Women's Colleges—the latest lost cause?

Abstract

St Hilda's is the last surviving single-sex college for women at Oxford. It may not survive much longer in its present form, thanks to the Sex Discrimination Act which, as recently interpreted by the courts and mediated through Oxford's idiosyncratic appointments system, makes it illegal for the University to associate lectureships with a women's college (Llewellyn Smith, 1993). Law or systems must change to enable the College to continue under its present statutes. The publication of this centenary volume therefore has some topical interest. It also fills a gap in the history of women's higher education, since a History of St Hilda's, founded in 1893 by Dorothea Beale of Cheltenham Ladies' College, has never before been written. Why not, one might ask? Institutional histories purvey founding myths, allow alumnae to locate themselves within a tradition, satisfy nostalgias for times and places remembered, encourage the bonding and loyalties that boost morale and even benefactions. They are not usually written for or by professional historians but we make use of them in constructing more general narratives and typologies. Institutions that do not present an historical account of themselves court obscurity-and the suspicion that they actually do not have a 'usable past', as distinct from one that is best forgotten. Institutions under threat do well to show that their traditions are worth defending. Historians of women's higher education in the UK have not so far managed to make much of a case for the survival of the women's college. Vera Brittain (1960, p. 16) saw them as a gateway into Oxford and the 'equal citizenship of the mind': once Oxford contrived to integrate women, their purpose, she implied, would be fulfilled. (Her granddaughter was, in fact, to go to one of the first mixed colleges, Wadham). Martha Vicinus (1985) wrote with affection of women's colleges as one highly successful variant of the communities for middle-class single women that developed in the Victorian era; but that ideal had already dated by the early decades of the present century. The role of single-sex colleges and schools in carving out and reserving elite careers for women lasted longer-and yet, as Sarah Delamont (1989) admitted, coeducation gained support partly, at least, because such institutions alienated their constituency by pemickety rules and regulations and by their apparent weakness in science education. Such accounts point, sometimes regretfully, to historic weaknesses that made the women's college appear obsolescent. That impression is encouraged by the historians of the London colleges, all of which took the plunge into coeducation in the 1950s or 60s-whether they jumped willingly like Royal Holloway, where young women were no