national stage than England. But a conspicuous exception must be made—in education they have played a great part, and this part was nowhere greater than in Cambridge. We have the little group of college builders who lived in contiguous centuries—Elizabeth de Clare, Marie de Saint-Paul, Margaret of Anjou, and Margaret of Richmond—to prove it: but the activity of the xiv and xv centuries was equally apparent between the viith and xth. It was Saxon nuns who carried learning to Germany, and the rÔle of the great abbesses in those centuries, while it must be reckoned among the exceptions to the inconspicuous part played by women in English history, also served prominently the cause of education.[443]

The “two noble and devoute countesses” who built Clare and Pembroke, and whom Margaret of Anjou desired to imitate, realised perhaps more than anyone else in the xiv century the extraordinary joy of launching those first foundations with their promise for the

future:[444] but it was something of this joy which was reserved for their descendants who saw the rise of Newnham and Girton. It was, indeed, not to two but to four noble and devoute countesses[445] that Cambridge owed its most efficient co-operation in the great periods which mark its history—the dawn of the renascence in the xiv, the threshold of our modern life in the xv, and the consolidation of the religious movement in the xvi century:[446] and if Queens’ College was built by Margaret of Anjou “to laud and honneure of sexe femenine” Cambridge has repaid her by extending the significance of her ambition.

The women’s colleges which we now see did not, then, begin the connexion of women and the university, they completed it. It is a curious thing when one looks down a list of Cambridge benefactors to find that from a college to a common room fire, from a professorship to a Cambridge “chest,” from the chapel to a new college to the buttress of a falling college, from a university preacher to a belfry,[447] the names of women never fail to appear as benefactors, but appear in no other way. Not once until the xix century did any woman benefit from the learning which her sex had done so much to inaugurate, to sustain and consolidate.

In the year 1867 the idea of founding a woman’s college and of associating the higher education of women with the university of Cambridge began to take shape.[448] No movement of the century, it may confidently be affirmed, has done so much to increase the happiness of women, and none has opened to them so many new horizons. If men look back on the years spent at the university as among the happiest in their lives, so that everything in later life which recalls their alma mater—not excluding the London terminus from which they always “went up”—borrows some of its glamour, the university life meant all this, and more, for women. To begin with it repaired a traditional injustice, the absence of any standard of individual life especially for the unmarried; the neglect of every personal interest, talent, or ambition, which a woman might have apart from looking after her own or other people’s children. The Reformation, in itself, had done singularly little for women. Puritan views were of the kind patronised by a Sir Willoughby Patterne, and no step had been made towards recognising women’s claims as individuals since the days when convents had in some measure certainly admitted these, a fact which probably sufficed to make the convent turn the scale on the side of happiness.

Girton and Newnham are the outcome of two contemporaneous but separate movements. In 1867, as we have seen, the moral foundations were laid of a college in connexion with Cambridge university where women should follow the same curriculum and present themselves for the same examinations as men. In 1869 the late Professor Henry Sidgwick, fellow of Trinity, and afterwards Knightbridge Professor of Moral Philosophy, suggested that lectures for women should be given at Cambridge in connexion with the new Higher Local Examination which the university had that year established for women all over England. To-day, more than thirty years after the building of the two colleges, Newnham and Girton are as alike in character as two institutions can be, but this likeness is the consequence of changes on both sides. The view taken by the promoters of Girton was that if women were to be trained at the university by university men they should undergo precisely the same tests, and take precisely the same examinations as men. Professor Sidgwick contented himself with a scheme for relating the higher education of women to university teaching, and not only accepted but encouraged a separate course of study and a separate examination test. Girton represents the principle that a woman’s university education should closely resemble that which the centuries had evolved as the best for men. Newnham was started to further a scheme of education as unlike the men’s as preparation for the higher work made possible. The one grew out of a claim to have the same examination as men; the other was the outcome of an examination established expressly for women. Events have not justified the second scheme. If women’s education was to be connected with the university, the only permanently satisfactory way was, clearly, to follow the curriculum already traced out. If this was not actually the best which could be devised, the foundation of women’s colleges was not the moment to attempt to alter it. A “best” created for women would always have been thought to be a second best. There were in fact not one but two objects set before all who interested themselves in these things—to get higher education for women, and to win recognition for their capacity to do the same work as men. Among the founders of women’s colleges many had present to their minds something further than the advantages of education—they looked forward to a time when women should participate in the world’s work, and have a fair share in the common human life; not a fair share of its labour, for this had never been lacking, but of the means, the opportunities, and the recognition enjoyed by men.

Girton at once prepared its students for the university Previous Examination, and claimed that they should be examined for both the

ordinary and the honour degree. Newnham at first prepared its students for the Higher Local examinations and the triposes, discountenanced the Previous Examination and would not allow its students to prepare for the Ordinary degree. In the event, Newnham has had to abandon the examination which was the original raison d’Être of its existence, and Girton has had virtually to abandon its claim to examination for the ordinary degree. This means that every woman who takes a degree takes it in honours: the same is true of no college of men in Cambridge except King’s. The founders of Newnham considered it a waste of time for women to come to the university to qualify themselves for that Ordinary degree which graces the majority of our men, and which represented such a mysterious weight of learning to sisters at home in the old days. This decision has a double ricochet—it is good for the colleges, for only the better women come up; it is bad for many women who, like many men, are unfit to do tripos work and who might yet enjoy from residence at Cambridge the same advantages—direct and extraneous—which the ‘poll’ degree man now obtains.

The first committee for the future Girton College met on December 5th 1867;[449] but the foundation of Girton dates from October 16, 1869 when a hired house at Hitchin, midway between Cambridge and London, was opened to six students at a time when it was not thought advisable to plant a women’s college in Cambridge. The college at Hitchin[450] was carried on under serious tuitional and other disadvantages—lecturers from the university, for example, were paid for the time occupied in the journey—and in 1873 the college was removed to Girton, a village two miles out of Cambridge.

The manor of Girton on the Huntingdon road—the old via Devana—belonged in the xi century to Picot the Norman sheriff of Cambridge who expropriated part of its tithes for the endowment of the canons’ house and church of S. Giles which is passed by Girtonians on their way from the college to the town. In the xvi century the manor provided a rent charge for Corpus Christi College. Earlier still it was the site of a Roman and Anglo-Saxon burial ground (discovered in a college field in 1882-6). The college itself is built on old river gravel.

The final decision to build near but not in the university town was taken at the last moment when Lady Augusta Stanley, wife of Dean Stanley, refused both money and moral support if it were decided otherwise.[451] Lady Augusta Stanley who thus determined a step which has not proved advantageous to Girton was not, however, one of the founders of the college. This honour is due in the first place to Madame Bodichon (Barbara Leigh Smith before her marriage) and to Miss Emily Davies, daughter of Dr. Davies, rector of Gateshead, who elaborated the scheme together. The first thousand pounds which made possible the realisation of the scheme was given by the former, whose activity in all causes for the advancement of women’s interests was crowned by her gifts to the first women’s college: part of her capital was made over in her life-time to Girton which became her trustee for the payment of the interest until her death in 1891, and of certain terminable annuities afterwards.[452] The third founder was Henrietta wife of the 2nd Lord Stanley of Alderley and daughter of the 13th Viscount Dillon,[453] a munificent donor to the college, who joined the movement in 1871, before the removal from Hitchin, and who died in 1895.

The picturesque and collegiate-looking building which arose in 1873 for the accommodation of 21 students, was thus the first residential college for women ever built in connexion with a university. It was, like Pembroke, the result of a woman’s intention to found and finish a domus seu aula scholarium, the scholars being, for the first time, of the sex of the founder. Subsequent building in 1877, 1879, 1884, 1887 (when Jane C. Gamble’s legacy enabled the college to house 106 students) and finally between 1899 and 1902, has greatly increased its capacity, and the college now holds 150 students in addition to the Mistress and the resident staff. It contains a large hall, libraries, reading room, lecture rooms, a chemical laboratory, chapel, hospital, and swimming bath; and its position outside the town gives it the advantage of large grounds, some thirty acres being divided into hockey fields, ten tennis courts, an orchard, and kitchen garden; while a seventeen acre field, purchased with the Gamble bequest in 1886, is utilised as golf links and woodland. Over the high table in the hall are the portraits of the three founders; Madame Bodichon is represented painting, reminding each generation of students that one of their founders was a distinguished and delightful artist.

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 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]

The village of Newnham which is approached from the “Backs” of the colleges, and

which, until 1880, was also accessible by a ferry over Coe fen, played an important part in the early history of the university. It was the site given to the Whitefriars, who had been the first arrivals in Cambridge, and who from the time of their appearance there as romites till they became the sons of S. Theresa were the most conspicuous community in the town. The first general of the Carmelites—an Englishman—had been a contemporary of the founder of the first college, and it was at Newnham that he visited his friars in the middle of the xiii century, at the convent there which is described in the Hundred Rolls and the Barnwell Chartulary.[460] In the same century William de Manfield left his lands in Newnham to the scholars of Merton. In the next (the xiv) century the manor of Newnham was given to Gonville Hall by Lady Anne Scrope, and both Sir John Cambridge and Henry Tangmer, who were aldermen of the guilds of the Blessed Virgin and Corpus Christi, gave or bequeathed lands and houses they held in Newnham to the new college which the

guilds had built.[461] The Carmelites moved later to the present site of Queens’ and the adjoining ground, and the edge of their property is skirted by every Newnham student on her way to lectures either through Silver Street or King’s College. This new residence was the gift of Sir Guy de Mortimer and was in the busy university centre—Mill Street in the parish of S. John Baptist—so that the friars still heard the sound of the horn which was blown at the King’s Mill to tell the miller at Newnham that he might begin to grind. Beyond the mill was Newnham Lane, which stretched to Grantchester.[462]

Like Peterhouse which was adapted and built for the “Ely Scholars,” the Hall at Newnham was the outcome of a students’ association:—the North of England Council for the Higher Education of Women, of which Miss Clough was president, and the association formed to promote the interests of the Higher Local students were its real progenitors.

As soon as the removal from Hitchin had been decided, it was hoped that the students already settled in Cambridge and the Girton community might form one body; but the decision to build away from the town put a stop to any such scheme. The standpoint of the promoters of Newnham had always diverged in some particulars from that of the promoters of Girton. The former wished to reduce the expenses of

a university education to the minimum, and they wished, too, that it should be completely undenominational, while a clause in the constitution of Girton provided for Church of England instruction and services. Finally, the question as to which preliminary and degree examinations should be preferred by women was still pending.[463] But when the moment came to hire and build a house of residence, the advantage was all on the side of Newnham. Work began in a hired house in the centre of the town with five students, in the October term of 1871.[464] These quarters were too noisy, and Miss Clough, who loved a garden, found an old house set in a large garden and orchard, with the historic name of Merton Hall, and moved there in 1872. A supplementary house in Trumpington Street was taken next year, and there were then in residence 14 students in Merton Hall, 7 in Trumpington Street, and 8 in town lodgings. In 1875 Newnham Hall was built on one side of Coe fen and Newnham Mill, as Peterhouse had been built on the other. So that Newnham students frequented the streets of Cambridge from the first, and had their house of residence in the town two years before the sister community settled at Girton. The founders of Girton had been the first to ideate a women’s college in connexion with university teaching, but Newnham was the first college for women to take its place by the side of the historic colleges in Cambridge.

Let us now retrace our steps for a moment. In March 1868 the North of England Council memorialised the university to obtain advanced examinations, and in the following year Cambridge instituted the examinations for girls over eighteen since known as the Higher Local Examination. In the autumn of the same year (1869), as we have seen—the year which saw the establishment of the future Girton community at Hitchin—the organisation of the Cambridge lectures for women was mooted under the auspices of Mr. Henry Sidgwick. The first meeting was convened at the house of Mrs. Fawcett, whose husband was then Professor of Political Economy at the university, and whose little daughter, the future senior wrangler, was peacefully cradled at the time in a room above. The result of this meeting was the formation of a committee of management consisting of members of the university, and of an executive committee, and the programme of a course of lectures was printed for the following Lent term 1870.[465] The original scheme

included a students’ house where women from a distance could be lodged. Two students applied in the autumn term of 1870 for permission to reside in Cambridge, and were received into private houses in the town. Meanwhile in response to an appeal, originating with Mrs. Fawcett, exhibitions of £40 for two years for students attending the lectures had been given by John Stuart Mill and Helen Taylor, and before the year closed it was found necessary to open a house of residence. In March 1871 the post of head of a house of residence was offered to Miss Anne J. Clough.

We know more about Miss Clough than about any founder or first principal of a college on which he or she left a personal mark. Of the life and thoughts of others, with the exception perhaps of Bateman in the xiv century and Fisher in the xvith, we know singularly little. Anne J. Clough was born on January 20, 1820, at Liverpool. Through her Newnham received, what Girton missed, the impress of a strong individuality, now placed by “great death” at a distance which enables us to focus and appraise it. Her father’s family was of Welsh origin and traced itself to that Sir Richard who was agent to the great merchant-adventurer, Sir Thomas Gresham. To her Yorkshire mother, Anne Perfect, she and her brother, the poet Arthur Hugh Clough, owed their literary interests. In appearance she was of middle height and spare—an old woman of that Victorian epoch in which she was born, out of whose eyes looked the soul of the twentieth century, and after. She seemed indeed to have two personalities—the white hair and an uncertain gait typified the one, but the eyes, very dark and very bright, would lift unexpectedly in the midst of a conversation, and then the visitor would receive a revelation; he would see no more the old woman but the woman who must always be young, the stamp of an inexhaustible energy, that shrewdness with an unconquerable idealism close behind, an atmosphere about her of uncouth poetry.

For she was no artist. She had not that which separates the artist from the man of ideas, or the dreamer, or the seer—expression. No poetical imagination was ever more tongue-tied. She spoke by actions, and used words only as indications of thoughts. Her speech was compared by a former student to the works of early painters, before command over the material had been obtained, but where “sheer force of character and feeling had risen over the difficulties.” She was an idealist, but she could never understand the value of an abstract principle. Her interest was always in the individual, in the career, and she came to no matter, to no person, with a store of general principles ready for the case. She wanted to give women not merely learning, but a life of their own, to call out interests, to satisfy their individuality. She liked to find in them many and marked vocations, for she understood the dignity of all work and had no disdain of common things. She wanted every one to have a place and an office in life, and must perforce fit the squarest bits into a round hole, so intolerably pathetic was it to her that they should have no hole. You could not “hand her the salt or open the door for her” without receiving “some recognition of your individuality” a student said of her. This recognition of the individuality of women and of the human and practical sides of higher intellectual training was her contribution to the movement in which she took so great a part. And the contribution was all important.

She had besides a strong belief in the value of academic advantages. It was in order that some crumbs of things academic might fall to the teachers in elementary schools, that she arranged the summer meetings of University Extension Lecture students. Miss dough’s belief in happiness—in people’s right to happiness—was the source of most delightful qualities. She had waited, she said, for her own till she was fifty years old, and it had come to her with Newnham. She insisted on the little pleasures “which bring joy by the way.” Nothing was too small to engage her own attention, and her educational qualities lay in awaking similar interest in others, as her moral disposition led her to share and so to increase the common stock of interests and supports in life. And so on the rare occasions when she left the college boundaries she would recount to the students at her table or in her room all that had interested her during her absence. She busied herself over the minutest details of their health or well-being, and finding that two students made a simple supper upstairs on Sunday, she arrived at the door carrying a good-sized table, because she had noticed there was none convenient for the purpose. Newnham was for her a big house, and the students were grown-up daughters in a delightful family not yet realised elsewhere, each of whom had her own place in the world, her own personal life, its rights and liberties. Yet the “head” who habitually intervened in small college matters (with a total lack of power of organisation, which in the administration of Newnham she left to others) and who was frequently agitated and over anxious about them, balanced these things by a life-long habit of interest in large public affairs, and, what was more strange, by a very real serenity. She did not think the individual should be sacrificed to the college, or “to a cause, however good.” She never lived in a small milieu—even Newnham.

She constantly exercised a simple diplomacy, not divorced from sympathy—with independent-minded students, with university dons who viewed Newnham with disfavour, and in generally vain attempts to conciliate high theory with prudent practice. It was here that her characteristics sometimes jarred on the early students, among whom were many ardent spirits, people whose presence there at all was the consequence of a struggle À outrance with convention and prejudice; and who resented Miss Clough’s temporising ways, as though the first maker of Newnham were a backslider in the matter of first principles. They thought her indirect and timid. She was neither. She had real courage, not only as her biographer has said “audacity in thought”[466] but audacity in execution. She was staunch and tenacious, and might be found taking an individual’s part against the whole college; and whether the help she gave was moral or financial, no one ever knew of it but herself. Neither did she always prefer the most brilliant or useful student, but would take under her wing the apparently most insignificant. She had no fear of the unusual, though the younger students thought so, and it was “her indifference to abstract principle” which made them sometimes judge that she despised ideals. She had also a singular frankness—a singular directness—when speaking with others face to face; her important things were said at odd moments, odd moments were her opportunities. Neither did she compromise; she went all the way round and came out at the same place. This expedient made it quite unnecessary to override obstacles, and her aphorism “my dear, you must go round” was received with hostile scorn by a student seated on the high horse of abstract considerations. Indeed Miss Clough was not a fighter in the sense that she could neglect the quantity of others’ feelings: and her desire that people should not be offended was part of a sympathy, not of a timidity, which could not be conquered. The working of her mind is shewn in the saying: “If we watch, we may still find a way to escape”—because to her there was no inevitable where her sympathies were engaged. Her diplomacy led her to keep her notions to herself, so that they should not be nipped in the bud by the frost of hostile criticism.

“My dear, I did wrong” was the disarming reply to a very young student who asked her “as one woman to another” whether she considered she had been justified in a certain course of action. Her singleness of purpose—the absence of all vanity—a complete disinterestedness, shone on all occasions. Her never failing search after the right course she once tried to express by saying to a student: “You must remember that I try to be just but I don’t always succeed”; and she criticised the performance with complete detachment from the personal equation.[467]

Among the ideas which seethed in her brain was the training of students as doctors to work among Hindu women; and one of the last things she interested herself about was a school for girls at Siam. She wanted teachers trained to teach.[468] She urged students to know at least one country and one language besides their own. Her liking for new people, her interest in foreigners, especially in Italians, and in travel, was part of a spirit of adventure with which she was largely endowed. She liked old students to go to the colonies, and her interest in such doings never flagged. Her hold on the xx century was foreshadowed in the interest she took during the last years in the Norwegians, and in Japan. She felt very special sympathy with elementary teachers who receive small encouragement for highly important and difficult work. Even the monotonous life of the country clergy claimed her attention, as did a Sunday class for working men inaugurated by one of the students—which she visited, taking the keenest interest in the handwriting of the men, in the books they read. Her relations with her servants were always delightful, and she found time in the midst of a busy life to teach the Newnham house boy to write.

She sometimes spoke at the college debates, and usually, as a student remarked, “spoke on both sides.” On college anniversaries she would make short addresses, and point the connexion of study with life—“examinations demand concentration, presence of mind, energy, courage,” qualities which “come into use every day”: or she would tell students “to bear defeat, and to try again and again”; or she would quote the American who said we should not complain about things which can be remedied, or which cannot be remedied; and add: “there is great strength in these words.”

Her religion was unconventional like her mind; full of aspiration, but lacking in definiteness. She spoke of it as “a longing towards what is divine,” as “arising from the contemplation of the divine.” She spoke of “bringing our hearts into a constant spirit of earnest longing after what is right” and added in language which discovers the burning thought and the halting utterance that made strange partnership in her: “There is no occasion, then, of kneeling down and repeating forms to make prayers.”

One of the last acts was to preside on February 3, 1892 at a meeting which recommended the Council to build a college gateway; the gateway which was to symbolise the concentration of the work—for the public pathway had just been closed—and the attollite portas to ever fresh generations of students. Its bronze gates are the old students’ memorial of her. And on the morning of October 27, 1892, she died, in her room on the garden at Newnham, looking out at the gathering light of the new day.

She was buried with the honours of the head of a college, the Provost and fellows of King’s offering their chapel for the purpose. She lies in the village church-yard of Grantchester, the civitatula which Bede describes where the sons of Ely monastery came to fetch the sarcophagus for S. Etheldreda. So in her death she is not divided from the great memories which link the history of the university to that of the movement to which she gave her life.

The first 28 students came into residence in Newnham Hall on October 18th 1875, and found the moment no less thrilling because they approached the door of their alma mater across planks and unfinished masonry. More room was at once needed, and “Norwich House” in the town was hired. In 1879 the Newnham Hall Company and the Association for promoting the Higher Education of Women[469] amalgamated, and as “the Newnham College Association for advancing education and learning among women in Cambridge” built the second, or North Hall. Thus Newnham Hall became Newnham College. A public pathway led between the two halls, and this was not closed till 1891; but in 1886 a still larger building, containing the college hall, was erected, and called Clough Hall, the original Newnham (“South”) Hall becoming the “Old Hall,” and the North Hall becoming “Sidgwick Hall.” Lastly the two original halls were joined by the “Pfeiffer building”[470] and the college gateway in 1893, and in 1897 Mr. and Mrs. Yates Thompson presented a fine library, the pretty old library of Newnham Hall which had been built in 1882, being converted into a reading room. The land for the three Halls was purchased from S. John’s College, the hockey field is on Clare land, and the total acreage is about ten and a half acres. The college holds 160 students, a few ‘out students’ being affiliated to one or other of the halls—and consists of a large hall, capable of seating 400 persons, a smaller hall and reading room in each building, the library, nine lecture and class rooms, gymnasium, small hospital, chemical laboratory, and the Balfour laboratory in the town which is a freehold of the college. The grounds contain two fives courts, lawn tennis courts, and a hockey ground. In the hall are the portraits of Miss Clough, Professor and Mrs. Sidgwick, and Miss M. G. Kennedy, as the four people who had given most of their life work to Newnham.[471]

The fees vary from £30 to £35 a term according to

the rooms occupied. The college is governed by a Council, and presided over by a Principal, Old Hall Sidgwick Hall and Clough Hall having each a resident vice-principal.[472] Miss Clough hoped to effect a real and lasting union between the old students and Newnham—that the college might be the support of the students, and the students of the college. It was a principle she had always present to her mind, and she herself did much to realise it. School and college have long bestowed this advantage on men, which is reinforced by the support men are accustomed to give to each other; but all this is lacking for the woman who goes forth into the world to fend for herself. University life might however do much to supply the want, and it is to be hoped that women will form a tradition on the point, as men have done. The constitution of the college at least preserves some part of its first Principal’s idea, old students have from the first had a share in the government and a place on the Council.

Candidates for entrance must pass the College Entrance examination (of the same standard as the university Previous Examination), unless they have already taken equivalent examinations. The greater number read for a tripos, but students may follow special lines of study. As to its university successes—the first tripos to be taken was the Moral Sciences (1874), and here Newnham students at once obtained the highest honours.[473] In 1876 Sir George Humphry,[474] as one of the examiners for the Natural Sciences tripos, when he met his fellow examiners said “I don’t know, gentlemen, who your first is, but my first is a man called Ogle.” The man called Ogle was a Newnham student.[475] In 1883 first classes were obtained in the Second Part of the Classical tripos, but Newnham waited till 1885 for its two first wranglers. In 1890 the University Calendar inserts in its Mathematical tripos list: “P. G. Fawcett, above the Senior Wrangler.” Miss Fawcett obtained (it was reported) several hundred marks above the university senior wrangler Bennett of John’s. It is customary to ring the bell of Great S. Mary’s in honour of this enfant gatÉ of Cambridge university; but Mr. Bennett stopped the ringing, and a bonfire at Newnham celebrated the occasion. In the History tripos two Firsts were obtained in 1879, and this tripos has frequently been duplicated with another—the Moral Sciences, Modern Languages, Mathematical, Classical, or Law. The first woman to take the two historic triposes, mathematical and classical, together, was Miss E. M. Creak in 1875. The first examinations in the Medieval and Modern Languages tripos were passed in 1886, 1887, and 1888, when Firsts were obtained, and 30% of first classes have been taken in this tripos. Newnham has indeed been remarkable from the beginning for the number of its first class honours in the university lists.

There have been 880 honour students, and the total number of past and present students is 1600.[476] Like the Girtonians, old Newnhamites are to be found engaged in all kinds of work and in every corner of the world, and like Girton they have their large share of the teachers in the County and High schools of the country; the towns which are perhaps most conspicuous for the number of Cambridge ‘graduates’ being Norwich, Exeter, Cambridge, and Birmingham. Among the mathematicians one is lecturer on Physics in the London School of Medicine for Women, another is mathematical lecturer at the Cambridge Training College, a third is warden of the House for Women Students at Liverpool, a fourth (who took the Natural Sciences as a second tripos) is senior physician in a Bombay hospital. Others are lecturers in the Civil Service Department of King’s College London, and others again are teaching in Toronto, Cape Town, the Training College of Cape Colony, in Nova Scotia, the diocesan school at Lahore, and at an Indian mission school; one is assistant investigator in the Labour Department of the Board of Trade, another who was secretary for secondary education in the Transvaal is now Chief Assistant on the Education Committee (Executive Office) of the L.C.C. The classics are engaged as classical tutors in Columbia University, in Trinity College Melbourne, at Mysore, and Cape Colony, at the Girls’ High school at Poona, and as lecturers on history in University College Cardiff, on Method in the Chancery Lane Training school of the L.C.C., as assistant to the Professor of Humanity at Aberdeen, and as members of the educational committees of the Staffordshire County Council and Newcastle Town Council. The moralists have posts as lecturers at Newnham, as Mistress of Method at University College Bristol, and in the training department of the government school for girls at Cairo, as member of the Chiswick education committee, and as sub-warden of the Women’s University Settlement at Southwark; and a senior moralist was first Principal of the Training College Cambridge. The natural scientists lecture on physiology in the London School of Medicine, on chemistry in Holloway College, are to be found in the geological research department of Birmingham University, as Quain student of botany in University College London, and as assistant demonstrator in geology to the Woodwardian professor at Cambridge. One is in Bloemfontein, one is sanitary inspector at Hampstead, another assistant curator of the museum at Cape Town, and another in the missionary

school at Tokio; and a daughter of a late master of S. John’s is a market gardener. The historical students are to be found teaching in New Zealand, Johannesburg, Bloemfontein, and Winnipeg, lecturing in English literature in Birmingham University, assisting the Professor of Education and assistant secretary in the faculty of commerce and administration in Manchester University, Principal of S. Margaret’s Hall Dublin, of the Cambridge Training College, of the Diocesan school at Lahore, of the missionary school at KobÉ, Japan, superintendent of the women students in University College Bangor, and on the Education committee of the Somerset County Council. The Medieval and Modern Languages students are to be found as tutor and lecturer in French at University College Bristol, as readers in German at Bryn Mawr College Philadelphia, lecturers in English and French at Holloway College, mistress of the Ladies’ College Durban, and of the convent school Cavendish Square. Teaching in Queen’s College Barbadoes, in Londonderry, Brecon, and Guernsey (Newnham and Girton students are to be found in both the Channel Islands), Vice-principal of the Samuel Morley Memorial College London, and, not least interesting, lecturer at the University Extension College Exeter. One is assistant librarian of the Acton library Cambridge, another almoner of King’s College hospital, and a third is on the Education committee of the Gateshead County borough Council. Among the 658 who have not taken triposes,[477] among the usual number of principalships and head and assistant mistress-ships of schools and colleges, we find old students lecturing in History at the Women’s College Baltimore, demonstrating in Physics at Bryn Mawr College Philadelphia, lecturer at Smith College Northampton U.S.A., Professor at Wellesley College Massachusetts, tutor at Owens College Manchester, head of the Presbyterian school Calcutta, head mistress of the Church Missionaries’ High school Agra, warden of the Women’s University Settlement Southwark (and ex-vice-principal of Newnham College), and Principal of Alexandra College, Dublin (LL.D. of Dublin honoris causa). One is clinical assistant at the Royal Free hospital, another is in the superintendent’s office at Guy’s, a third is a physician at Newcastle-on-Tyne and member of the County borough Education committee. There is a lecturer in botany at Holloway, the director of a lyceum at Berlin, a teacher and superintendent of a class for blind women (Association for the Welfare of the Blind), a clerk to London university, a member of the council of Queen’s College London, and the secretary of the Association of University Women Teachers. These old students are also to be found in Toronto, the West Indies, Vancouver, New South Wales, New Zealand, Pietermaritzburg, Natal, Johannesburg, North China, New York, and Christiania; and on the Education committees of the Dorset, Herefordshire, and West Sussex County Councils, on the Croydon Education committee, and lecturing on English literature and on classical archaeology.

A large number of students take the tripos with a view to tuition, with which the above lists are, as we see, mainly concerned; but an account of the literary output of Newnham students is in course of preparation.

Newnham has formed a collegiate character which is partly due to elements in its original constitution, partly to its first principal, and partly to its physical vicinity to the university. To take the last first. The college has always benefited by what one of the professors once described to the present writer as “the life of the university passing through it.” It was not only this proximity, but the fact that Newnham was the product of the interest taken by university men in the advanced education of women—(Girton of a just and fully justified claim to university education made by women for women)—which made the acquirement of this character easier: and Newnham has in a marked degree the character of the university which harbours it—its cult of solid learning, its width and range, the absence of all pretentiousness, of that which every man and woman educated at Cambridge abhors as “priggishness.” The delightful informality of Newnham and the liking for simple appearances is already outlined in the first Principal’s views about the scheme and the new building; “nothing elaborate or costly” is wanted: “The simple Cambridge machinery will be found all the better and all the more lasting because it suggested itself so very naturally, and almost, so to speak, created itself. It is all the better for a college, as for other institutions, when it is not made, but grows.”[478] And Newnham was not made but has grown, grown “very naturally” out of the “simple machinery” first designed for it; has “created itself” because these simple elements suggested the way and the means of growth. There is no chapel at Newnham, all sorts and conditions of men have always been found there, and have worshipped God their own way—“not on this mountain, nor in Jerusalem.” Old students sit at its council board, and come up to read in the Long Vacation. Miss Clough governed without rules, in conditions which were not then normal—which were thought indeed to be so abnormal that no company of women could venture to accept them.

If the enthusiasm expended over the two colleges by those who did most for them—the anxiety when things seemed to go wrong, the rejoicing when they went right—be remembered best by those who experienced it, it has had its enduring result in the

movement itself. For nothing great is born without enthusiasm, and this was one of the greatest movements of the century. The lecturers—those “trained and practised teachers” who as an original prospectus declared “were willing to extend the sphere of their instruction“—took no fees, or returned them for several years as a donation to Newnham. Miss Clough not only took no stipend as Principal but helped the college with money; Dr. and Mrs. Sidgwick, in addition to financial help of every kind, gave up their home in Chesterton and lived in three rooms at the “North Hall” of which Mrs. Sidgwick became vice-principal; and here Miss Helen Gladstone, Gladstone’s unmarried daughter, acted as her secretary. Miss M. G. Kennedy has been honorary secretary of the college since 1875, Mrs. Bonham-Carter its honorary treasurer and Mr. Hudson its honorary auditor. It may fairly be said of Newnham also, that it is partly the outcome of the enthusiastic loyalty of its first students, who have since taken so large a share in its welfare.[479]

In the Lent term of 1881 there happened the greatest event in the history of the women’s university movement. Three “Graces” were proposed to the Senate (a) should women be entitled to examination in the triposes (b) to a certificate of the place won (c) to the insertion of their names, after that of the men, in all tripos lists, with a specification of the corresponding place attained by them in the men’s list? On the eve of the day fixed for the vote—February 24th—the vicar of Little S. Mary’s church and a Mr. Potts announced that they would non-placet the ‘graces,’ and as the day dawned some believed that their recruits would swamp the vote. On the same evening Mr. John Hollond, late M.P. for Brighton, was differently engaged in the House of Commons getting members to promise to share in a special train which was to take them to the university by two o’clock to record their votes, and get them back to their places by four when there was to be an important division in the House.[480] The students of Girton and Newnham crowded the roof of the latter college to watch for the pre-arranged signal—a handkerchief tied to the whip of a student who rode along the “Backs” from the Senate House carrying the news. The vote in favour of the Graces had been 398 to 32, and when it was declared the venerable Dr. Kennedy, the distinguished headmaster of Shrewsbury school and at that time Regius Professor of Greek,[481] waved his cap under the eyes of the vice-chancellor like any schoolboy. The loyal friends now came hurrying up to Newnham, one by one, Henry Sidgwick, Miss Emily Davies, Professor Cayley (first president of the College Council) Mr. Archer-Hind, Mr. (now Dr.) J. N. Keynes, and received an ovation from those whose battles they had fought to such a successful issue: and if one of the seniors of the university became a boy in his delight, another Johnian[482] did not fail to cover himself with glory by his verses in imitation of Macaulay’s Lay of Horatius, in which “Father Varius” and his friends hold the bridge against progress:

The anniversary has since been kept at Newnham as “Commemoration” day: and if one touch were needed to complete it it would be found in Miss Clough’s reminder to the students that they commemorate not only what women gained that day, but what the university gave that day. There was an amusing sequel to the vote: the official charged with the preparation of the university certificates consulted a confidential clerk as to the colour of the knot of ribbon which is attached to the university seal—“Don’t you think blue—the university colour?” he hazarded; but was met by the prompt and horrified rejoinder “blue stockings, sir, blue stockings!” So the colour is green.

Except under special circumstances the age for admission at Newnham and Girton is 18. Students’ quarters at Newnham consist, in most cases, of a bed-sitting room; at Girton each student has a sitting room with a small bedroom leading from it. The necessary furniture is supplied, and can be supplemented according to taste by the student. All students must be within college boundaries by 7 o’clock (but with permission they can be out till 11) and are “marked in” two or three times a day, the chief occasion being the 7 o’clock “hall.” Girton and Newnham students, if no other lady is to be present, can only visit men’s rooms accompanied by some senior of the college. Visits of men to students’ rooms are not permitted, except in the case of fathers and brothers; but a student cannot ask her brother to her room to meet her college friends, for as Miss Clough observed “the brother of one is not the brother of all.” Careful supervision with large liberty and an atmosphere which encourages the students to make themselves the trustees of the rules, characterise both colleges; and women students, as Miss Davies has pointed out, carry on their university life without being subject to the proctorial control which is found necessary in the case of men.

In the early days it required some independence of character to encounter the gibes and the wonder which women’s life at the university aroused outside it. People who did not know what a “divided skirt” was, undertook to affirm that all Girtonians wore them: at Newnham some unconventionality in dress was amply concealed by the general dowdiness of the early Newnhamite. The dreaded eccentricities in conduct or clothes would not indeed have killed the movement; and the authorities did not allow this dread to paralyse the quality of mercy, so that there was in fact small justification for the witty suggestion of a Newnham student that “Mrs. Grundy rampant and two Newnham students couchant” would make appropriate armorial bearings for the college. Nevertheless, as a concession to human weakness, smoking was not, and still is not, tolerated.

Both colleges hold debates in the great hall and also inter-collegiate and inter-university debates. Here are some of the subjects discussed: “Is half a loaf better than no bread?” “That we spend too much” (lost). “That the best education offered to our grandmothers was more adequate than that offered by the High Schools of to-day” (lost). The most important society at Newnham, however, is the Political Debating Society, and the lively and absorbing interest in politics shown nowadays by the college is in striking contrast to the general indifference to politics at Girton. This year (1906) in an inter-university debate (Oxford and Newnham) the motion “That this house approves Chamberlain’s conception of empire” resulted in a ‘draw.’ Most of the students of both colleges are members of the Women’s University Southwark Settlement, to which they subscribe. There is a Sunday Society and two musical societies in addition to the original Choral Society at Newnham, and societies in connexion with each of the triposes take the place of the select “Jabberwock” and “Sunday Reading Society” of earlier days. The great indoor institution at both colleges is the students’ party at 10 p.m. known at Newnham as the “Cocoa.” Two to four is the chief recreation hour, and there are college, inter-collegiate, and inter-university hockey, fives, cricket, tennis, and croquet matches. One of the first conveniences provided at Newnham was its gymnasium, where in the early days of the college a senior moralist might be seen leaping over the back of a student who had just been “ploughed” in the divinity of the “Little-Go,” and a series of reverend seigniors would engage in a hopping match round the room led by the youngest “first year” who was an acknowledged expert in the art.

The public of a generation ago imagined that

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.

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 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?

As between the two ancient universities Cambridge remains the pioneer in the education of women. The examinations are open to women at Oxford, but the same restrictions as to preliminaries and residence are not imposed.[489] It is, however, by the restrictions imposed that Cambridge has established the position of its women students. It has thus bound itself to compare the work of all tripos students irrespective of sex. While at Oxford there is no university recognition of the status of the candidate or of her hall, and no university certificate of the place obtained, Girton and Newnham are recognised colleges at Cambridge; the name of the successful candidate followed by that of the college is read aloud in the Senate House and published on the Senate House door; and only students presented by these colleges are admitted to the university examinations, as is the case with men. Girton and Newnham each owe something to the other. Newnham to Girton in the collegiate status now enjoyed by both, Girton to Newnham because the considerable advantages accruing to women students through proximity to Cambridge have been reflected on the sister college. Each displayed a boldness distinctively its own which has been the main source of the success of the movement: Newnham planted her house of students in the university town, Girton asked to follow the same curriculum as men; and these two things have had a mutually favourable reaction ever since.