‘Nicely Feminine, Yet Learned’: Student Rooms at Royal Holloway and the Oxford and Cambridge Colleges in Late Nineteenth‐Century Britain

Abstract

This article uses photographs of student rooms at Royal Holloway and the Oxford and Cambridge colleges to examine the material culture of everyday life at these institutions in late nineteenth‐century Britain. Male and female student rooms are compared, revealing the impact of gender on nineteenth‐century student life. Both male and female student rooms were anxiously surveyed by the college authorities. Under pressure from a hostile media to conform to a feminine culture, institutions for the higher education of women deliberately displayed feminine decor. But students did not always follow suit: both male and female students decorated their rooms in styles conventionally associated with the opposite sex. Men and women used ‘artistic’ decor to differentiate their rooms from those of their fellow students, but these spaces are not easy to read. The meaning of such decorative choices was altered by the gendered context in which they were practised.