'No women at Cambridge!' The 1897 protests, Part 1
Angry clamour in King's Parade
On this sunny May day, King’s Parade in Cambridge looks much the same as in the photograph above, if considerably less crowded. This is the first of a special two-part post marking the anniversary of 21st May 1897, a notorious date in the history of the University, when a vote to award women the title of their degrees turned into a protest against women’s right to study at Cambridge. Attitudes towards access to higher education are very different today, thanks to the efforts of women and men who worked together over the years. This post contains references to deeply unpleasant historic views of women. (Part 2, ‘The Woman Cyclist’, describes what happened later that day; both posts updated in 2025.)
21st May 1897
Looking down from the high window of Gonville & Caius college, the view resembles a sea of bobbing straw boaters, jaunty with striped college ribbons. On this pleasant summer's morning, thousands of young men are closely packed into King’s Parade in central Cambridge, waiting. The noise of the crowd is building: excited chatter and shouting to friends, whistles and catcalls, a low rumble of impatient voices. In the hazy distance there is a row of hansom cabs, horses stamping their feet, waiting. They have brought many older men from the railway station for the day and soon will be bringing them back again. Just visible in the background is the neo-Gothic façade of King’s College, and to the right of this photograph, behind the railings, is the enclosed yard of Cambridge University’s Senate House, where the dons are milling about, waiting to cast their vote.
Just out of shot in the photograph above is a large banner spelling out the demand that most of these men had gathered in King’s Parade to reinforce: ‘No Women at Cambridge’.
Most of the young men in this thousand-strong crowd are mild-looking men in their early twenties, dapper in their pale linen suits and straw hats. Some are standing about casually with their hands in their pockets; others are smoking pipes, looking serious. Among the crowd of undergraduates there are several middle-aged men, some in dark suits and bowler hats, others in clerical clothing. They are staring straight ahead with grim dignity, while other men and boys in flat caps laugh up at the camera. On the right of this photograph you can see some of the more eager undergraduates pressing against the high railings of the Senate House. A few have already scaled nearby lamp-posts, trying to get a better view of the professors and college fellows who are have gathered inside the Senate House yard, wearing their academic gowns, mortarboards or top hats, talking earnestly to one another.
‘The scene will never be forgotten’, one onlooker later recalled, ‘the excitement of the undergraduates who assembled in great numbers, the spectators at every window and on the tops of houses and St Mary’s Church, and fireworks in the Senate House Yard’. To him, and many others, it was a grand day out.
An unimportant fad?
For almost thirty years, ever since the first two ‘ladies’ colleges’ at Girton and Newnham were founded in 1869 and 1871 respectively, women who lectured and studied at Cambridge had been largely ignored, or seen as harmless bluestockings. Higher education was regarded as ‘an unimportant fad that would come to nothing’, as Blanche Athena Clough, later principal of Newnham, noted. In 1881 a university vote in the Senate House permitting women students to take final examinations was passed with general approval; there was a gentlemanly disposition ‘not to refuse to do what you were asked to by ladies’, as Clough recalled.
Towards the end of the 1880s Girton and Newnham’s college leaders began to plan their campaign for women to be awarded B.A. degrees at Cambridge, but they didn’t want to seem too ‘pushing’ or unladylike about it. As Helen Gladstone put it, their approach was ‘so as not to ask for degrees, but not appear to reject them if they were offered.’1
Since 1881, the two women’s colleges of Newnham and Girton had awarded their own certificates to students who had taken its final Tripos exams and fulfilled the University's degree requirements. But by the 1890s more and more British universities were offering equal opportunities for women to study alongside men, and applicants for the best jobs were expected to have B.A. and M.A. degrees. Women who had studied at Oxford and Cambridge, but had no degree certificate to prove it, were finding it harder to compete in the professional workplace.
‘to the University at least unharmful, and to women an unmixed gain.’
Girton and Newnham students had already proved their intellectual ability, with the outstanding results of Agnata Frances Ramsay in Classics in 1887 (see Punch cartoon above) and Philippa Fawcett in Mathematics in 1890. There seemed to be no valid reason why such women should not be acknowledged by the University. The Principal of Newnham College, Eleanor Sidgwick, wrote that the conferring of a Cambridge degree to women students would be ‘to the University at least unharmful, and to women an unmixed gain.’
Thirteen peaceful men
Perhaps surprisingly, compulsory Greek was the subject that aroused the fiercest Cambridge passions at this time. Three attempts to have Greek removed from the university’s entrance examination had been defeated, most recently in 1891. Those who supported degrees for women felt that they were on safer, less controversial ground. In 1896 a committee comprised of senior members from the two women’s colleges made a formal request for their students to be awarded degrees, and in February 1897 a syndicate of thirteen professors were appointed to discuss the proposal, to be put to the vote at the University Senate House in May. The Chair was Frederick Maitland, the Downing Professor of the Laws of England who described the group he led as ‘a syndicate of peaceful men, dull men, perhaps the thirteen dullest men in the university’ and tried to use humour to take the heat out of the situation.
To begin with, the forthcoming vote was discussed behind closed academic doors, with those in favour and against women's degrees expressing their opposing views in lengthy speeches. Under pressure from professors including Alfred Marshall, Maitland’s syndicate agreed to water down Newnham and Girton’s proposal to a more acceptable form: if approved, women would be awarded only the title of their degrees, so that they could put ‘B.A.’ after their names but would not yet become members of the university. But those who were against any form of degrees for women at Cambridge refused to be placated, and soon the dons’ disagreements became a topic of polarised public debate, and daily newspapers ‘reported each thrust and counter-thrust in a fashion reminiscent of war-reporting’, as the historian Rita McWilliams-Tullberg writes in Women At Cambridge (CUP, revised edition, 1998).
The traditional rivalry between the two ancient universities was infused with a new energy in the 1890s that depended on keeping the women out.
In 1897, The Times and the Morning Post did not need to give any reasons why women should be excluded from the responsibilities and benefits of a Cambridge degree: it was simply held to be self-evident, as proved by Oxford University's recent refusal to change its statutes in favour of women’s degrees. Even the more liberal Manchester Guardian editors pointed out that Cambridge could not afford to show any weakness in this matter, lest all the best rowing men went to Oxford. The traditional rivalry between the two ancient universities was infused with a new energy in the 1890s that depended on keeping the women out. ‘Some opponents of the College used their influence with the undergraduates, and especially the athletic element,’ Newnham’s historian Alice Gardner wrote, and ‘the voice of “sweet reasonableness” was drowned in angry clamour’.
No gowns for Girtonites
The views of undergraduates were not usually taken into account by their professors at the time, but now youthful male anger became a politically useful tool for members of the university who were opposed to change. Meetings were held in colleges and student rooms in the months leading up to the vote, petitions were circulated and posters printed and displayed around the town, with jokey, but nonetheless inflammatory, slogans such as ‘No Gowns for the Girtonites! Non Plus the Newnhamites!!’
Many former students (known as M.A.s), who still had a right to vote, many years after they had studied at Cambridge, suspected that allowing women to graduate would change the fundamental character of their beloved old university and as such would constitute ‘the thin end of the wedge’, leading to further invasions of male-held privilege by women who would be able to vote on, and change, age-old university statutes. They feared that the women were about to ‘steal’ a Cambridge degree, something that, they felt, should belong only to men from the most élite social classes.
The Times announced that special trains of the Great Northern Line would leave King’s Cross for Cambridge in time for M.A.s to register their ‘non-placets’ (no) for the vote that would take place at noon on Friday, 21st May 1897. Male undergraduates, who were not permitted to vote, met these former students, many of them clergymen, at Cambridge railway station and rushed them in one-horse hackney carriages along Regent Street, through the marketplace and to the Senate House. ‘There they had to press through excited throngs, under the gaze of undergraduates leaning out of Caius College dangling effigies of women students. . . . When at last the result was announced, the women had suffered a crushing defeat. The final vote was 1,707 against women receiving degrees, and only 661 in favour.’2
New photographs, images and diary entries from 21st May 1897 have recently come to light, and feature in Dr Jill Whitelock’s excellent post for Cambridge University Library’s Special Collections blog, ‘A crowd’s-eye view: the 1897 Cambridge vote for women’s degrees’. Above is perhaps the most notorious photograph of King’s Parade on that beautiful summer’s day. Hanging from a window of MacMillan and Bowes’s bookshop swings an effigy of a red-haired ‘Girtonite’, riding her bicycle dressed in bloomers. It’s a grotesque, misogynistic caricature.
But just visible in the doorway are also the women who were involved in the campaign for degrees, watching and waiting. They knew that one day their voices would be heard.
Sources
'Crowds gather...' : Cambridge University Library (UA Phot. 174/3); Alice Gardner, A Short History of Newnham College Cambridge (1921); Ann Kennedy Smith, ‘The Road to the Senate House’, TLS online, October 2019; Rita McWilliams-Tullberg Women At Cambridge (CUP, 1998); Gill Sutherland, ‘History of Newnham’, Newnham College website; ‘The Rising Tide: Women At Cambridge’, Cambridge University Library 2019-20 exhibition website. All websites consulted 21.5.2024.
Quoted in Rita McWilliams-Tullberg, p. 76.
Quoted in ‘Cambridge Boys Celebrate When Women Are Refused Degrees’ , Graphic Arts Collection Special Collections blog, Princeton University.
A fascinating post, and what incredible photographs. Intrigued to read part 2. I didn’t realise Oxford and Cambridge were behind other universities in this regard.
The wonderfully calm way in which you write this, Ann, makes it all the more powerful - I could feel my blood pressure rising as I read...
So so interesting, thank you.