1885 Women's education

King’s was a trailblazer for the education of women. The University of London awarded degrees to women from the 1870s, much earlier than Oxford or Cambridge, and King’s Ladies Department opened in 1885. It became a beacon and a haven for many of the first women in England to gain a degree and become academics, such as Caroline Spurgeon, Shakespeare scholar, and Helen Fraser, Professor of Botany at Birkbeck as well as Commandant of the Women’s Royal Air Force in World War 1. Lilian Faithful, Head of the Ladies Department in 1894-1907, and also the first woman Justice of the Peace in England, said the joy of College life was to provide women with ‘a castle of their own’, and indeed Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell both studied at King’s. Many students went on to take up professional careers in the institutions of the nascent welfare state, for example as teachers, nurses, and hygienists, and were caught up in politics locally and globally in various ways. The fight for a woman’s right to education was one of the burning aims of the women’s movement, and many graduates became active suffragettes, such as Edith Morley, literary scholar and first woman professor at a British university. Sarojini Naidu, known as the ‘Nightingale of India’ for her poetry, studied at King’s when she was 16 in 1895, went on to try and persuade the British government to give Indian woman the vote, and then to campaign for Indian independence and women’s access to education, which she described as essential, like the air we breathe.

This research will explore the emancipatory power of King’s for women, as well as the systemic inequalities it instituted and perpetuated. It will examine the debates around the inclusion of women in education and the College’s transition to a fully co-educational institution, and situate these debates in the wider contexts of feminism and democratic reform.

So what question…

While gendered inequalities have levelled out over the last generation, there remain serious discrepancies for women in Higher Education, for both students and staff, in relation for example to pay and power. This research will shed light on the struggles of the past and the ways in which their legacies continue to inform the structures and culture of life at King’s today. It will reflect on the tight link between education and women’s liberation, and the ongoing intransigencies within the sector and with regard to the very idea of women’s intelligence.