“The bushes, willow, and sky painted the river red, green, and blue one fine October morning. She had cast the line of her thinking into the water, pulled, and now the thought lay before her on the bank like a meagre fish. She rose and paced the grass with it and — the Beadle cut her thinking short and ushered her away. ‘I was a woman. This was the turf; there was the path’. The river to her back, she left, now thoughtless, a woman where no woman should be.”

Virginia Woolf had come to Cambridge in October 1928 to ask how the physical constraints on women prevented them from thinking and writing well. The female students of the Newnham Arts Society and Girton’s literary society “Odtaa” (One Damned Thing After the Other) were audience to Woolf´s two talks about why there had been no great female writers. Her proposed remedy, 500 pounds a year and a room of one´s own, resonated with her young audience as it did with generations to follow. “It was not and is not so easy to compose in a parlour,” agreed Newnham student E.E Phare in a review of the talk. A parlour, however, remained the space female students like herself found themselves relegated to as the rooms of learning had shut their doors to the “second sex”.

“Barred to women for six centuries, the first female students who flocked to Cambridge found their intellectual ambitions smothered by the weight of patriarchal tradition”

“The library doors stood half open. Behind them, a copy of William Thackeray’s novel The History of Henry Esmond awaited her eager eye. She pushed and a black gowned gentlemen chased her away. “Ladies are only admitted to the library if accompanied by a Fellow of the College or furnished with a letter of introduction”. And the doors of learning shut to woman once again.”

Woolf’s essay reflects its origins. Within the setting of the fictionalised “Fernham College” of the “University of Oxbridge”, her narrator suffers the restrictions on female creation. She is chased from the turf and banned from the library. The dinner to which she is invited at the women’s college, (“there are people whose charity even embraces the prune”), evokes her indignation and pity. Plain soup, tasteless prunes, and dry biscuits serve as a reminder of the relative poverty of the women’s colleges. And, as Woolf writes “one cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”

Virginia Woolf’s “Oxbridge” narration begins with a warning: “Lies will flow from my lips, but there may perhaps be some truth mixed up with them.” Her personal ties to the university and its legacy of misogyny and exclusion make this truth apparent. Barred to women for six centuries, the first female students who flocked to Cambridge’s only two women’s colleges, Girton and Newnham, established in 1869 and 1871 respectively, found their intellectual ambitions smothered by the weight of patriarchal tradition. Full degrees could only be obtained by female students in 1948. Libraries, laboratories, and even lectures closed their doors to them. Attempts to secure equality ended in violence. The vote for full women’s degrees in 1897 famously erupted into riot as some 20,000 men marched along the gates of Senate House to celebrate the vote’s defeat. The decapitation of the “Girton girl” effigy, red-haired and bike-riding, made for a harrowing metaphor. When the vote was repeated in 1921, the year Oxford accepted women for full degrees, it triggered the invasion of Newnham by a mob of some 1400 male students who sought to terrify their female counterparts into submission.

“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind”

“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.” Virginia Woolf, herself prevented from studying at the University that her brother, future husband, and other members of the Bloomsbury group attended, had anticipated the resilience of the women who fought for female access to education. Cambridge, embarrassingly slow to open its doors to women, had yielded to pressure by the 1970s. 1972 marks the year in which the first colleges, King’s, Churchill, and Clare, accepted women into their midst (“letting cats into a dogs’ home”, one bursar called it). Robinson, founded 1977, created precedent by accepting women and men on an equal basis. Enthusiasm for gender equality remained as curbed as progress remained slow. With its flag on half-mast, black bands adorning the arms of students and staff alike, and a coffin marched through the streets in a mock funeral for education in 1988, Magdalene College embodied the misogynist spirit that had broken into Newnham 60 years prior, that had chased Virginia Woolf from the turf, and that had shut the library doors to women for centuries.

Today, Cambridge boasts a student body divided equally amongst women and men. Female students can let their minds run undisturbed in a room of their own. Doors have been opened, but others remain firmly shut. For the year 2022-2023, only 24.9% of all Cambridge professors were women. And Cambridge remains a place of incomparable privilege. According to UNICEF, only 49% of countries worldwide have achieved gender equality in primary education, and upper secondary education sees this figure fall to 24%.

103 years ago, Virginia Woolf came to Cambridge to talk about the material constraints on women´s intellect. Were she alive today, Woolf would find the situation for women in education both radically altered and alarmingly unchanged.

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