Thank you. It's a pleasure to be giving this paper today. It's a joint paper as part of a continuing research project in the School of Geography.
A word first about the foundation of geography at Oxford. It's not an ancient subject.
It was founded in 1887 when the School of Geography was established at Oxford with the support of the Royal Geographical Society.
That was financial support as well as general encouragement and enthusiasm.
Go to Oxford in2 founding a school of geography. There was no Oxford degree initially.
Qualifications started in 1981 with a two year diploma and the shorter one year certificate.
And in addition, there were summer schools every other year when school masters and school
mistresses came to Oxford for a summer course of some weeks where they improve
their geographical skills and knowledge and then took that knowledge back out into schools to raise the standard of geographical teaching generally.
And degrees were established first in 1932. So although this conference marks the centenary of degrees for women, rather counterintuitively,
perhaps I'm going to be talking today about short non degree courses which predated the Oxford geography degree.
We can see here two illustrations of the School of geography.
First, in the old Ashmolean building and from 1922 in this much more August building on Mansfield Road.
And what geography was established? Charles Firth, who was a great supporter of geography at Oxford, described it as being for honours men.
Now, what he meant by that was probably that it was going to be a postgraduate qualifications, see, for people who'd already done honours.
But in fact, by the time it was established, there were women with honours degrees, not from Oxford but from some other universities.
Nonetheless, Firth described it as being for honours men.
And that really describes the general assumptions that geography was going to be a man's subject involving technical skills, field work and so on.
So it's suitable for honours men. It didn't turn out like that, though.
If we look at this graph, we can see that the green bars representing women were a very sizeable number of
the school students in this early pre degree period for the premier qualification,
which was the diploma. Women outnumber men and really quite considerably.
There were more men on the shorter certificate in geography, and the certificate in surveying was exclusively for men,
and that was for people who were going on to imperial careers that needed a background in surveying.
And those careers were closed to women. So overall, there were more men than women in the school during this period, but only just.
And in the the main qualification, the diploma, as we can see,
women really quite heavily outnumbered men and we can see that they were there even from the start.
This is a very nice picture of the first diploma student cohort of nineteen eighty one.
And we can see that women are there from the start. This woman, Jane Reynolds, sitting in the front row amongst the other students and the tutors.
And you may recognise that image which you would have seen on the conference.
Publicity and women were also present in the summer vacation courses in large numbers we see here snaps of them doing fieldwork rather nicely,
still wearing their elegant hats as they as they do their work in the field.
So really very substantial numbers and proportions of women.
If you look at the makeup of these diploma and certificate students, we can see a number of rather striking things.
So as we said, these are these were always intended as postgraduate qualifications.
And so we can see that everybody was really older than typical undergraduate age group, but particularly in the early period.
So the up to 1923, women were really very substantially older than men at 30 years of age on average rather than men's 25 and a half years of age.
Now, that average age dropped from 1924.
And that was really for two reasons.
Partly that women's education came to resemble men's a little more closely as various courses are degree courses and other courses
opened up to women and were established in geography and partly because it was a bit of a backlog to clear in in those early days.
But really, we can see that they were they were what we would now call mature students.
And we can also see how very important teaching was as a profession before coming up to do their diploma.
More than a third of women, what already experienced teachers,
much less so for men who tended to come more from from a general education, although there were teachers amongst them.
We can see some examples of that if we look at the 1916 cohort of diploma students whom we can see in the image here.
Now, there were no men because it was during the First World War.
And in that cohort, we can see those two things that we've pointed out in the last slide.
So firstly, the the really quite significant age of some of the women.
Margaret, David, for example, 40 being really a mature student.
And we can see that some were post graduate, such as to say they'd already done a degree.
One, Mary Heslop has even done two degrees. She did her her master's after having done her bachelors.
And we can see that teaching was really important. So seven of the cohort were teachers when they arrived and a further one became a teacher.
So there were mature students.
Teaching was a career which was leupen open to them, and many of them were experienced before they arrived to take a little case study.
Let's look at Hilda Howell, an early student there.
She's interesting because her father was a cook and confectioner and he and her brother were admitted to full and read workhouse in 1885.
So the family was obviously in rather straitened circumstances. And we don't know how her mother died, but she was left an orphan.
And we can pick her up in 1891 when she's a people teacher aged any 14 in an orphanage in Hampshire.
What comes to her rescue really is her maternal aunt,
who was headmistress of a really rather smart girls boarding school at in more than the Lawnside School.
So her aunt rescues her and she becomes a teacher at that school, goes on to the Reigert high school, and then she gets her Oxford diploma.
And that leads on to a distinguished career, really very August schools.
The Royal School in Bath, for example, is the first school that she goes to after doing her Oxford diploma, and she then moves to a school in Redding.
All important independent girls schools.
She keeps her interest in geography. She's elected fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.
But we can see how the part, an Oxford diploma there plays in her teaching career.
And we can see two influences, really, home and Oxford.
And we mustn't assume that Oxfords provided transformative experience for women.
It was certainly very significant, but we mustn't assume that it was transformative.
Rather, it was part of the trajectory which owed much to family background.
That's a point which was emphasised by Janet Howarth in her pioneering work on Women at Oxford.
Janet was due to speak at her conference today. It was a pity she wasn't, in fact able to to join us.
But it's very nice to be able to acknowledge her work here. We can see another link between Oxford geography and women's independence.
Geography. Oxford geography certainly furthered women's economic independence, but simply because it gave them better access to good careers.
But on the other hand, women's economic independence, further dogs for geography, the scores really extremely precarious.
In its early days. And it was really fees from women students that majority of students during the diploma that kept the school afloat.
It was actually subsidised in its early days by the Royal Geographical Society,
and it really wasn't clear at all that it was going to continue after that subsidy came to an end.
So the fees from the women students really helped to secure the geography school.
Let's turn to look at staff in the school of geography. Well, as you'd imagine, they were mostly men, but there were some women.
And an important cohort of women, really, given the small size of the staff overall.
So in the 1910 summer school, for example, of 19 demonstrators, the majority were women.
Which isn't necessarily what she would fix bacteria. And amongst the permanent staff, there was a one hour, sometimes one of three was was female.
So normally, mum, you can see her in the middle row of your image here, the middle row or the other of the tutors.
So Nora McMahon was a modern historian at Oxford, as you can see.
She went immediately from that to her diploma in geography.
And immediately after having finished the diploma, she became a demonstrator.
And she was only the second woman in the whole of Oxford to hold a university position.
So she has a rather distinguished place in the history of the university. She rose through the ranks, as you can see there, and she is one.
She was one of the first first cohort of women to graduate in 1920 when they were allowed to do that.
When she received her M.A. at that point. Now, one of the most remarkable things about my mom is her connexion with the suffrage movement.
She was already convinced of the suffrage suffrage cause before she arrived in Oxford, three experienced her hometown.
She carried on that interest in the Oxford University Suffrage Society.
And she was also one a member of the Oxford branch of the Women's Social and Political Union.
And that's important because the WSP view was the militant branch of the suffrage movement.
So the suffragettes and she made many contributions to the WSP, you, especially after militants.
And in some instances, violence increased at that point.
Many women felt they couldn't support the WSP anymore, but McMurry actually increased her giving after after that.
And she was also a member of the Women's Tax Resistance League,
which signified that she was willing to withhold her tax illegally because in the service of no taxation without representation.
Also in the school of geography was her sister, Lettice, who was a demonstration or at least to Oxford.
Some schools we are still tracking down her her her contribution to the school.
And like Norris, she was as involved in suffrage activity at home and carried on supporting the WSP you after after militancy increased.
Madeleine Frenk started life as a modern historian, did her certificate in geography, then her diploma also taught on the summer school.
So she was staff and students are a keen geographer.
One of the first women fellows of the Royal Geographical Society, again a supporter of the WSP view, and she was also absent from the 1911 sentences.
And that's possibly significant. There was a movement amongst suffragists, suffrage, to say that if the state wouldn't recognise them as as voters,
then they wouldn't allow themselves to be recognised by the state census.
So illegally. Many women absented themselves from the census as a mark of a mark of protest and civil disobedience.
And our final geographer suffragette that we know about as Dorothy Warton, who really was a remarkable suffragette,
she was absent from the census and she was sentenced to a month imprisonment for malicious damage and a suffrage protest.
She at the following year, she attained her diploma with distinction.
So was done investigating this. But we think that she was actually imprisoned while she was a student on the diploma course.
So in all these suffragettes, these geographical suffragettes, we can see the influences again of home and of Oxford,
the McMahons sisters and more and more already in the movement before they came to Oxford.
But we think that Fripp probably became convinced of the rightness of the cause was she was in Oxford.
Again, we're still investigating this.
But it's interesting that Home and Oxford are both influenced in the sort of political affiliation of these these women.
So how did Oxford geography and women's independence mesh?
Well, we've seen how that went in in an economic sense, but in a political sense,
there was a connexion to geography seems to have been a hub of suffrage activity.
We can see that from the individuals I've talked about. But one of the male tutors suggests, Crawford remarked, that all his students,
his geography students seemed to be suffragettes and a jolly good thing, too, in his view.
And I think it's probably the case that having confirmed suffrage supporters arrive,
students and staff at the school helped the movement in Oxford, but the movement in Oxford influenced other students and staff when we were there.
So there's a sort of gate reciprocity, just as there was in in in economic terms.
So we've been discussing the school of geography before degrees were granted, but in 1932,
a geography degree was established and ironically, having that was a mark of importance to the school of geography.
But ironically, it came to represent the male ideas of its male founders.
Once there was a degree, more men came up as geography students.
It was less linked to teaching and more to a broader career spectrum, including many careers that weren't open to women.
The Army and Navy, particularly the civil service, for example.
And it went up the social scale because state school mistresses,
who were notable by their presence in the school of geography, they tended to shrink in importance.
Some public school boys increased. So ironically, it was the granting of the degree that made Oxford geography less female.
It wasn't I'm female. It was a this is the first degree cohort and we can see the first person to get a first
class degree and the first person to hold graduate research scholarship was Dorothy Duffed.
And you can see her in the front row, second from the left.
And the first person to get a D fill in geography was and Landrieu, who was a Chinese student who got her degree, that her DFL joined the war.
So women continued to be important in the department, but they no longer defined it.
So was it a subject for honours men? I just know women were vital to the school in a number of ways, intellectually and financially.
And in terms of how geography made its mark around the university, and they were also simply something.
It is vital to the survival of the school, which was vital to the survival of the discipline in the United Kingdom.
This was the first school of geography in the United Kingdom.
So had it failed, it would have been pretty calamitous for geography at university in general.
So women kept it afloat. And for that, we should be grateful.
Thank you very much.