Why did women go to university?

[CatsAreAssholes]

Inspired by the 'how were things different for your grandmother' thread.

I was just wondering about the way women in professions were expected to give up their job after they got married, this combined with the expectation of an early marriage would have made Uni fairly pointless if you see it as a means to employment. I'd have thought at the time higher education for educations sake would have seemed very impractical. Unless it was seen as a back up plan for women who couldn't find a husband or a means of meeting one?

I'd say the same reason that retirees do university courses, interest and a need to learn. Just because you don't have to do the degree doesn't mean you shouldn't.
If I had the choice between a university education or honing my embroidery skills, I know what I would pick! 😀
I would think there was an element of making yourself an interesting wife at one point though.

I don't think that university was seen as a means to employment for my parents generation, at least not in the way it's seen now. More of a rite of passage perhaps, definitely an extension of education, and much more of a straight academically experience. Also as you say for the women an opportunity to meet men of a similar background, bearing in mind that it was only a fairly small section of the population that went to university then.

My mother only had a professional job for a year or two after she graduated as she gave up work (as expected) after she got married (and started a family almost immediately). Her parents were wealthy, and university cheap. If she hadn't gone to university I expect she would probably just have got married when she was younger, and probably never worked at all.

My grandmother that went to university came from a highly academic family, married someone similarly academic and while she didn't have a career as such (or a job for that matter) continued her academic pursuits well into her 80s. She went to Oxford only ten years after it was possible to get degrees at all there. This article says that the advocates for higher education for women around the turn of the century had to argue that it led to women being better wives and mothers with lots of health checks to make sure that the women weren't being damaged through too much use of their brains.

I would think there was an element of making yourself an interesting wife at one point though

That's a problem in India at the moment - a demand for wives to be highly educated women, but not actually then not practicing as a lawyer/GP/whatever once they're married.

My great grandmother was one of the first women to go to university. Despite doing as well as the men the women weren't actually awarded degrees but given a "permit to teach"

Gaudy Night by Dorothy L Sayers is a great book for many reasons, one is that it's written in a historical context where most university-educated women had to choose between marriage and career and career and how it addresses that (attitudes to class not quite do enlightened though).

Unless it was seen as a back up plan for women who couldn't find a husband or a means of meeting one?

You are aware that some women don't want to marry (a man) ... are you? Not can't find a husband, just don't want one.

Back in the day, I think I would have thought very, very long and very very hard about whether I really, really want to give a man the legal right to rape me. (I think men massively profited from the fact that many women weren't sufficiently educated to even know about that part of marriage)

Back in the day many women probably wouldn't have thought about sex within marriage as ever being rape. My mother certainly gave my sisters and me the message that after marriage your body pretty much belonged to your husband, and that sex was an unfortunate duty which men couldn't really help wanting and women endured. She was sent to a clinic by her mother to get ready for sex (including using stretching devices) during her engagement. I don't know how representative her experiences and thoughts were but I'm sure she wasn't alone.

You are aware that some women don't want to marry (a man) ... are you? Not can't find a husband, just don't want one.

Sigh.

Vestal I've been using this board for about 6 years. Prolifically so. I have noticed a tendency of yours to jump down posters throats, frequently missing the irony of posts and telling the poster how wrong they are, I realise that English isn't your first language so I've tried to ignore on those occasions. You will also occasionally post as though you're some final authority of feminism.

The fact is that on this board most posters will presume (rightly or wrongly) that they're dealing with women who are reasonably well educated on feminism.

Yes, I am very aware not every woman wanted to marry a man. I am however also aware that there weren't loads of out lesbians 50-100 years ago. There also weren't a lot of well to do women who would have had an easy time choosing to be an 'old maid' by their families. It was expected you got married and you mostly did what you were expected. As most people do today. I began my post under the assumption that most readers will understand that most women planned to get married, either out of choice or out of social obligation.

Additionally you're implying that only women who wouldn't want to get married would be interested in an education.

Nooka that's horrific and I hope very unusual. Was this in the UK?

Worth noting that there will be many women in this board who got married when spousal rape was legal.

It's been legal in all most all of our lifetimes

The reason I went to university 60 years ago was because it seemed the next step in my education, and I really wanted to go. I was at a girls' grammar school , taught by mainly unmarried women. It was at a time when universities were expanding, and most us were the first of our families to go, and very few of us had any idea of what work we would eventually do, and certainly didn't go in order to get a husband. We mostly studied subjects we enjoyed and had excelled at at school. The prospect of eventual financial reward was never discussed.

Thanks for answering Eddie! We're your family very supportive of you going, was there an assumption by then that you would go as you'd been to the grammar and done well or were they surprised by your choice? We're you able to study any subjects you wanted if you'd done well or did you find yourself steered in a specific direction?

(Sorry for all the questions)

Well they just accepted that was what I wanted to do. I think they were very proud of how well I had done at school,and wanted the best for me.
I'd done Physics, Chemistry, Pure Maths and Applied Maths at A Level, and decided to do a Maths degree, because it was a subject that I loved.
There wasn't any pressure to study a particular subject; the whole idea and experience was completely outside most parents at that time. Unlike today where parents seem almost over-invested in their children's lives.
I didn't go to university to find a husband, but I ended up with one anyway.

eddie :) thank you for an insightful reply.
in Canada it seems the first women to attend were circa 1910 or so.
was it earlier in the UK?

My grandmother, born 1903, was a pharmacist. Was this a graduate profession? I actually never asked how / where she trained as all conversation was always about my grandfather being a doctor. "Doctor" spoken in hushed tones of reverence when, in fact, her early career must have been more remarkable.

Yes, in the UK. My mum isn't the most reliable narrator, but that story rang true to me. She also has a tendency to reify marriage, unmarried women of her generation were presented by her as something of sad failures, pretty much regardless of their opinion on the matter. I certainly worried about ending up like my aunt, which as an adult seems ridiculous as my aunt seems to me to have (and still have) a pretty interesting and fulfilled life.

^Well they just accepted that was what I wanted to do. I think they were very proud of how well I had done at school,and wanted the best for me.
I'd done Physics, Chemistry, Pure Maths and Applied Maths at A Level, and decided to do a Maths degree, because it was a subject that I loved.There wasn't any pressure to study a particular subject; the whole idea and experience was completely outside most parents at that time. Unlike today where parents seem almost over-invested in their children's lives.
I didn't go to university to find a husband, but I ended up with one anyway.^

Thanks for answering all my questions
You definitely didn't take any soft subjects! Can I ask a couple more

What work did you go on to do after studying and was it affected by the accidentally found husband once you married? It's sad to consider that most of us today wouldn't consider higher education for its own sake because of the huge costs involved. Do you like seeing the statistics today that flip the ratios to more women entering uni than men?

Roseformeplease I've tried googling and I don't see anything about the qualifications for a pharmacist at the time. But you're right, it would have been very interesting partly because of her sex and partly because she'd have been dealing with all the ex servicemen of the two wars. And they'd have still been giving out opium then right??

That's so sad Nooka, My grandmother on my father's side has been unhappily married for years but a divorced woman is a failure too, obviously. As is being an unwed mother (which she was) but hasn't stopped her being awful to her daughters who had premarital sex.

My great-grandmother was fairly early to study at university, in the 1880s. The first women to matriculate in the UK seem to have been the Edinburgh Seven in 1869.

What is perhaps hard to recapture is that until the 1940s or so marriage was often talked about as a career, and where education for women was approved of, university education was sometimes considered/rationalised as equally valuable for that 'career' as for a profession, usually for educating children but also for community/voluntary work. Just to point out that I don't agree with this, I'm expressing what I think was the view of many people at the time. My great-grandmother held eugenic views and so did her husband, they wrote books about how educated white women should breed more so they could outnumber the lesser orders. I'm a believer in education myself but she's not a great advertisement for it.

Eddiemairswife - I'm very similar though younger - I went to university 40 years ago. I took A Levels in Maths, Further Maths, Physics, Statistics and General Studies and went on to read Maths (no surprises there!)

My father was certainly happy for me to go to university - he hadn't himself although he was certainly capable and I was fulfilling a dream for him. (Which I then let him down on, but that's another story.)

I certainly wanted a career, and I've had one all my life, but as a software engineer rather than an astronomer as planned!

My mother on the other hand once told a friend that it would have been better if my brother had had my brains, and if I had been more into feminine pursuits as she was. I was furious and upset - it felt as though she had no love for me as the person I was.

I've also got married twice.

And they'd have still been giving out opium then right??

Probably not so much. Sales of opium start to be controles from the 1860s with the Poisons Act - you had to sign a book if you bought things like that, and arsenic, I think. There are more regulations in the later 19th century, but the main one was DORA - Defence of the Realm Act on 1916, which also brought in licensing hours in pubs and so on. Of course, you can still get morphine on prescription and only yesterday, the pharmacist was telling me codeine is one if the few painkillers I can take alongside my current prescribed meds. Opiates have always been important medicines.

(Can't remember all the details about morphine control, and am meant to be going to work, but at one point, I gave a talk on it.)

Will come back to talk about my grandmother's education...

I have never really planned anything apart from deciding to go to university.I went into primary teaching after graduating as I didn't want to teach Maths to adolescent girls. However, we wanted a family so I ended my probationary year 6 months pregnant. We had very little money, but my husband was also teaching, so we had a steady, reliable income with good prospects of promotion. We had 4 children in just under 6 years and moved to different parts of the country during that time. I didn't go back to work for several years; child care wasn't available to the extent that it is today, we didn't live near our families and I wanted to look after my children myself. I have never felt that I wasted my education. I have done what I chose to do; our children have all got responsible, satisfying jobs in the public sector; 2 went to university, 2 chose not to. 4 of my grandchildren have been to/are at university; the youngest is still at school.
When Tony Blair stated his wish for 50% of young people to go to university he quoted statistics that said on average graduates earned £400,000 more over a lifetime than non-graduates. That figure was based on those who graduated in 1960, when less than 6% of school leavers went to university; it would be unlikely to apply to the 50%.

My grandmother was born in the early years of the 20th century and did maths at Cambridge, but didn't get a full degree, because women weren't awarded degrees there till the 1940s. She married in her 30s and had 3 children, and was a farmer's wife before teaching at a girls school (maths & physics.) I suspect these days, she would have gone on to do a PhD.

My grandfather's sisters who survived to adulthood also all had some form of higher education, in "sex-appropriate" subjects like nutrition, botany, English, dairying. So I come from a family where women's education was approved of, and they could afford it. I also have a letter from a Victorian ancestor, who fell out with her father in the 1860s because he didn't approve of her going to college (she did anyway; they later made up.)

On the other side of my family, I'm the first to have gone to uni, so I think the differences are more marked there, despite her being nearly a generation younger than my other grandmother. She left school at 14 and worked in a factory until she was called up for the services at 18 (early 1940s.) But I think there's also more contrast because she came from a city and always lived there, whereas my other grandparents had been on a farm, and my father was a farmer, so there was all that in common, and we saw a lot more of that side of the family when we were children. It did all mean I was brought up expecting to go to uni, and there was no truck with ideas like girls can't do maths and science (which I also didn't get at school, which was single-sex for secondary.) It did take a bit of mental adjustment at uni that there were quite a few people who were the first in their families to go to uni (1990s) - I thought a cousin of my generation was a bit of a rebel for not going!

I went to an all-girls school. In the founding documents regularly read out on founder's day we had it explained to us that it makes sense to educate women because educated women will naturally raise better educated children, and that by educating your daughter you are indirectly improving the education of your grandsons. (This was read out in context of this no longer being the justification in modern times, of course)

The reason's their families sent them was most likely to meet men in the right circles and get an education in a social science that will make them good conversationalist at dinner parties. Several people in my family still think this way low key. It was their generations version of a European tour or being an "accomplished lady" with embroidery and shit.

A university degree as a way of improving ones career options is very much a post-1980s view IMO. Prior to that, and certainly pre- world war 2 a degree was something done for its own sake.

a degree was something done for its own sake.

Yes, I think this was mostly the case for my grandmother and great aunts.