The Good Women of Peterhouse: Patriarchal Community, Femininity and University Reform

Abstract

This article reads a Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Company stained glass window in light of Victorian reforms extending university education to women. Designed by Edward Burne-Jones and installed in the Senior Combination Room of Peterhouse College in 1870, the window boasts six stained glass panels that together illustrate twelve characters from Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Legend of Good Women. I argue that the beautiful, passive, idealized women the panels represent constitute a discursive response to the social and cultural anxieties raised by the emerging figure of the girl-under-graduate, who was widely understood to threaten the patriarchal structure of the academy. Comparing Chaucer’s poem to Burne-Jones’ design, I contend that both poet and artist defined ideal femininity as an expression of masculine mastery, and a ‘good woman’ as compliant to male authority in love and life. I then frame the ‘goodness’ of the window’s figures within the contemporary discourses levelled against female undergraduate students. Taking surviving archival evidence into account, I interpret the decision to include the window’s visual illustration and material incarnation of fragile femininity within the cloistered, homosocial space of the Combination Room as a defensive one, intended to bolster a masculine community that feared itself besieged by power-hungry women.