Newnham College Cambridge restricts women’s fellowships …

[SabrinaThwaite]

… to actual women.

newn.cam.ac.uk/research/research-fellowships

There’s proper full on meltdowns going on:

The decision by Newnham College to bar trans people from applying for the Research Fellowship for outstanding female researchers early in their careers constitutes a blatantly discriminatory act of prejudice and intellectual cowardice.

https://feministgenderequality.network/fgen-statement-on-newnham-college-transphobic-fellowship-announcement/

I think it’s important to recognise that this announcement comes in the context of the SC ruling and is a positive development suggesting a direction of travel under the current Fellowship. Decisions made in the past in this field take a lot of unpicking. There may or may not be an appetite to tackle undergraduate admissions now as well - I would have thought they would have to from a legal perspective.

The solipism is shocking. But wholly unsurprising.

I also don’t think we can assume anything about what relatives in the past may have thought. I’m like a PP in that if I’d been offered a place in Newnham in the 80s I would have turned it down, partly because I come from a heavily Newnhamite family and partly because I saw single sex provision as obsolete. Maybe my past relatives would have felt the same? I can’t be certain. Goodness knows a lot of women have been front and centre in promoting TRA views, from a variety of angles.

I am very glad to hear this indeed! Newnham should be about and for women, not men.

Feminist Gender Equality Network. Run by Natacha Kennedy, he who partners with his male self to co-author papers.

Aims

• advance the understanding of gender and sex as fluid categories
• protect the rights and needs of people of all (or no) gender
• counter transphobia and transmisogyny in social life and institutions, legal structures, political movements and media and cultural representation
• counter sexism and gender-based violence and discrimination
• further intersectional understanding and political mobilisation to stress the relationship between gender marginalisation and other social inequalities
• forward self and bodily autonomy and reproductive choice and rights

Men's rights organisation.

If entrance criteria allows all women but only some men to apply, aren't they just one court case away from being forced to be mixed sex?

Aaaah! ...... That explains the de-peopled TIFs

The "Feminist Gender Equality Network" reminds me of that famous comment about the Holy Roman Empire: 'Neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire.'

I'm so glad I left academia in the UK a couple of decades ago due to ill-health. I would have been cancelled and hounded out by the blue-haired gender-special overgrown children who seem to run the place now. As it is, I still have to keep my feminism [the real thing, not that meretricious, MRA-in-all-but-name nonsense-on-stilts paraded around by the FGEN] on the down-low.

I attended an Oxbridge mixed-sex college in the 70s, but was sad when several of the traditionally female colleges went co-ed, and I am still glad my school was single-sex. Here's hoping Newnham hold the line.

Well, if there were tantrums over the fellowship being restricted to women-only, just wait til they fix the admissions policy.

It’s almost like the patriarchy never left, despite flicky hair and skirt go spinny.

Good to see you have posted from beyond the grave to say so 🙂

I wish I had attended Newnham. My college had started admitting women only three years before I started, and that was the early 1980s. Student life was dominated by the rugby club, and woe betide any woman who didn't laugh along with their banter. My tutor was a woman, but when I reported sexually aggressive behaviour by a male (former) friend, she seemed to think I should just shrug it off. And he wasn't even the worst one.

Friends at Newnham seemed to have a better experience and a more nurturing ethos. I had gone to a girls' grammar school, so I knew what I was missing.

Hmm, I would potentially be eligible for the fellowship in 2028…interesting!

Wouldn’t it be poetic justice amusing if this thread led to a female Mumsnetter actually getting the fellowship?

Good to be appreciated! Presumably by a fellow Newnhamite.

@unwashedanddazed

Run by Natacha Kennedy, he who partners with his male self to co-author papers.

That’s nuts!

In more ways than one…

murasaki my grandmother was one of those women. I was so shocked to hear of the shit that the women students had to put up with in her day. I had no idea how much they were resented including by university staff.

Me too. I joined in because I thought it was outrageous that it had happened, that it would be interesting, and it was 2 weeks before graduation so I was there anyway.

With my 1990s 21 year old viewpoint, I hadn't really 'GOT' how much it meant to them until I sat down and talked. And how easy we'd had it.

Standing on the shoulders of giants.

Ahh that’s lovely to say. Yes indeed we are.
I only found out as an adult that in 1921 (before my grandmother’s time) about 1500 male undergraduates had formed a mob because women were going to be awarded the titular (not full) degrees for their studies.

This huge crowd of men successfully smashed in the gates of Newnham College, as the Principal, Miss Clough stood facing them behind the gates shooing her students out of sight. I can’t imagine how terrifying that must have been.
https://newn.cam.ac.uk/about/history/no-ordinary-rag-the-attack-on-the-clough-gates

My grandmother kept in touch with Miss Clough until her death, and talked of her often. My grandmother had only ended up at university because the Headmistress at her girls secondary had gone to Newnham herself. That Headmistress would have been there the first time the college was attacked by a male mob in 1897.

My grandmother was the first in her family to go on to higher education and it shaped her life completely. I find those early generations of pioneers of education for women and girls so optimistic and inspiring. It’s only later as an adult that I realised how much opposition and risk they faced the whole time as female students and teaching staff. I think they’d also be very concerned about the state of women’s rights globally if they were alive today.

I find the idea that Newnham would ever take men to be such an insult to those women.

Miss Clough must have been very brave and determined to face down a 1500 strong mob of angry young men, what an admirable woman. I read out some of the linked page to DH and he was horrified.

I studied Physics at Cambridge in the 90's (not Newnham). I remember Dr Padman teaching me in a practical my first term there. I remember us going back and telling our friends that evening about the big rugby player in a dress who'd been in the lab with us. It probably made the top 10 of bonkers things that had happened to me that week, then got quickly forgotten.

I wasn't aware of Germaine Greers view at the time, but I do remember being confused why he was at Newnham which I think was women only for fellows and students, which differentiated it from New Hall which had male fellows.
I also didn't 'get' women's only colleges at the time, was probably quite dismissive of them. I'd have hated to be at one myself.

Its an encounter I've thought about more recently with all this gender madness. Dr Padman is one of only 2 'trans' people I've come across in my life, both fleetingly. I suppose I just saw him as another male eccentric in a department chock full of them - which was something about the place I appreciated, but I wonder if 18 year old me had found him in with me in the women's toilets I'd have felt the same.

He was very unconvincing. But we were in stupid #bekind mode at the time. And then we grew up.

@murasaki Yeah, the article above saying he was publicly outed made me smile a little at the absurdity.

Interesting you say bekind was in play. My memory in the dept was that it just wasn't treated as anything remarkable at all, and nobody thought to treat him any differently to another lecturer and nobody referred to him as she rather than Dr or him. Although as an undergrad I probably saw very little.

I suppose these days you'd probably have documents, training and fellow students telling people how to behave and what the right views are. I wasn't aware of anything like that back then and good luck to anyone trying to tell that wonderful bunch of physics oddballs what to think.

Probably different to the environment in college. Wonder if in a similar position idiot teenage me would have joined the protests against Greer. Hmm, probably.

We painted on a bedsheet with anti Greer slogans and flew it up the flagpole over the porters lodge as that was accessible via my room, with a bit of climbing. It made the local paper.

I am now thoroughly ashamed, although it seemed funny at the time.

She was right we were wrong.

She was. Oh god, if I'd got a whiff of being involved in that sort of fun I'd have been right in there. Thank god social media/twitter etc didn't exist then.