Girton College Research Articles

ETHEL ANN BURTON-BROWN WITH BONI IN THE FORUM, 1898–1904

This essay has two objectives. First, it acknowledges and situates the contribution of Ethel Ann Burton-Brown (1868–1927) to the history of the archaeology of the Roman Forum as it was excavated between 1898 and 1905 under the direction of Giacomo Boni (1859–1925). Her English-language handbook on the discoveries, now overlooked in literature on Boni, showcased her education at Girton College, her experience with traditional cultures such as those of northern India, and her understanding of established and newly-emerging methods of classical archaeology. Unlike Esther van Deman and Eugénie Sellers Strong, who embraced careers in archaeology just years after Burton-Brown's publication, she did not pursue working in the discipline because of her personal situation. Secondly, it investigates the manner in which Burton-Brown received Boni's presentation of the excavations. Trained as an architect and experienced in architectural restoration, Boni brought innovative scientific methods to the task of uncovering Rome's archaic past. He did so while deliberately distancing himself from those scholars before him who applied traditional academic approaches, i.e., those reliant on classical literature, to archaeological practice. In large part, Burton-Brown's handbook echoes the descriptions and analyses of Boni's finds in the Roman Forum. However, a closer reading of her text reveals that her personal experiences shaped some of her explanations of the archaeological past in ways that differed from Boni's. In addition, their respective nationalities, British versus Italian, shade how they each value Rome's early history.

Wittgenstein in Alethea Graham’s diary (1929-1930), and new data on the audience of his Lecture on Ethics and LT 1930 class

Amongst the attendees at Wittgenstein’s lecture to the Heretics Society in November 1929, there was also Alethea Graham, a student in her fourth year at Girton College who attended also his lectures in Lent Term 1930. Excerpts from her diary mentioning the philosopher are here transcribed and commented upon. A sharper focus on the audience of Wittgenstein’s Lecture on Ethics and his first academic class is then added.

The Financial Autonomy in Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own”

The essay “A Room of One’s Own” by Virginia Woolf was published in 1929 and was based on two papers at Newnham College Arts Society and Girton College in October 1928. This essay investigates the relationship between gender, economic freedom, and creative expression. Woolf contends that for women to reach their full intellectual and artistic potential, they must have their own physical space as well as a reliable source of money. The researcher goes into the historical, social, and economic issues that contributed to women's financial insecurity in the early twentieth century. The researcher also emphasizes how Woolf's request for economic independence as a prerequisite for artistic expression was both a reflection of her own experiences and a rallying cry for the larger feminist movement. Woolf illuminates the status of women, particularly female artists in a male-dominated world. This challenge exposes women to financial difficulties since they cannot compromise to put their thoughts or ideas down on paper. Woolf uses unique literary skills in her piece of writing to prove that focusing on looking for money or financial autonomy fosters women in controlling their own lives and space rather than strengthening men into being more dominant.

Julia Wedgwood, a Victorian feminist and female intellectual. Who was she and why has she been forgotten?

ABSTRACT Julia Wedgwood (1833–1913) was a non-fiction writer who chose an unusually wide range of subjects, including theology, the Classical world and German Biblical criticism. She was also a leading feminist who wrote several influential pieces on female enfranchisement, campaigned in the 1870 elections to the London School Board and taught informally at what became Girton College. She was the niece of Charles Darwin, the great scientist, and had a short but intense relationship with Robert Browning, the poet. She was also close to many other leading Victorian cultural figures. Yet her achievements as a writer are now largely forgotten as is her role as a feminist. This article re-examines her life and career before considering why she has fallen out of the record and what that suggests about the influence of misleading stereotypes in our approach to nineteenth century women’s non-fiction writing and the study of first wave feminism.

Educating Ida: Gilbert and Sullivan Among the New Women

Gilbert and Sullivan's eighth Savoy opera Princess Ida (1884) is best understood against the backdrop of women's higher education and emancipation in nineteenth-century Britain. Careful work has been done in tracing correspondences between the opera and its source texts, but Ida is not only a descendant of literary figures. She is the peer of the pioneering women of Girton College, Cambridge whose biographies attest to the challenges faced by women in pursuit of an education at the end of the nineteenth century. This association allows Ida and her students to be positioned as precursors of that fin-de-siècle phenomenon, the New Woman. Often dismissed as an uncomfortable relic of Victorian male chauvinism, the political and ideological complexity behind Princess Ida is recognised here as the opera is identified as one moment in continuous literary, cultural and social history.

Cevanne Horrocks-Hopayian - Cevanne Horrocks-Hopayian, Welcome Party. Horrocks-Hopayian, Ziazan, Clowes, Giles, London Symphony Orchestra, Hargreaves, Morant, Choir of Girton College, Cambridge, Wilson. NMC, NMC D268.

Cevanne Horrocks-Hopayian - Cevanne Horrocks-Hopayian, Welcome Party. Horrocks-Hopayian, Ziazan, Clowes, Giles, London Symphony Orchestra, Hargreaves, Morant, Choir of Girton College, Cambridge, Wilson. NMC, NMC D268. - Volume 76 Issue 301

‘Lock up your libraries’? Women readers at Cambridge University Library, 1855–1923

This article explores the admission of women readers to Cambridge University Library from the mid-nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. The period covered begins with the introduction of new library rules in 1854, which allowed for the formal admission of readers who were not members of the university, including women. It focuses in particular on women students, who arrived in Cambridge with the founding of the first women’s colleges, Girton College in 1869 and Newnham College in 1871. It argues that the control of access to (male) privileged spaces such as the University Library (alongside lecture halls and laboratories) was bound up with and symbolic of the status of women in the university, part of the long battle for women to be admitted as full members of the university.

Cambridge Women and the Professional World: Navigating Gender Conservatism in the Late Victorian Era

During the late nineteenth century, British women received better education, especially at the university level. In particular, the University of Cambridge opened two women’s colleges, Girton College in 1869 and Newnham College in 1871. The establishment of higher educational institutions greatly contrasted the traditions of the Victorian gender norms, which dictated that women should be feminine, nurturing, and supportive towards their husband and family. Due to this persistence of tradition, these conservative notions of gender influenced Cambridge women throughout their academic and professional lives. Although women may have been limited by gender conservatism in their careers, it is important to note that these limitations did not make their accomplishments less impressive. Furthermore, their strategic navigation of traditional gender roles aided them in successfully establishing their professional presence in their respective fields. Women such as Jane Ellen Harrison, Charlotte Angas Scott, Marion Greenwood Bidder, and Philippa Fawcett used various tactics to establish themselves as academics and help inspire other women in the process. Though exceptional in their upbringing and talents, other Cambridge women commonly practiced their methods of navigating gender conservatism and other social dilemmas. By skillfully conforming to certain gender norms, these women helped revolutionize women’s professional opportunities from within and ushered in the next generation of female academics. Keywords: feminism, gender, nineteenth century, twentieth century, University of Cambridge, university education, Victorian era, women’s history

The Girton Conference One Hundred Years On

This paper discusses the conference of the Churchmen’s Union held at Girton College in 1921 which proved a controversy in the wider Church of England on account of the views of some speakers, particularly Hastings Rashdall and J. F. Bethune-Baker, on the nature of Christ’s divinity. It argues that although there was little that was novel in the opinions expressed at the conference, it nonetheless provided the main impetus towards the setting up of the archbishops’ Doctrine Commission. Against the background of a triumphalist Anglo-Catholicism, the Commission developed a theory of truth that made liberalism less a method shared across the Church than a distinctive party, thereby reducing its general appeal.

Shelagh Elizabeth Milne

Born in Maidstone, Kent, Shelagh Elizabeth Marmion was the first from her school to study medicine and the first to study in Cambridge, where she was at Girton College and...

Dr Dorothy Helen Rayner FGS (1912–2003): vertebrate palaeontologist and academic

Abstract Dorothy Rayner was one of the first women to be appointed to a tenured academic post in any English university geology department, joining the Geology Department of the University of Leeds in 1939 and serving for 38 years to her retirement in 1977. She had two very important early influences in her life. The first was her family, with its tradition through several generations of doctors, scientists, engineers, mathematicians, radical politics and social activism. The other was her earlier education, particularly her 7 years at the very influential Bedales School, the first of what were to become known in the twentieth century as ‘progressive’ schools. After gaining a First at Girton College in the Cambridge Natural Sciences Tripos, she undertook ground-breaking research on the taxonomy and neural systems of Jurassic fishes, for which she was awarded a Cambridge PhD in 1938, soon after which she was appointed Assistant Lecturer in Geology at Leeds. In addition to an always very heavy teaching load, she continued with a broad range of research, including further work on fossil vertebrates, and the stratigraphy of first the north of England and then the whole of the British Isles. She was also an outstanding Editor, and then President, of the Yorkshire Geological Society.

Frances Mary Halle

Frances Mary Halle attended Girton College, Cambridge, for her preclinical studies before moving to Sheffield University to complete her medical degree. In July 1948, just days before the inception of...

Judith Mary Hockaday

Judith Mary Hockaday (nee Fitzsimons) was both of Irish stock and from a strongly medical family: her father was a consultant surgeon and her mother an industrial medical officer, while...

Carlo Acerini - raging against the dying of the light.

Carlo Acerini - raging against the dying of the light.

The Girton Girl’s “academical home”: Girton College in the Late-Victorian Periodical Press

The Girton Girl’s “academical home”: Girton College in the Late-Victorian Periodical Press

Rethinking Inadequacy: Constance Maynard and Victorian Autobiography

In 1881 two women who were to become part of the history of Victorian feminism met: Constance Maynard (1849–1935), graduate of one of the first cohorts of women to enter Girton College and founder in 1882 of Westfield College for Women, and Bessie Rayner Parkes Belloc (1829–1925), friend of Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon and the “Langham Place” group of feminists, and former editor of the feminist English Women's Journal. In 1873 Maynard became the first woman in England to receive a degree in “moral sciences,” from Girton, and subsequently worked for six years as a headmistress and schoolmistress at two groundbreaking girls' schools, Cheltenham Ladies' College and the new St. Leonard's School in Scotland. When she met Belloc, she was living in London with her brother, taking art classes at the Slade School, and beginning discussions that would lead to the foundation of Westfield College, formed as an explicitly Evangelical-identified parallel to ecumenical Girton and also as the first college to prepare women for the examinations and degrees offered by the University of London.

Writing Suffrage in Edwardian Nottingham

ABSTRACTThis article focuses on the provincial aspects of the Edwardian women’s suffrage campaign in Nottingham, a city in the East Midlands, UK. The article explores writing about suffrage life in a range of formats—biography, journals, letters and archived materials, including notes of speeches—in respect of local activists—the suffragette Helen Watts, the Women’s Social and Political Union organizer in Nottingham, Nellie Crocker and the suffragists Alice and Helena Dowson. Three distinctive pieces of writing have been selected. These include the speeches of Helen Watts; the diaries of Alice Dowson related by her granddaughter, Alix Meynell, which are presented as a biography entitled What Grandmother Said (1998); and the autobiographical writings of Nellie Crocker, entitled “Incidents in the Women’s Suffrage Campaign”, which she submitted to Girton College, Cambridge, in 1949. This personal testimony is important not only to aid understanding of the extent of the campaign for the vote in Nottingham, previously undocumented, but also for highlighting the interconnections between the protagonists under discussion and the wider suffrage movement during the period 1907–12.

Margaret Elizabeth Abel

Margaret Elizabeth Abel, whose married name was Bright, was educated at the Atherley School in Southampton and Cheltenham Ladies’ College. In 1956 she gained a state scholarship to Girton College,...

O Virgo Virginum

O Virgo Virginum Malcolm Guite (bio) O Virgo virginum, quomodo fiet istud?Quia nec primam similem visa es nec habere sequentem.Filiae Jerusalem, quid me admiramini?Divinum est mysterium hoc quod cernitis. O Virgin of virgins, how shall this be?For neither before thee was any like thee, nor shall there be after.Daughters of Jerusalem, why marvel ye at me?The thing which ye behold is a divine mystery. Who are the daughters of Jerusalem,Who glimpse you still as you transform their seeing?Whom have you called to this mysterium,And bathed in the blithe fountain of your being?Daughters of sorrow, daughters of despair,The cast-aside, the overlooked, the spurnedThe broken girls who scarcely breathe a prayerThe ones whose love has never been returned. O Maid amongst the maidens, turn your face,For when we glimpse you we are not alone,O look us out of grief and into grace,Lift us in love made stronger than our own,Summon the spring in our worst wilderness,And make us fruitful in your fruitfulness. [End Page 269] Malcolm Guite Malcolm Guite, poetpriest, is Chaplain and Supernumerary Fellow of Girton College, Cambridge, and teaches at the Faculty of Divinity at the University of Cambridge. His recent books include Love, Remember, Mariner (a spiritual biography of S. T. Coleridge), Parable and Paradox, The Singing Bowl, and Sounding the Seasons. He has edited two poetry anthologies for Lent and Advent: The Word in the Wilderness (2014) and Waiting on the Word (2015). Malcolm writes Poet's Corner, a weekly column in the Church Times. www.malcolmguite.com. Copyright © 2018 Johns Hopkins University Press

Mary Lyon's X-inactivation studies in the mouse laid the foundation for the field of mammalian dosage compensation.

Mary Frances Lyon was born in 1925 in Norwich, England. In 1943 she entered Girton College, a part of Cambridge for women and graduated in 1946. She started graduate school, with R. A. Fisher at Cambridge and then moved to the Institute of Animal Genetics at Edinburgh where C. H. Waddington had developed good facilities for mouse work. Lyon earned her Ph.D. in 1950 and remained at Edinburgh to work on the mutagenic effects of radiation. The project moved to Harwell in England because of the need for more space. Lyon moved with the project and became head of the genetics division in 1962. There she remained for the rest of her career. She received a number of honours for her work, including being made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1973; election to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 1979; receiving the Royal medal of the Royal Society in 1984 and the Wolf Prize in Medicine in 1997. She died on Christmas Day, 2014. In the first 10 years of her postdoctoral work she published several papers on mouse and radiation genetics and one in 1960 on the murine sex-linked mottled gene. This paper, entitled, ‘A further mutation of the mottled type in the house mouse’ was published in the Journal of Heredity (Lyon 1960). Though rarely quoted, is highly significant. In it, she concludes ‘This prompts the suggestion that in heterozygotes some event occurs at an early embryonic stage which determines whether the mutant or normal gene shall be active in each cell present at that time, and that the subsequent pattern depends on movement of the descendant cells. It is not possible to suggest what is the nature of this early event’. This ‘early event’ was specified a year later in a much quoted one page paper in Nature (1961). Lyon proposed that the mosaic phenotype of female mice heterozygous for some sex-linked