King’s Ladies Department: How do you start an institution from nothing?

Hannah Dawson is a Reader in the History of Political Thought in the Department of History

Really, the question is not how you start an institution from nothing, but how do you start one from worse than nothing – how do you start an institution when there are complex forces ranged against even the idea of your existence? Institutions are magical entities, they comprise people, buildings, rules, funds, mythic narratives that give them a common identity and energy that is irreducible to the sum of their parts – but they need not exist. They are, far more than nations or families, functions of extraordinary acts of will, creatures of fiat. They require powerful and insistent agency on the part of individuals that can easily drain away and leave bare earth behind.

In exploring the archive of the King’s Ladies Department at its inception at the turn of the twentieth century, the overwhelming impression is of individuals – and out of their disparate activity intimations of a unified corporate body emerging. Sociologists and historians debate the locus of social change and causation, arguing on the one hand that it lies in structures, and on the other that it lies in individuals. Over time, once they are established, institutions surface as agents, and entities that supersede and have a life that transcends the people within them – but one of the many striking things about the Ladies Department archive is it reveals - in this case at least – that structures begin with individual human actors. This picks up a thought from ancient and early modern political theory – that while political bodies develop laws and process that animate them in the long run, in the beginning, this is the work of founders, of lawgivers – of the rule of will not of law. Thinking about institutions from the perspective of time therefore, while structure becomes crucial, individuals are gods at the foundation.

Sometimes the women who instantiated the Ladies Department seem to chisel minutely at what was not yet formed, sometimes they seem to leap into the void with extravagant annunciations. Running throughout is the sense that they are up against it. They laboured under the great weight of the still widespread view that women should not be admitted to higher education, the anxiety that a university education for women would imperil the order and fabric of society. A college for women had to fight for its right to exist, and for the material means of existence.

Lilian Faithfull, Head of the Ladies Department from 1894 to 1907, and the key force in its formation, reflected in its Magazine (itself a practice of identity) on the way which people would ‘shake their heads ominously, and prophesy untold evils to women’s character, women’s health, women’s influence, to women’s work in their homes, and to society at large’. She describes the ‘courage and independence’ of the pioneers, who had to the bear the insult of being called ‘blue’ – bluestockings – and the suspicion that came from being ‘alarmingly intellectual and “advanced”’. She declared that the King’s Ladies Department was proving the prophecy wrong, and demonstrating the moral and social development that a higher education gives to a woman, not only adding ‘greatly’ to her ‘happiness’ during the years when she is ‘most impressionable, most full of capacity for enjoyment, when her vitality is most abundant, but also provides her with a deep and permanent source of happiness for after life’. This metamorphosis is something, Faithfull says, that ‘can perhaps only be realised by those who have seen college life from within college walls’.

While Faithfull was upbeat about the ‘wonderful advance’ in cultural attitudes to the higher education of women, there is a sense in which she is trying to effect the transformation in her iteration of it. Virginia Woolf, alumna, was still in despair about the mortifying judgement that a university education was ‘bad’ for women in Three Guineas in 1938. She marvelled at the refusal to allow women letters, at the way for example in 1933 that even non-resident male students of the University of Cambridge flooded into Senate House to vote against women being allowed to put BA after their names, and then went on to vandalise the gates of Newnham. She itemised the galling difficulties that women still had in getting any money at all out of universities, the church, and the state, to fund even the rudiments of a college – to say nothing of the vast libraries and splendid laboratories, the partridges and the whitest cream, wineglasses ‘flushed yellow and flushed crimson’ at high tables, that had been lavished on men’s colleges for hundreds of years. Woolf probed what it did to a person to be told that ‘desire for learning in women was against the will of God’, and that ‘marriage was the only profession open to her’.

Another great King’s Ladies alumna, Sarojini Naidu – then Sarojini Chattopadhyaya, who studied here in 1895, and went on to be a leading light in the fight for Indian Independence – took the fight for women’s education to India. In a lecture in Calcutta in 1906, she mused on the fear that men have of educated women. “What”, they cried, “educate our women”? What, then, will become of the comfortable domestic ideals as exemplified by the luscious ‘halwa’ and the savoury ‘omlette’? In response to this worry that education would take women away from the kitchen, from their proper place in the home, Naidu answered that education is as essential to life, is as much a birthright, as the air we breathe. It is how humans ‘soar’, the ‘indispensable atmosphere in which we live and move and have our being’. Naidu also says that the education of women is necessary for true Indian independence. ‘The education of women is an essential factor in the process of nation-building’, she declares, for women are the mothers of the people.

In dialogue with her alumna, Woolf, Faithfull sees membership of King’s Ladies Department as like having ‘the possession of a castle of one’s own’. One glimpses the battles and self-assertions in the archive – the move from one solitary page allotted in the general King’s College Gazette, to a Magazine all of their own; the fight for scholarships for women of the sort that male students enjoy; the fight for a library; the change of name in 1902 from Ladies Department to Women’s Department – ‘at last … we are now Women and no longer Ladies!’; the fight to be eligible for prizes – we should like to know why our students are given no chance of distinguishing themselves in other branches of study’ beyond life drawing and ‘clothwork’? In 1894, a collection of male professors wrote a joint letter to the Ladies Department demanding that any new lecturer in the said professors’ subject areas should not be permitted to teach without the express invitation of the professors. The Ladies Department responded that they could not agree to this demand. Attendance at courses in the Ladies Department was voluntary; the department therefore needed to provide lectures that the students wanted, and had to be at liberty to appoint, cancel and arrange as it saw fit. Here one sees not only the departmental claim of self-government, but also the straightened financial circumstances of the Ladies Department which left it vulnerable to market forces.

Lilian Faithfull was in the explicit business of cultivating free moral women ‘capable of governing [themselves], equal to responsibility … so long as she shows herself trustworthy, she is in most matters a law unto herself’. But Faithfull was also interested in conjuring – and cajoling – an esprit de corps, which relied on the participation of all students in their myriad interconnected individual endeavours. Alongside the constellation of their chosen courses – on, for example, Arthurian legends, Cardinal Newman, English architecture, cosmical evolution, trench cookery, and political economy – they played sport, put on amateur dramatics, had tea parties, and engaged in debates on, for example, the value of fiction. Finally, Faithfull wanted to admit women into what she saw as that other bastion of male privilege: friendship. Since Aristotle, and famously Montaigne, this was often thought to be an affective and social space reserved for men. Unencumbered by necessity or economics, individuals would freely associate out of pure choice, and love the other for who they were, for their own sake, as Aristotle had said. As Faithfull says, in these precious relationships, ‘the woman is taken for herself’. Men, she says, have enjoyed the opportunities for these life-long friendships ‘for centuries, women only in the last twenty years; and no one who has enjoyed the comradeship and intimacy of College will deny that friendships made there are unlike all others’.

Dr Hannah Dawson is a Reader in the History of Political Thought at King’s College London. She has published widely on early modern thinking about language, and her books include: Locke, Language and Early-Modern Philosophy (Cambridge University Press); Hobbes: Great Thinkers on Modern Life (Pan Macmillan (UK) Pegasus (USA)); The Penguin Book of Feminist Writing, ed. (Penguin), and Rethinking Liberty before Liberalism, eds. (Cambridge University Press). She is currently preparing her edition of Locke’s Disputations on the Law of Nature for the Clarendon Works of John Locke, and writing a book on the birth of feminism.