Steamboat Ladies
The enterprising Oxbridge women who sailed to Dublin to get their degrees
This post is about a subject close to my heart. It’s about how, between 1904 and 1907, over 700 former students of Oxford and Cambridge took the boat to Trinity College Dublin (TCD) to be awarded degrees which their own universities had refused to give them. Why? Because they were women! It’s impressive to think that, during those three short years, lasting links were forged between academic women at Dublin and at Cambridge, as a historic gift to TCD’s first woman professor in 1962 reveals.
Women undergraduates were first admitted to Ireland's oldest university, Trinity College Dublin, in 1904. One of the most important episodes to raise its academic reputation was the awarding of ad eundem gradum (an academic degree awarded by one university to an alumnus/alumna of another) to women who had studied at Cambridge and Oxford in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but had not been given degrees. Girton College was the UK’s first residential institution, offering university education for women from 1869, and Newnham College Cambridge took its first five students two years later. Oxford's first women's colleges were established in the late 1870s.
But although by this time women had been studying at degree level and succeeding in final year exams at Oxford and Cambridge for over thirty years, they continued to be refused degrees at the two oldest English universities (London and other UK universities accepted women on equal terms) . In Ireland, TCD needed money to build a hall of residence for its first women students; then a former Girton student came up with a bright idea. She suggested to the Provost that a good way of raising those funds might be to offer ad eundem degrees to 'Oxbridge' women like herself and many others. On 4 June 1904 TCD’s Board passed a resolution stating that:
‘Women Students or Graduates of other Universities in which women are given full academic status, are entitled to every privilege granted to men of the same standing.’
The first TCD degrees to be awarded were honorary D.Litt. (doctorates) to three Irish female pioneers in higher education: Jane Barlow, Isabella Mulvany and Sophie Bryant in 1904. The following year, Ellen McArthur (Girton, 1882) was the first woman from Cambridge University to be awarded an honorary doctorate. For the next three years, former Oxbridge students (mostly now employed professionally as headmistresses, teachers and university lecturers) travelled to Dublin to be given the degrees they had rightfully earned. They were nicknamed the 'Steamboat Ladies' for the cheap ferry transport they often used to to cross the Irish Sea from Holyhead; each paid £10, 3s. and their names were recorded in TCD’s Commencements lists.
Inviting Oxbridge women to attend a formal graduation ceremony on the same terms as TCD’s male undergraduates was an unprecedented act of forward thinking on the part of Trinity College Dublin in 1904, especially given that it had for so long resisted campaigns to admit women students. As Susan M. Parkes writes in her book A Danger to the Men? A History of Women in Trinity College Dublin 1904-2004 (Lilliput Press 2004), the Board had presumed that only a handful of Irish women who had studied at Oxford and Cambridge would take up the offer, and were rather surprised when over 700 women, of many different nationalities, took leave of absence from their jobs and made the journey to Dublin.
‘These distinguished women of varying ages were the leaders of women's secondary and higher education in Britain’ Parkes writes. ‘Trinity was honoured by their presence, and though the majority of the "Steamboat Ladies" probably never returned to Dublin, they remained proud holders of University of Dublin degrees.’
Seeing so many pioneering professional women gathered together - among them lecturers, senior civil servants, medical doctors and journalists - must have been inspirational to Trinity's first generation of female students who were starting their degrees. On regular occasions from December 1904 to 1907 they could watch the gown-and mortarboard-wearing Oxbridge women proceed from the Provost's house (where they had been given a good lunch) to the college's gracious Front Square where they posed for photographs on the steps of the Dining Hall.
There’s lots of interesting extra information in this Trinity Today article from 2022, ‘Trinity and the Steamboat Ladies’, and in the connected online exhibition via Google Arts and Culture here.
The final ad eundem degree ceremony for Oxbridge women took place in 1907, and the revenue generated enabled the purchase of a sizeable residence for women, Trinity Hall in Dartry, south Dublin, which today is a cluster of residential halls set in peaceful tree-filled grounds.
The first Warden of Trinity Hall -who would stay in post for the next thirty-two years- was Elizabeth Margaret Cunningham, who had studied modern languages at Girton College, Cambridge in the 1890s and was one of the first 'Steamboat Ladies', travelling to Ireland from her post as a lecturer at Royal Holloway College London. In 1908 she gave up her academic career there and returned to Dublin to make Trinity Hall a welcoming place for TCD's female students. She wanted Trinity’s women students to experience the atmosphere of encouragement and support that she had enjoyed while studying at Girton.
See this post by
for more about one of the Girton ‘Steamboat ladies’, Hélène Reynard:Hélène Reinherz had studied for the Moral Sciences Tripos in Cambridge and later returned to her alma mater Girton as Junior Bursar in 1904. The following year she joined the Steamboat Ladies2 to take her MA at Trinity College in Dublin. With the revival of interest in votes for women in the early 20th century, the Girton College Women’s Suffrage Club was formed in 1907 (it ran until 1916) and Hélène was the first staff member on its committee3. When she left Girton in 1913/4, to help her father’s wool manufacturing business4, her place on the committee was taken by Eileen Power. With the outbreak of war in 1914 the family changed their name to Reynard.
Postscript: Sixty years later, in 1968, Barbara Wright (née Robinson), who had completed her Ph.D. degree at Newnham College Cambridge in 1962, became one of the first four women to be elected to the Fellowship of Trinity College Dublin. To mark the occasion, Dame Ruth Cowen (then Principal of Newnham) gave Barbara Wright a remarkable gift to remind her of the link between Dublin and Cambridge women in higher education: one of the original graduation gowns worn by one of Newnham's Steamboat Ladies. In a 2019 broadcast, Prof. Wright said:
I thought that was really moving that [Newnham] wanted to mark the full accession of women to all stages in Trinity, in gratitude for what Trinity had done for them. These were very important women, in society, and in the world of learning, and it was extremely important that they should be recognised as such.
It was wonderful to see this historic gown on display in Cambridge University Library’s 2019-20 exhibition 'The Rising Tide: Women at Cambridge' (my review in the Times Literary Supplement here) As a Trinity student in Dublin in the early 1980s I was fortunate enough to be taught by Barbara Wright and it was partly thanks to her inspiring teaching that I moved from Dublin to Cambridge to study for my own Ph.D. in French Literature in 1985. It's lovely to think that historic, tangible connections between those pioneering women at Trinity College Dublin and at Cambridge University continue to have an influence today.
With thanks to Ciara Daly, TCD Dublin Archivist for her generous advice (any remaining errors are all my own) and I highly recommend TCD’s excellent online centenary exhibition, ‘If a female had once passed the gate…’ https://www.tcd.ie/library/exhibitions/trinity-women/ (accessed 22/11/23)
The perseverance of women, I feel, often goes unseen. This really does show that, brilliantly written and detailed.
My Irish friend will love this piece!