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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.

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A word first about the foundation of geography at Oxford. It's not an ancient subject.

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It was founded in 1887 when the School of Geography was established at Oxford with the support of the Royal Geographical Society.

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That was financial support as well as general encouragement and enthusiasm.

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Go to Oxford in2 founding a school of geography. There was no Oxford degree initially.

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Qualifications started in 1981 with a two year diploma and the shorter one year certificate.

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And in addition, there were summer schools every other year when school masters and school

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mistresses came to Oxford for a summer course of some weeks where they improve

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their geographical skills and knowledge and then took that knowledge back out into schools to raise the standard of geographical teaching generally.

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And degrees were established first in 1932. So although this conference marks the centenary of degrees for women, rather counterintuitively,

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perhaps I'm going to be talking today about short non degree courses which predated the Oxford geography degree.

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We can see here two illustrations of the School of geography.

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First, in the old Ashmolean building and from 1922 in this much more August building on Mansfield Road.

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And what geography was established? Charles Firth, who was a great supporter of geography at Oxford, described it as being for honours men.

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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.

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But in fact, by the time it was established, there were women with honours degrees, not from Oxford but from some other universities.

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Nonetheless, Firth described it as being for honours men.

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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.

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So it's suitable for honours men. It didn't turn out like that, though.

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If we look at this graph, we can see that the green bars representing women were a very sizeable number of

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the school students in this early pre degree period for the premier qualification,

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which was the diploma. Women outnumber men and really quite considerably.

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There were more men on the shorter certificate in geography, and the certificate in surveying was exclusively for men,

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and that was for people who were going on to imperial careers that needed a background in surveying.

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And those careers were closed to women. So overall, there were more men than women in the school during this period, but only just.

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And in the the main qualification, the diploma, as we can see,

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women really quite heavily outnumbered men and we can see that they were there even from the start.

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This is a very nice picture of the first diploma student cohort of nineteen eighty one.

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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.

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And you may recognise that image which you would have seen on the conference.

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Publicity and women were also present in the summer vacation courses in large numbers we see here snaps of them doing fieldwork rather nicely,

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still wearing their elegant hats as they as they do their work in the field.

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So really very substantial numbers and proportions of women.

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If you look at the makeup of these diploma and certificate students, we can see a number of rather striking things.

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So as we said, these are these were always intended as postgraduate qualifications.

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And so we can see that everybody was really older than typical undergraduate age group, but particularly in the early period.

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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.

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Now, that average age dropped from 1924.

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And that was really for two reasons.

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Partly that women's education came to resemble men's a little more closely as various courses are degree courses and other courses

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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.

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But really, we can see that they were they were what we would now call mature students.

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And we can also see how very important teaching was as a profession before coming up to do their diploma.

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More than a third of women, what already experienced teachers,

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much less so for men who tended to come more from from a general education, although there were teachers amongst them.

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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.

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Now, there were no men because it was during the First World War.

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And in that cohort, we can see those two things that we've pointed out in the last slide.

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So firstly, the the really quite significant age of some of the women.

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Margaret, David, for example, 40 being really a mature student.

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And we can see that some were post graduate, such as to say they'd already done a degree.

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One, Mary Heslop has even done two degrees. She did her her master's after having done her bachelors.

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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.

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So there were mature students.

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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.

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Let's look at Hilda Howell, an early student there.

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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.

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So the family was obviously in rather straitened circumstances. And we don't know how her mother died, but she was left an orphan.

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And we can pick her up in 1891 when she's a people teacher aged any 14 in an orphanage in Hampshire.

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What comes to her rescue really is her maternal aunt,

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who was headmistress of a really rather smart girls boarding school at in more than the Lawnside School.

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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.

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And that leads on to a distinguished career, really very August schools.

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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.

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All important independent girls schools.

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She keeps her interest in geography. She's elected fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.

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But we can see how the part, an Oxford diploma there plays in her teaching career.

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And we can see two influences, really, home and Oxford.

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And we mustn't assume that Oxfords provided transformative experience for women.

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It was certainly very significant, but we mustn't assume that it was transformative.

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Rather, it was part of the trajectory which owed much to family background.

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That's a point which was emphasised by Janet Howarth in her pioneering work on Women at Oxford.

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Janet was due to speak at her conference today. It was a pity she wasn't, in fact able to to join us.

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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.

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Geography. Oxford geography certainly furthered women's economic independence, but simply because it gave them better access to good careers.

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But on the other hand, women's economic independence, further dogs for geography, the scores really extremely precarious.

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In its early days. And it was really fees from women students that majority of students during the diploma that kept the school afloat.

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It was actually subsidised in its early days by the Royal Geographical Society,

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and it really wasn't clear at all that it was going to continue after that subsidy came to an end.

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So the fees from the women students really helped to secure the geography school.

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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.

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And an important cohort of women, really, given the small size of the staff overall.

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So in the 1910 summer school, for example, of 19 demonstrators, the majority were women.

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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.

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So normally, mum, you can see her in the middle row of your image here, the middle row or the other of the tutors.

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So Nora McMahon was a modern historian at Oxford, as you can see.

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She went immediately from that to her diploma in geography.

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And immediately after having finished the diploma, she became a demonstrator.

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And she was only the second woman in the whole of Oxford to hold a university position.

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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.

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She was one of the first first cohort of women to graduate in 1920 when they were allowed to do that.

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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.

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She was already convinced of the suffrage suffrage cause before she arrived in Oxford, three experienced her hometown.

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She carried on that interest in the Oxford University Suffrage Society.

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And she was also one a member of the Oxford branch of the Women's Social and Political Union.

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And that's important because the WSP view was the militant branch of the suffrage movement.

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So the suffragettes and she made many contributions to the WSP, you, especially after militants.

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And in some instances, violence increased at that point.

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Many women felt they couldn't support the WSP anymore, but McMurry actually increased her giving after after that.

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And she was also a member of the Women's Tax Resistance League,

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which signified that she was willing to withhold her tax illegally because in the service of no taxation without representation.

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Also in the school of geography was her sister, Lettice, who was a demonstration or at least to Oxford.

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Some schools we are still tracking down her her her contribution to the school.

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And like Norris, she was as involved in suffrage activity at home and carried on supporting the WSP you after after militancy increased.

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Madeleine Frenk started life as a modern historian, did her certificate in geography, then her diploma also taught on the summer school.

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So she was staff and students are a keen geographer.

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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.

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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,

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then they wouldn't allow themselves to be recognised by the state census.

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So illegally. Many women absented themselves from the census as a mark of a mark of protest and civil disobedience.

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And our final geographer suffragette that we know about as Dorothy Warton, who really was a remarkable suffragette,

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she was absent from the census and she was sentenced to a month imprisonment for malicious damage and a suffrage protest.

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She at the following year, she attained her diploma with distinction.

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So was done investigating this. But we think that she was actually imprisoned while she was a student on the diploma course.

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So in all these suffragettes, these geographical suffragettes, we can see the influences again of home and of Oxford,

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the McMahons sisters and more and more already in the movement before they came to Oxford.

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But we think that Fripp probably became convinced of the rightness of the cause was she was in Oxford.

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Again, we're still investigating this.

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But it's interesting that Home and Oxford are both influenced in the sort of political affiliation of these these women.

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So how did Oxford geography and women's independence mesh?

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Well, we've seen how that went in in an economic sense, but in a political sense,

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there was a connexion to geography seems to have been a hub of suffrage activity.

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We can see that from the individuals I've talked about. But one of the male tutors suggests, Crawford remarked, that all his students,

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his geography students seemed to be suffragettes and a jolly good thing, too, in his view.

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And I think it's probably the case that having confirmed suffrage supporters arrive,

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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.

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So there's a sort of gate reciprocity, just as there was in in in economic terms.

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So we've been discussing the school of geography before degrees were granted, but in 1932,

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a geography degree was established and ironically, having that was a mark of importance to the school of geography.

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But ironically, it came to represent the male ideas of its male founders.

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Once there was a degree, more men came up as geography students.

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It was less linked to teaching and more to a broader career spectrum, including many careers that weren't open to women.

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The Army and Navy, particularly the civil service, for example.

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And it went up the social scale because state school mistresses,

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who were notable by their presence in the school of geography, they tended to shrink in importance.

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Some public school boys increased. So ironically, it was the granting of the degree that made Oxford geography less female.

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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

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class degree and the first person to hold graduate research scholarship was Dorothy Duffed.

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And you can see her in the front row, second from the left.

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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.

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So women continued to be important in the department, but they no longer defined it.

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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.

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And in terms of how geography made its mark around the university, and they were also simply something.

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It is vital to the survival of the school, which was vital to the survival of the discipline in the United Kingdom.

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This was the first school of geography in the United Kingdom.

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So had it failed, it would have been pretty calamitous for geography at university in general.

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So women kept it afloat. And for that, we should be grateful.

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Thank you very much.