1974-2024
The introduction of women students at Brasenose is arguably the most momentous event in the College’s long history since 1509. Many readers may not appreciate that this happened only fifty years ago. We are celebrating this important 50 year anniversary with a series of dinners, panel discussions, events, an exhibition of alumni portraits events, and a permanent marker in College, but I wanted briefly to tell the story of how this reform came about.
The history of women studying at Oxford is of course much longer than half a century. Two notable dates are the creation of all-female halls of residence in 1879 and the conferring of degrees in 1920 when for the first time women became full members of the University. What we are celebrating at Brasenose is the first establishment of undergraduate co-education in the 1970s. Instead of joining single sex colleges, students could apply to study at a college admitting both men and women.
This development was set against the backdrop of the wider societal context of the women’s liberation movement, the introduction of equal pay legislation in 1970 and the imminent arrival of the Sex Discrimination Act, although there were exemptions for single sex educational establishments. Within the UK and also internationally, social and economic factors also favoured entry of women into higher education and the labour force more generally, notably in the USA. The 1970s saw a rise in the average age of marriage and an associated increase of women entering professions, including those for which a degree level education was needed.
One of my predecessors as Principal, Prof. Herbert Hart, is reputed to have said that BNC was full of “Old Turks and Young Fogeys” in his time. This renders it the more surprising that Brasenose was in the vanguard of reform. It is also said that Brasenose’s Junior Common Room protested the change but the level of concern is hard to establish at this distance. In the early 1970s the Oxford Union voted 1039 to 426 in favour of admission of women.
Women were of course involved in Brasenose and contributed to its history long before the 1970s. Two Queen Elizabeths visited Brasenose well before women were admitted as students. We entertained Queen Elizabeth I in 1562 and 1592. Queen Elizabeth II first visited in 1948 as Princess Elizabeth and then once again after the admission of women. We also had two major benefactresses (the Duchess of Somerset 1631 – 1692 and Joyce Frankland 1531 – 1587) who did not seem concerned that members of their sex were not permitted to take degrees at the College yet gave prodigious sums of money. Women provided other types of support as well, contributing to the College’s domestic service in particular. There were also some examples of women living at and associated with Brasenose, including Elizabeth Gilbert (1826-1885), the daughter of Principal Ashurst Gilbert. Blinded by scarlet fever at the age of two, Elizabeth rose to become a prominent advocate for the education of women and founded a charity to promote employment opportunities for people with visual impairment.
There were also of course many women teaching, studying and graduating in Oxford before 1974 - but all at the women’s colleges such as Somerville, St Hughs, St Hildas, LMH and St Annes.
The story of Brasenose becoming co-educational is one of a long slog and there were heroes and one or two villains in the tale. There were also many forks in the road to getting there to the destination desired in particular by younger fellows. A strong motivation for change was the correct perception that a shift to co-education would enhance the calibre of undergraduates, resulting in higher student attainment. Academically able young men and women, it was believed, would prefer to study in a mixed gender environment. Competition between colleges for the brightest students served to incentivise the push to admit women.
The process started in our College on 30 November 1966 (some eight years before the actual admission) when a committee was appointed consisting of the Principal (Sir Noel Hall), Vice-Principal, Bursar, Senior Dean, Barry Nicholas (later the Principal) and Graham Richards (a Chemistry Fellow). The immediate initiative came from a scheme for additional accommodation on the New Inn Hall site and this committee was tasked with drawing up a paper outlining the possible impact on the architectural design if it were to house women students as well as the men. The provision would be different depending on the decision.
On 24 May 1967 the Committee reported that it had extended its inquiry to a consideration of the admission of women to the College at all levels. It asked the College for a view as to whether:
(i) to amend the Statutes so as to allow women to become members of the College;
(ii) to envisage the accommodation of women within the present curtilage of the College.
The first was answered in the affirmative by 17 votes to 3, and the second by 14 votes to 11.
The committee considered all the problems involved, drew up alternative practical schemes, and suggested a time-line for their implementation. A significant development happened six months later when Dr Laszlo Solymar was appointed to the committee. He was a young Engineering Fellow who had escaped from Communist Hungary. He regarded single sex education as “unnatural”. Another key player throughout was Dr Graham Richards who had been a post doc at Cite Universitaire in Paris and preferred the mixed environment to that which he had experienced at Brasenose as an undergraduate.
An experiment took place with Somerville to see whether places could be given to near miss candidates but on 21 February 1968 the Governing Body received a report which said that the scheme had not proved to be a success although the reasoning for this verdict is not clear from the documents.
Much of the opposition to the plans for co education came from women’s colleges. On 1 May 1968 the College Officers reported in detail on a meeting they had held with the women Principals of those, and it was distinctly frosty. As these heads of house made clear, “mixed colleges were against the interests of the women’s colleges”; they were concerned in particular that there would be fewer opportunities for female academics if the male colleges admitted both sexes. The women’s colleges were indeed academically very successful. The main anxiety for women’s colleges was the fear that there would be drop in quality of female applicants as the most talented would they feared apply to the co-ed colleges.
The College accepted nem con the Committee’s recommendation that no further action should be taken in this matter until such time as it can be resumed by more than one men’s college in agreement with at least two of the women’s colleges. It took a while for other colleges to join the party.
In 1970 it was agreed that the College would like to be associated with proposed intercollegiate discussions about the admission of women to the present men’s Colleges. A new Committee on the Membership of the College was constituted from the previous one. The decisive move was taken on 16 June 1971 by a majority of 24 in favour to 8 against, to alter Statute I by the deletion of Clause 2 which read: ‘No woman may become a member of the College’.
On 26 April 1972 Governing Body accepted a report sent to Hebdomadal Council (the decision making body of the University in those days) in which arrangements agreed between the women’s colleges and Brasenose, Hertford, Jesus, St. Catherine’s and Wadham Colleges (who became known as “the five”) and suggested that the first admissions should be in October 1974. It took until 24 January 1973 for a report to come back to Governing Body that the Queen in Council (the Privy Council) had approved the changes in the Statutes as it had to do.
So it was that twenty-seven women matriculated in Michaelmas 1974 at the same time as four other colleges: in Brasenose they were allocated to staircases 12 and 16. This included an undergraduate of colour Raksha Shah and two mature students, Sheila Mahon and Nina Goodchild. Six women graduates were recorded in the following academic year 1975-6 after a further decision had been made to admit them. John Habbakuk, the Principal of Jesus College, rightly predicted that in ten years’ time no one would give these changes a second thought and so it proved.
However the depth of hostility, suspicion and fear at this time can be seen at Princeton, where Gardner Patterson (who headed a committee looking at coeducation there) asked heads of administrative offices about the likely effect on their operations of enrolment of women and Arthur Horton, the Director of Development, replied that “we will run headlong into a huge problem (as any coed place will confirm) that if surnames are changed (ie when alumna Joyce Jones becomes Mrs John Smith). This is a problem and would require more indexes and cross references and of course just plain more of everything in the record keeping world. Plus a lot of confusion” (cited in Nancy Weiss Malkiel, Keep the Damned Women Out, The Struggle for Co-Education, Princeton, p.111). Apparently that did not prove an insurmountable problem at Brasenose or probably anywhere else.
E N Willmer, a Professor of Histology at Clare College, said that admitting women would contravene the “fundamental physiological fact” that “woman is attractive to man and man to woman…The proximity of women is inevitably a distraction to men and as such is likely to interfere with their sustained study and mental effort” (Weiss Malkiel, p.517). That may have been more of an issue! There was a lot of straightforward misogyny not least the US College “Leader” who wrote what became the ignominious title of Nancy’s book “Keep the Damn Women out”.
The move to becoming co-educational contributed to Brasenose developing the capacity to offer undergraduates accommodation in all years of study. Prior to the 1970s, it was normal for students to ‘live out’ for at least a year of their degree and sometimes more. Within a few decades, for the first time in its history the great majority of students were able to spend all of their time living alongside Brasenose students on either Main Site or the Frewin annexe. This in itself constituted a profound change and Brasenose was in the vanguard of this shift partly because it had taken a lead in 1974 to admit women alongside men.
The Fellowship
There were women teaching male undergraduates before 1974. The history of women being paid to teach in temporary posts, but not appointed to well-salaried tenured posts, is a long one. It was suggested in a report presented to GB in December 1972 that the college should elect a woman Fellow in anticipation of the admission of women. On 24 January 1973 however GB decided not to do so. Brasenose had engaged a woman lecturer from 1973 (Margery Grace Ord, Lecturer in Biochemistry) and Janet Dyson in Medicine. Mary Archer covered for Graham Richards (a Chemistry Fellow) while he taught at Stanford for a year in 1974 (she was later to marry a Brasenose student called Jeffrey). On 28 April 1976, Susan Treggari of the University of Ottawa (although originally British) was elected as a Visiting Fellow for the academic year 1976-1977. She is a classicist and remains an active member of our Brasenose community.
On 1 October 1981 Mary Stokes was the first woman to be elected to an Official Fellowship (an achievement that is celebrated by a plaque outside our Stallybrass Law Library). As Ms Stokes had a fellowship at Harvard Law School, she did not take up the fellowship at Brasenose until October 1982. Rosa Beddington (who was amongst the first cohort and gained the first female first class degree at the College) was elected as a Fellow soon after with effect from 1 October 1982. She became Jenner Fellow and FRS moving on to head a lab at NIMR. Sadly she died at the age of 40. After Ms Stokes’s departure to a successful career at the company Bar there was a gap in governing body fellows until the arrival of Anne Edwards in 1994 (also part of the first cohort) and later Sos Eltis in 1997. Both remain Fellows.
We now have 14 women out of 42 members of Governing Body and 9 of our Research Fellows are female. This is still not enough but we are on an upward trajectory and of course not so many Fellowships come up each year. We are however making progress and we have female Fellows in what might have been seen as traditionally male dominated subjects like Physics and Engineering. The first female Chaplain was Reverend Julia Baldwin appointed in September 2017.
The first cohort
So what was it like in those first years? Women students started soon to run clubs and societies and succeeded well academically. The Brasen Nose reported somewhat haughtily that “there is every indication that the women have taken their place in the academic community without prejudice to their identity, and that their contribution to the life of the College is of the highest value.”
Jane Raymond was the first woman JCR Secretary in Michaelmas 1975.
By 1981-82 there was the first female JCR President, Lucinda Riches. The first recorded all-Women’s Dining Society – The Somerset (named after our benefactress) started in 1977 or 1978. Sarah Woodward (now Sarah Martin married to BNC alum Alastair Martin) was the first woman to chair a society - the Pater, a philosophy society. The first BNC undergrad couple to marry in College were Huw Williams and Alison Playfer in July 1980.
We have some fascinating direct testimony of these momentous times. The Brazen Nose records “For male undergraduates it will never be quite the same, and the comforting masculine enclave into which young men could retreat after the wounds of love and the humiliation of sporting defeats is gone for ever, so that they can only sigh nostalgically, with Marvell: “Two Paradises ‘twere in one/To live in Paradise alone.” But they will find compensations.”
Writing in the Times Higher Education Supplement in October 1974, one reporter described the scene this way: “It only needed a beginning of term stroll through the porters’ lodges where Habitat bags and vanity cases were piled up against the usual trunks to realise that things were going to be very different. “
Nancy Hulek (nee Thorpe) who matriculated in 1974 has provided a fascinating ringside account that “When the first 27 women came up to BNC in 1974 it was to what was essentially a men’s college; we were even addressed as Mr in the plentiful advertising mail from gentlemen’s outfitters and the like that awaited us! On the whole we were treated fairly though not equally: major efforts had been made to provide for our needs: on the 2 staircases reserved for women each room received a full-length mirror and we had our own ironing room at the top of staircase 12….No more stale dinner rolls being thrown around at dinner, with the aim of lodging them behind the portraits hung high on the walls, women’s sports clubs, students called by their first names, and generally a civilised atmosphere. With the transition to a mixed college, many of the old traditions had also gone: we were no longer required to send our sheets in advance of the first day of term so that the beds could be made up ready; in fact no one made the beds at all if we didn’t.”
Habbakuk was right; after a few years no one noticed there were women in the College. Soon most other Colleges followed, including the womens colleges. Eventually, co-education was accepted as preferable and superior to the alternative. It was a momentous, hugely successful and civilising decision and I am proud that Brasenose was amongst the first five Colleges to go down this road. It is appropriate we should celebrate.
JOHN BOWERS KC
With thanks to Dr Eltis, Dr Smith, Jane Johnson, our Archivists and to alumnae Drusilla Gabbott and Sarah Jackson who produced a brilliant booklet called 'Brasenose Womens' Firsts'