History

Equality at last?

The first world war brought a catastrophic collapse of fee income for the men's colleges and Cambridge and Oxford both sought state financial help for the first time. This was the context in which the women tried once more to secure inclusion, this time asking not only for the titles of degrees but also for the privileges and involvement in university government that possession of degrees proper would bring. In Oxford this was secured in 1920 but in Cambridge the women went down to defeat again in 1921, having to settle for the titles - the much-joked-about BA tit - but not the substance of degrees. This time the male undergraduates celebrating victory over the women used a handcart as a battering ram to destroy the lower half of the bronze gates at Newnham, a memorial to Anne Jemima Clough.
 

Damaged bronze gates

The women spent the inter-war years trapped on the threshold of the University. They could hold University posts: twelve women were appointed in 1926 and Dorothy Garrod, Fellow of Newnham, was elected Disney Professor of Archaeology in 1938, the first woman to hold a professorial chair. But they could not speak or vote in the affairs of their own departments or of the University as a whole.
 

Dorothy Garrod	Admission to full membership of the University 1948

Finally in 1948 the women were admitted to full membership of the University, although the University still retained powers to limit their numbers.

National university expansion after the second world war brought further change. In 1954 Newnham and Girton were joined by a third women's college, New Hall. In 1965 the first mixed graduate college was founded. At the beginning of the 1970s three men's colleges began to admit women as undergraduates. Gradually Cambridge was ceasing to be 'a men's university although of a mixed type', as it had been described in the 1920s in a memorably confused phrase.

Gill Sutherland, Dec 2001