Somerville: A College for Women

What is a woman’s college? Today, there are no more colleges solely for women in Oxford, although Cambridge has Murray Edwards, Newnham, and Lucy Cavendish. However, the history of being a woman’s college is still, inevitably, stamped into Somerville College. The dining hall, where students gather regularly, and will spend important events from  fresher’s dinner to a leaving dinner, is decorated with large portraits  of the female principals. The smallest portrait is actually that of Daphne Park, who is known as the ‘Queen of Spies‘ for her work with MI5 during the Cold War. At one end, Mary Somerville, the college’s namesake, a mathematician whose contribution to the subject is being recognised soon by the Royal Bank of Scotland. A short walk around the Somerville site will reveal other famous alumni: most notoriously Margaret Thatcher, Indira Gandhi, Dorothy Hodgkin, Winifred Holtby, Vera Brittain, and Shirley Williams – all of whom have buildings affiliated with them.

Mary Somerville, after whom the college was named

This is a powerful legacy, a more glorious list of alumni than Somerville is given credit for – something Alice Prochaska, the current Principal, questions in relation to female fame in a wonderful paper on women’s colleges. One part of this legacy is also women overcoming severe disadvantages – from becoming the first female Prime Minister to simply attending university against the wishes of a family who did not approve. When Vera Brittain came to Somerville, women could not earn degrees, or even enter the University libraries without permission and a chaperone. Such stories are a part of Somerville’s story, highlighting women’s suppression and their resistance.

When talking to my interviewees, I was keen to gain something of what the women’s college meant for them. Interviewing women who had been at Oxford between 1943 and 1964 was an interesting time period. Women had had degrees in Oxford for a long time, but there was a cap on female numbers until 1957. Even when that changed, there were of course only four women’s colleges. One interviewee, who came up in 1954 hazarded a guess at ten men to every woman, and said it was bigger in science. The other science students also referenced how few women there were in the lab. One, who had gone on to do a D.Phil., said that there were 25 scholarships for this and that only two women got one.

However, what this did mean, is that science ladies never wanted for a date. The first woman I referenced here spoke of being positively inundated with requests from the men, who wanted dates for all of the balls and events around Oxford. She actually said that returning to Somerville was something of a relief, an escape from the men who had to be cleared out before hall. Another woman spoke cheerily about snogging sessions outside the front of college at 11pm, right before all the men had to head back to their own colleges. Another woman said that her group of friends joined the Judo club – solely because there weren’t any women in it and they wanted to ask why. These little details definitely bring the realities – fun or otherwise – of women’s colleges to life.

To return, perhaps, to the more intellectual side of life in a woman’s college, one woman who was a young fellow at Somerville relished the conversational gatherings of intelligent women. For scientists in particular, who worked (and would go on to work) in a male-dominated field, meeting women from all disciplines all of whom excelled, was an important experience. All of my women spoke of discussions with all the other girls, and the lifelong confidence they associated with Somerville. They often deliberately mentioned the benefits of meeting lots of women who were all different – from different backgrounds or with different opinions, with different specialties and subtleties. Many of these women would go on to be the first in their field, or the only woman at their workplace, or face prejudice for working while they had children. Somerville gave them confidence to excel, in whatever they ended up in.

Re-using oral histories: A Somervillian Example

Reusing oral history is listening to interviews that you have not collected. In particular, it can involve re-interpreting them for your own historical context.

The key issue, which can be interesting to explore, is how to deal with the fact that the historian who had collected the interview had a different agenda and concept to what you would like to find. However, with a little thought, this can become a very interesting part of your study.

As an example, I would like to use this oral history interview with Julia Higgins, which can be found and accessed in the British Library Sound Archive. Julia is a Somerville alumnus, but the purpose of the study is to capture ‘An Oral History  of Science’. It then joined a website for the British Library called ‘Voices of Science’.

Hypothetically, I am conducting research to find out all about life at Somerville in the 1960s. While the focus of the interview is on science, it still contains many interesting segments on Somerville. When asked about what life was like, she responded

As you got to know it there was the delight of having your own room, and inviting people for tea, and going off cycling, and joining societies, all of those peripheral things, actually the teaching wasn’t very good at all.

This is such an exciting passage – capturing in just one sentence something of the joy of joining Somerville, and experiencing freedom. There are a number of interesting issues which could given new life in a different study. But perhaps you want to explore a more specific issue, and interpret the interview through a lens of what life was like for women at Oxford, and if there was any discrimination.  If you were discussing sexism at university, you could analyse her anecdote about losing a rowing competition with Cambridge

I remember as we came in behind them somebody shouting out to us, never mind Oxford, you win on looks, which is totally un-PC, but it was a comfort.

What is really exciting about oral sources, is that they are oral – they have sound quality, intonation, accents, inflection, pauses, laughter, tears. It has often been to the frustration of historians in the field that people are unwilling to listen to the recordings, but in doing so, they miss out. The section above features a loud laugh between ‘you win on looks’ and ‘which is totally un-PC’ which gives it an air of a lively story – and affects the meaning.

This makes this small example something more than just an anecdote – it tells us something of how Julia feels now about it. The term ‘PC’ is inextricably associated with the last ten years, and would not have been applied at the time. She acknowledges the past and the present – that now it is un-PC, but then it was a comfort.

Therefore, not only can you interpret this source in the light of how women were treated, but how they felt about it then, and how they might feel now. It is a very minor example, and could be used as supplementary to your own collection, or could be used as part of an analysis of the whole interview – determining how she feels about approaches to women throughout her life.

 

Adding a little colour: Janet Vaughan and Dorothy Hodgkin

 

Dame Janet Vaughan

Sometimes, a few figures crop up a lot in interviews. Especially if you talk to people who attended Somerville at the same time.  I was interviewing women who had attended Somerville before 1964, with the earliest date for starting at Oxford (matriculating) being 1943. I would like to discuss two people who came up in multiple interviews, and the things you find out from the people who knew them – either closely or peripherally. The first is Janet Vaughan, Principal of Somerville from 1945-1967, and the second is Dorothy Hodgkin, chemistry research fellow from 1934-1937.

 

Dorothy Hodgkin (c) Getty Images

What I knew about these figures before the interviews was fairly perfunctory – the kind of information gained by someone who attended Somerville and has an interest in its history. Vaughan, as a Principal, has a (notably ugly) building named after her, and a portrait in the hall. I heard her mentioned a few times, and was aware that she was a scientist. Dorothy Hodgkin is one of Somerville’s most famous and revered alumni, being the first (and only) British woman to win a Nobel Prize for Chemistry, and less importantly but also notoriously, having tutored Margaret Thatcher.

From my interviewees, I gained scattered perspectives on what these women had actually been like. Vaughan was described in various capacities. One interviewee noted her ‘left-wing’ politics as being a part of Somerville’s liberal culture. While she is indeed noted by sources such as the Oxford Dictionary for National Biography as having taken part on many social bodies, it was interesting to hear about her in the context of the liberal Somerville, which many of my other interviewees referred to. Politics is often difficult to comment on as an historian, unless the individual deliberately described themselves as having certain political leanings. To someone reciting from memory, it is much easier.

Memories of Vaughan were filtered through those I spoke to. One lady recalled her interview in which she was asked ‘where do you see yourself in five years’ time’ by Vaughan, to her horror. Another described Vaughan as somewhat disorganised, being the consummate scientist. However, all of the memories were tinged with a general affection. One simply described Vaughan as her idol, a woman who had been a doctor, a researcher, and a woman with two small children. She was someone who appeared at breakfast, at dinner, and was an inspiration.

Dorothy Hodgkin, remembered primarily by the Chemistry students, was described as somewhat retiring and reserved. Unlike Vaughan, she lived out of college, at home with her husband and three children. However, this living arrangement made an enormous impression on one lady I spoke too, who described vividly going to Hodgkin’s house for tea. At this house, her esteemed Chemistry tutor had three ‘rough-and-tumble’ children. It was proof that a woman could have children and still show a distinct commitment to her career – and this was before she won her Nobel Prize.

Plaque in Oxford (c) Owen Massey McKnight 

Another Chemistry undergraduate spoke a bit about Dorothy Hodgkin, a quiet person who was

‘always humming hymns under her breath and her fingers were always moving in three dimensions ‘cause of the Crystallography.’

It was Hodgkin who had got my interviewee a job, ‘the same job she had got Margaret Thatcher’. This was a research post for Joe Lyons food. Margaret Roberts (later Thatcher) is reasonably famous for having worked on Mr Whippy ice cream, before her journey into politics, and apparently Hodgkin had a direct hand in securing this for her. My interviewee mentioned that they still remembered Thatcher in the lab when she came along, ten years later. Hodgkin, she confirmed, was a lovely lady.

These stories are always small, almost incidental. They add glorious colour to the picture, to the lists of accolades attributed to Janet Vaughan, Dorothy Hodgkin and others of their academic stature. Historians can struggle to attribute their subjects with active compassion – naturally weary of leaving the certainty of fact. Hearing it from the source therefore adds something rather special to Somerville’s history – another excellent reason to collect interviews.

Preconceptions vs Explanations

Generic Divinity School Picture (c) Georgie Salzedo 2015

To explain or not to explain – this has been an interesting challenge I have faced over the course of my interviews. A key question debated by oral historians has been whether or not an oral history should be mostly an interview, with the questions firmly denoted and supplied by the historian, or more of a story, with the interviewee providing more of the direction and flow of the interview. Both have their advantages: the former allows the historian to curate information more likely to be of use for their project (and in particular not to allow time constraints to weaken the body of useful information), and the latter leaves room for interesting pieces of unexpected information, and for questions to be answered that historians have not yet asked!

For most, the decision is made by the remit of the project. At the beginning, the historian must ask what information am I hoping to find? How many interviews with one person am I going to conduct? What is the purpose of this project? I did indeed consider some of these issues, but would add another element in – especially for the unpractised historian. What kind of person are you?

It sounds somewhat wishy-washy, and not the kind of thing that academics generally like to consider about themselves. But just as the academic historian might read the primary source in a different manner depending on personality as well as purpose, so the oral historian might interview differently depending on who they are.

I myself, am something of a people-pleaser. I like to let people do as they wish for the most part, and allow them to direct the interview. While many of my interviews were entirely fine based on this philosophy, I have run into trouble a couple of times by simply letting my interviewees talk, even deciding when the interview was to end or take a break or begin. While the recordings are often lovely, with expansively told stories, I sometimes found myself missing crucial information, be it small things like the year in which something happened, or larger, like entire questions I simply could not bring myself to ask and risk interruption.

This does not mean that these interviewees did anything wrong at all – on the contrary, the lessons to learn were all mine. I learnt is to express more plainly how I would like to conduct the interview. I realised with hindsight that I should have highlighted certain questions as essential to my project, rather than considered them unimportant to the flow of the narrative. A little more certainty on my part might have allowed me to navigate certain interviews better.

The other reminder of course, is that an interview is not solely a conversation. Valerie Yow once tellingly titled an article ‘Do I like them too much?’ While rigidly following a structure without developing any kind of relationship with the interviewee is both unlikely to inspire information, and a pointless attempt at sterilising a human interaction, there is balance to be found. Perhaps I let myself be swayed too much by the thought that they were doing me a favour, rather than that I was conducting a project.

The Then and the Now

Punting, that timeless pastime of Oxford Students (c) Georgie Salzedo 2016

The inevitable interlinking of the past and the present is an issue in a constant state of discussion by historians – partly in response to the tendency for academic historians to ignore it. If a book was written in the past, a person reading it is inextricably doing so in their own time, relying on their own subjectivities. From GCSE level, history students are told to recognise ‘bias’ in the source – but it takes longer to recognise any bias in the self. I would like to note, that this is not a wholesale subscription to a philosophy which states all history is subjective and therefore useless, but rather a reflection upon my recent experiences in conducting oral history interviews.

The stark realisation of the communion of past and present in the creation of history is nowhere clearer than in the oral history interview. I am by no means unusual in recognising or writing about this, but only in conducting the interviews myself have I truly absorbed the reality of this conjunction. For every anecdote an interviewee told me about drinking coffee and discussing politics at Somerville, or about the buildings in which we both have lived, I wished to comment ‘it was the same for me! Things haven’t changed!’. Or if the lady spoke about only applying for one university, or about boys all being kicked out of Somerville at 11pm, I automatically responded with ‘how times have changed! You wouldn’t get that nowadays’. Listening back to these interviews, I can hear my unnecessary but natural considerations on a comparison of times. It prompts self-reflection.

Of course, this effect was exacerbated by my own closeness to the subject. I was interviewing Somervillian ladies from the 50s, and I myself had attended Somerville 60 years later. One of my great joys in conducting the interviews was hearing about how things had been different, or else seeing myself and my friends in these girls who had come up so long ago. I experienced similar joy when reading letters in the Somerville archive, which depicted the past in gleeful colour. My thoughts when reading were the same as when listening – I just had less opportunity to interrupt.

The process of weaving together the past and the future was not one way either – some ladies were very keen to know a little more of my own time at Somerville, as well as something of my life story. Often after the interview, over lunch or tea, they would ask me what had changed, whether I enjoyed it as much as they, subjects I was very happy to discuss. Oral historians often consider ‘insider/outsider’ status, and the implications of that status on the interview process. My insider status, in this case, ensured a consistent link between the old and the new, and age seemed to make considerably less difference when one is discussing the lack of carpeting in Penrose or the eternal presence of students on punts on the river.

The importance of all this, lies perhaps in the bright light that oral history shines on the creation of history as a man-made process. History does not simply spring from the past, fully-formed. It is carved and shaped by the sources of the past, the historians who, to use Paul Ricoeur’s term, ’emplot’ them, and those who consume it. Being a part of oral history interviewing, perhaps especially with an ‘insider’ status, is an engaging way to force yourself to confront this process head-on, and hopefully deepen your understanding of history.

 

 

The Pre-1964 Gaudy

Somerville College Hall (c) Philip Allfrey <https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2513138&gt;

As the official ‘Oral History Project Girl’ for the Somerville Archives, I was lucky enough to be invited along to the 2016 gaudy for those who had matriculated before 1964.  The Oxford College Gaudy is an alumni reunion held annually for a particular set of matriculation years. A dinner is usually involved, along with a curated selection of events designed by the alumni team. On day number 2, armed with questionnaires and a recorder, I set out to gain an idea of the memories of the women of Somerville who were all at least 70 years old.

I admit, it was quite nerve-wracking, entering a room full of women all of whom were reminiscing and talking with a practiced ease, and all of whom had been among the most educated of their generation. Somerville College, before it went two-sex, held a reputation for being particularly intellectually rigorous, the most academic of all the women’s colleges (and above many of the men’s). In this setting, the fierce intelligence of the women was blatantly framed.

After getting over my original nerves, the day absolutely fascinating. Firstly, I was treated to an excellent talk about the women who worked at Bletchley Park from Tessa Dunlop, author of The Bletchley Girls, accompanied by Mary and Marigold, two Somerville Alumni who had served at Bletchley themselves. All three were interested in debunking the myths that surround Bletchley – and in particular telling the stories of the women who had utterly outnumbered men at Bletchley, despite Hollywood’s portrayal. I then had canapes and lunch with the ladies, and enjoyed a number of interesting conversations ranging from their history to the current Brexit issue.

As the alumni team and I had handed out questionnaires regarding each person’s history – some women were keen to the nature of the survey. One woman pointed out that memory was deeply problematic as a source anyway, to which I argued that capturing how memory affects history is as much a part of oral history as capturing memories. Another was keen to impress upon me the importance of social class in the 1950s, as it was only in this post-war era that the grammar schools allowed those who were not ‘debs’ to enter the higher echelons of education. Two different comments, which nevertheless capture the self-awareness of the women involved in my history-making project. Much oral history surrounds capturing the ‘voice of the voiceless’ – this is not what I am doing. If anything, I am capturing the stories of the ‘voiceless with a voice’: women with the highest, most respectable level of education who nevertheless were often hampered by the expectations and understandings of society.

The women who offered me comments on the survey, and the two ladies I later interviewed, showed a strong awareness of their place in both society and history. The two I interviewed were interested in conveying how they navigated the boundaries set upon them, and how Somerville, with its collection, in the 1950s and 1960s, of fiercely intellectual (but sometimes also having a family) had inspired them throughout the rest of their lives. Both referenced gender without prompting, and in particular offered differing perspectives on the pressures of combining career with family.*

This awareness of gender and of history and of intelligence and experience was apparent throughout the room at the Gaudy. Tessa Dunlop discussed how one woman’s engagement with the Bletchley story at an older age had changed her life from being one of invisibility (‘as an older woman you are invisible in society’) to one of respect. The room heartily agreed with the inescapable invisibility of age. As I noted earlier, the women became noticeable as something other than elderly because of the setting at a Somerville reunion.  As an oral historian, it made me wonder that reunions could be an interesting source for collecting memory – for someone a little more practiced than myself. The atmosphere of memory was poignant, and encouraged by all in the room. In a gathering of the ‘least visible’ in society (or at least those who perceived themselves as the least visible), the interest in creating, recording, and preserving memories of when they were more visible, with a huge amount of self-awareness, was incredibly high.

I would like to thank everyone, both organisers and guests, who helped me have such an interesting and enjoyable experience at the Gaudy!

*If this seems a fairly unspecific description, it is because both ladies were (understandably) weary of having their stories on the internet, and I wish to respect those boundaries.

Somerville, from inside the SCR (c) Georgie Salzedo