From a blogpost
by
Cambs Women Together
Two steps forward one step back
Sophie Watson
.’ Newnham wasn’t established in order to exclude anyone. It was established in order to meet the needs of a class of people who were already excluded.
In 1871, thriving British suffragette movement notwithstanding, women had very few of the rights under law which men already took for granted. Many of the young women who arrived at Cambridge to study had never had any kind of formal schooling before.
The women who founded Newnham (and the men who helped them) did so in the belief that this was not an inevitable state of affairs, and that given enough preparation and support their female students were entirely capable of succeeding at degree-level work. In 1890, Philippa Fawcett outclassed every male student in the Mathematics Tripos when (sitting the examinations despite not having the right to be awarded a degree) she was ranked above the Senior Wrangler.
If you are reading this blogpost, you will likely already be aware that women’s right to single-sex spaces of all kinds (not just colleges) is under attack. The vitriol of these attacks makes them initially very startling, but they begin to make sense once placed in the proper historical context.
In 1897, the University Senate voted on the question of whether female students (just about tolerated to attend lectures and sit examinations) should be awarded degrees and allowed full membership of the university. There is a photograph in my book, taken from above Market Square, of hundreds of male undergraduates protesting outside the building while the Senate deliberated - the familiar pavements have been transformed into a roiling, angry sea of gentlemen’s hats. When the motion was voted down, they celebrated by letting off fireworks and doing thousands of pounds of criminal damage. A few decades later in 1921, a similar motion was proposed and defeated. This time, male undergraduates celebrated their victory by storming Newnham’s gates and attempting to batter them down with a handcart. Blanche Athena Clough (then principal of the college) stood alone on the other side, facing the jeering men down.
There have always been men who try to destroy that which women create for themselves. The difference today, exactly a hundred years after the storming of Clough Gates, is that they have convinced some women to help them.
“all [women’s colleges] do is put women atop the hierarchy instead of dismantling it.” But what hierarchy are women and girls at the top of?
Between 2014 and 2018, the number of reported rapes and sexual assaults in UK universities rose by 82%, with the number of incidents at Cambridge coming second only to the University of East Anglia. Sexual violence is experienced disproportionately by women – the female sex, not anyone who identifies as a woman or “transfeminine.”
Women are not at the top of any hierarchy. Yet we are supposed to believe that we are selfish for standing on the shoulders of the women who came before us, and fiercely protecting the rights that they fought for. As a strategy, this has been very successful - not only at causing women to disavow their own interests, but to police the behaviour of other women when they refuse to do the same.
The student organisation of which I am Co-president (the Cambridge Radical Feminist Network) is a source of ongoing concern for student council members at Newnham; the same people who regularly lobby the college to admit males on the basis of self-ID. The success of any strategy which makes feminists the enemy relies on cutting women off from our collective history.
Another (openly feminist) member of the CRFN was taken to task recently for “appropriating the genderqueer colours” in her profile picture. Much frustration and some hilarity ensued when she told us this – reader, they were the suffragette colours. Purple, green, and white.
Being a female student in Cambridge today is far easier than it was 150 years ago. Being a feminist, however, is not so different. They still call us names, only now we’re “TERFs” and “SWERFs” rather than “nasty, forward minxes.” The sentiment behind these insults has remained constant for over a century: women who say no, women who won’t sit down and shut up - and who fight for our rights on our own terms, rather than accept the scraps society throws us - are selfish and contemptible.
I hope that my college stands firm when I leave it, and refuses to betray the women who came before me or cheat the women who will come after me by opening admissions up to men; but I can no longer be naive about this. The situation is dire - but perhaps its solution hasn’t changed much in the last 150 years either. Millicent Fawcett, mother of Philippa and one of Newnham’s founders, wrote that: “Courage calls to courage, everywhere, and its voice cannot be denied.” I’m grateful to the women of CambsWomen Together for creating new spaces in which women can come together while the world seeks to erode our established ones; and for being that voice of courage and helping me to find mine.’
Written before men were allowed in Newnham
Sadly it seems womens colleges are betraying the women they were set up for.