Writing Women's History Since the Renaissance by Mary Spongberg

Author:Mary Spongberg [Spongberg, Mary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Historiography
ISBN: 9780230203075
Google: RSJIEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2017-03-08T15:55:31+00:00

The European Experience

Europe was slower in advancing the cause of women’s education and opposition to women’s higher education was both more widespread and more entrenched, as older universities with clerical traditions dominated the intellectual landscape. In the same year Vassar opened, Cambridge University granted women permission to sit for its local examination.21 This marked the beginning of an eighty-year struggle for women to gain equality of education at that institution. The first women’s colleges at Cambridge, Girton and Newnham were established in the early 1870s. By the 1880s women were permitted to attend lectures if chaperoned and to sit for the same examinations as male undergraduates. But they were in no way recognised as members of the university and could not take out degrees or hold any university office.22

History was very popular among women at both the Oxford and Cambridge colleges.23 At Oxford Louisa Creighton (1850–1936), wife of the future Bishop of London and keen ‘amateur’ historian, had been a central figure in the push to integrate women into Oxford. A number of men she lobbied to form a committee to provide lectures and classes for women were also historians, such as William Stubbs, Thorold Rogers and her husband Mandell Creighton.24 In part the push for women to study history may have been shaped by gendered assumptions about the discipline. At both universities history was considered an ‘easy study involving little more than memory’.25 Efforts were made throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century to ‘stiffen’ history up so it appeared as a more ‘vigorous’ study, but the impression remained that it was ‘easy school for rich men’.26 Many assumed that women studied history because ‘it made no demands on their non-existent knowledge of the Classics’.27 Yet most of the women who established careers in history first read at Girton College. Girton had been established by the formidable Emily Davies, who insisted upon the importance of women readingthe same subjects as men, particularly the Classics and mathematics. Girton women such as Eileen Power, Lilian Knowles, Ivy Pinchbeck and Dorothy George were classically educated before comingto Cambridge.

It is more likely that women were attracted to the study of modern history because it was an emerging discipline and thus was more welcomingof newcomers and more open to innovation. As in America, British women saw that the study of history clearly offered them a liberal training in citizenship, enhancing their potential in the public sphere. Through the endeavours of the British Historical Association young women were trained to accept the importance of history in relation to their citizenship, both at school and at university. By 1921, 91 per cent of members of this association were women.28 Ironically, in both countries women were educated to citizenship through history, before they became citizens following the First World War. The enthusiasm of supportive male academics enhanced the pattern of ‘mutual intellectual debt and scholarly partnership’ that the women’s colleges fostered.29 In the United States men such as Herbert Adams, Henry Adams and George E. Howard, through their research and teaching, did much to encourage women into historical scholarship.

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