Travelling careers: overseas migration patterns in the professional lives of women attending Girton and Newnham before 1939

Abstract

This paper explores the migration patterns of women who studied at Girton and Newnham prior to 1939 through whom dissemination of knowledge and values flowed from Cambridge overseas. It also considers organisations that fostered women’s mobility in empire, particularly the Colonial Intelligence League for Educated Women and the International Federation of University Women. The former exemplified links with empire and Europe and dissemination of imperial values and practices, while the latter fostered women’s international mobility around interwar notions of the ‘international mind’ and links with the League of Nations. It ends by looking at the work of Cambridge‐educated women in League of Nations structures. The article addresses cultural transmission through a prosopographical approach to mobility to illustrate the larger patterns constituted by the myriad individual lives that formed themselves in networks, relationships, institutions and careers across a global canvas. For some Cambridge‐educated women the notion of career included shifting combinations of paid employment, voluntary activity and domestic and familial responsibilities. While teaching formed their main occupation and the most direct medium for dissemination of knowledge and values, it must be seen alongside a more diverse range of occupations in which academic values might also be embedded. It is argued that values and practices of empire and commonwealth became inflected in internationalism in new ways, and the authors point to the need for further research into the role that Cambridge‐educated women played in the tensions of empire, commonwealth and internationalism.