So I'd like to start with a letter that second year Somerville student Karris Barnett wrote home to her parents in October of 1913.
And in this letter, she explains that her best friend, another Summersville student, Dorothy Rowe, quote, had a ripping idea for a party.
But we have since had to abandon it as dangerous.
We seven were each to ask what we considered the typical woman student, and no one must know whom the others had asked.
It turned out afterwards that several of us had fixed on the same one.
There were other details. One was a prise for the hostess, whose guest was the most woman student ish during the party.
I came across this letter in the course of researching a group of friends who attended Somerville College with Karris Barnetts.
That was a group of friends who founded the writing group,
which they called they called themselves the Mutual Admiration Society, and they remained friends for the rest of their lives.
They were part of a really important generation in terms of the centenary that we're
here to celebrate today because they attended Oxford just before the First World War.
At a time when it was possible for women to participate in many of the activities that that were associated with typical undergraduate life.
So they attended lectures. They sat for exams. They lived in a college setting, although a very specific kind of college setting.
They took part in activities like hunting and debate and so on.
But they were still, of course, barred from officially taking degrees and many of them would attend that first degree ceremony in October of 1920.
In addition to Karris Barnett, who later married and became Karris Frank Enberg,
my talk today will draw on the experiences of the most famous member of the Circle of Friends that I mentioned the mutual admiration society,
the true crime novelists. Dorothy L. Sayers. So the letter about the woman's student party really struck me.
What did it mean to be woman student ish? How could you be sort of more or less woman student ish?
Right. Because that's what they're talking about.
They're talking about inviting the most woman student dish person that they know and having a prise for who's the most woman student dish of all.
And why ultimately did Carrison, her friends, who were, after all, women and students, ultimately shy away from this party as too dangerous?
So the first thing that I want to be clear about here is that the category of students,
as in specifically Oxford undergraduate student, was implicitly male at this time and would remain so for for some decades afterward.
The image of the Oxford undergraduate that had been kind of canonised in in popular culture
in the 19th century and that continued to be really influential in the 20th century,
kind of conjured up ideas of youth, of privilege, hijinx, of intellectual engagement.
All of that in a resolute masculine mode in the person of of of really a male undergraduate student.
And it's pretty easy, I think, as well,
to picture the stereotype that that and her friends ultimately decided was too dangerous to base a party on her.
Or maybe too unkind to base a party on the woman student as a kind of figure of fun was a subset of the category of spinster.
The category of old maid.
So someone who was messy, who was scattered, who was unmarriageable importantly, who was freakishly devoted to books and who was socially inept.
So. If being a stereotypical Oxford undergraduate was not available to women at this time and being a woman student ish was alarming.
Well, I want to explore in this talk is what these young people at Summerville College actually did.
And I want to use kind of student life and activities as a way into what I think was actually a panoply
of what we might call gendered ways of being to use very 21st century language and not at all.
Early 20th century language. So in place of this dreaded stereotype of the woman's student,
I would like instead to talk about five other characters or ways of being that that carries Burnett.
Dorothy L. Sayers and their friends actually did want to be or at least try their hands at being.
And I want to point out that each of these roles, in a way was a different kind of performance that drew in elements of masculinity and femininity.
And I think. Taken together.
Tell us something interesting about what it meant to be a woman student in these in the decade, really leading up to the granting of degrees in 1920.
All right, so the first of the five, the accidental tourist.
So embracing feminine femininity, fully conventional ways of being feminine in this era meant risking not being seen as a student at all.
So in karass memoir, she recalls having permanent.
I'm just going to quote from her memoir here.
She recalls having a very pretty dress shot silk in blue, green and golden brown, wearing it to a lecture on my way to the river.
I was asked by the porter for the only time in my career to show my ticket in order to keep up the illusion of being an American tourist.
I produced the looking glass and powdered my nose, causing a mild sensation.
A St. Johns man said, I suppose there are two kinds of girl at Somerville, freaks and girls like you.
That's the end of the quote. And this image here is from a few years later when when after the First World
War had broken out and Karris Burnat volunteered to serve with friends society.
I think it captures her both as a tourist and in this kind of slightly glamorous looking mode.
In the story she tells from her memoir, Wearing this silk dress leads to being seen as a tourist in Oxford,
even when she's ultimately recognised as a student. She's produced her ticket.
She gets to go into the lecture. It's in a way that contrasts her appearance with the freaks, for which Somerville is allegedly known as freaks,
being in some ways a sharper way, I think, of countering the dangers of being a woman students.
So at the opposite end of the clothing spectrum, at least the trousers roll within the confines of Summerville College,
students could use fancy dress parties and theatrical performances as spaces to try wearing entirely masculine clothing.
And indeed, in their terms, dressing up as men.
Again, in October 1913, Dorothy L. Sayers attended a fancy dress dance, an old fashioned masculine attire, playing the violin.
Dancing until half past eleven and impressing everyone with her impersonation.
She told her parents that even Emily Penrose Surrell, some rebels are formidable principal at the time.
Quote was completely puzzled. So she tells her parents she stared at me for about five minutes and then had to be told who I was.
It surprises everyone that I make up so well as a man. It surprises me rather.
And I love that letter because I think it shows kind of the intensity of this fancy
dress costume and also the way that it could raise questions about a sense of self,
a sense of identity. She's Sayer's is describing learning something about herself in this experience of being unrecognisable.
Dressed up as a as a man. And a little bit about.
About this photograph, which is just like my favourite photograph of all time,
I think the great unrequited crush of Dorothy L. Sayers is College Years was the conductor of the Bach Choir.
Dr. Hugh Percy Allen. Later, Sir Hugh, you, Percy Allen. She pursued a fairly stylised sort of crushin flirtation, a visa v Allen.
And in the going downplay of 1915, Sayers was the musical director of that of that play out in Summerville College.
And and she also performed the absurd fictional fictionalised version of Hugh Percy Allen, Doctor HP Rowland Tondo.
Another example of her really inhabiting joyously that the trousers roll.
So that kind of dressing up could be imagined as a form of drag, deliberately theatrical,
deliberately playing with any and indeed mocking conventions of gendered behaviour in clothing.
But there were other ways also of claiming aspects of masculinity within Summersville student life.
And I want to talk about two of those next. The first one is the parliamentarian, which I think is a particularly striking example.
So Somervell had its own parliament, the Summersville parliament, which was a debating society that followed the procedures of the House of Commons.
And in the context of this parliament, Somerville's students, including Kairis Burnett,
really were rehearsing for a citizenship that they weren't yet entitled to hold.
So all of this is happening right in the midst of the debate over the right of women to vote in the midst of the suffrage campaign.
Carice went to some suffrage meetings, although she was not a dedicated suffragette and by any means.
But so this parliament exists in this moment when being a member of parliament,
being an MP is restricted to men and rather than invents a female form or a feminine mode of of holding that kind of position of authority,
the Summersville parliamentarians just just inhabited these this sort of masculine role.
They used male titles. They also used masculine pronouns in the context of the parliament.
So, for example, Karris made her dramatic maiden speech.
And in the midst of it, she was interrupted by the chairman and chairman was the word that they used.
The chairman interrupted Karris and said, Order, order.
I must ask the honourable gentleman if his point has direct bearing on this clause.
And this was a challenge that the other other employees in this honourable parliament had sort of backed down on.
Karris refused to back down to laughter and then cheers from her own party.
And she she replied to the chairman. I think so, sir.
And then she went on to the end of the end of her speech, which gives you a flavour of carrots as a person,
but also suggests the way that in taking on these roles of MP in an era before there were any female
employees there simply adopting all the male forms and then and then carrying on themselves.
Some of those students could inhabit masculine roles in more subtle ways as well.
They took on masculine nicknames that weren't male alter egos, but equally, that did undercut the traditional quality of their given names.
So in the mutual admiration society, other members included Muriel Yagur,
who became known as Jim Yagur, and Catherine Godfrey, who became known as Tony.
And this is a photograph of Muriel St. Clair Byrne, who didn't take on a nickname at all.
She stayed Muriel. But this is a photograph from her fantastic archive that I think there's a very student ish vibe about this.
Not sure it's a woman student. This vibe in the sense that Dorothy Rowe and Karris met.
But so that's that's who this photograph is of.
I've called this one the fellow to get at the way that these students within Summerville College argued
and took up intellectual space in any kind of ways that were coded as more masculine and feminine.
And what I'm trying to get at, I think,
is nicely illustrated by a letter that Dorothy L. Sayers sent to Muriel Jim Yagur when they were all home on holiday.
So Sayres is writing about how she misses her friends. She misses life at all.
At Oxford. She misses being at Somervell. And she's complaining about the foolishness of the friends she was supposed to entertain at home.
So some of the nice young women who lived in the neighbourhoods she was supposed to be friends with, but Manchus back at home.
And she complains especially about who she. The person she calls the vacuous violent.
Violet came over for dinner. Dorothy tried to insist on what she called a sensible arguments, but the polite guests, Violet refused.
So Dorothy L. Sayers pushes things further as she told Jim she, quote,
laid down my ideas in an offensively dogmatic manner, purposely exaggerated in order to promote contradiction.
You know, that offensive manner of mine. But Violet parried with exaggerated modesty and said she bowed to Dorothy's superior knowledge.
Could anything explode? Dorothy, in her letter to Jim Yagur, make a fellow feel a sillier arse.
Within their Summerhill circle, she went on this false and implicitly feminine modesty could never happen.
So she continues, Oh, Jemmy. I miss our allowed voice arguments.
Ever be certain of being quite right? Hang it all what we're tongues made for and lust to argue with.
So in this letter, I think that Sayer's is claiming terms for herself, like fellow silly arse, you know?
Can anything make a fellow feel a sillier arse? I think is such a telling phrase.
Sayers is perfectly playing this part of the insulin undergraduate.
The jolly fellow who longs for the masculine camaraderie of the university rather than the polite domestic chat of the feminine home.
So then this this these are photographs from Muriel Yeager's archive, actually,
so when Sayer's and Yagur went to that graduation ceremony in October of 1920 and they got to wear their proper gowns,
they later on either shortly, a few weeks later, they visited with some of Yeager's relatives and posed for these photographs in their gowns.
So so sort of especially since Hennery themed images, I think are us Sayer's and so on the left arm and Yagur on my right.
Beyond that, Somerville's halls in the wider universe,
the maintaining that that role that Sayer's is is conjuring of a jolly fellow having a good argument with his friends.
Maintaining that role was less easy. And my last vignette is taken again from from Dorothy L. Sayers is Letters Home.
And it focuses on the complexity of navigating these kind of gendered expectations in the context of
attending classes and taking exams where there would also be young male students in her German classes.
Sarah's was frequently the only woman in the room, even in a literature class where she had one female companion.
That student, she said, quote, never says a word and never lifts her eyes from her book.
Later, when it came time to take exams, Sayers found herself the only female student taking a particular language exam.
When she first arrived in the exam room, she recounted. I wandered into the men's part of the room and the door keeper rushed at me with wildly waving
arms and a terrified expression and shooed me away to my seclusion like an intrusive hen.
This is where the title for this this last character comes from the intrusive hen.
Indeed, she said she had to take the exams severely isolated, like a leper in one corner of the room.
Even that, though, didn't suppress Sayers as intellectual self-confidence during the oral examination.
One examiner raised a potentially thorny point.
He said he was very much surprised to see that Sayer's had considered Schillers robbers a pleasing play.
Saras admitted to her parents. That my heart sank into my boots. But she decided to try, which she called an individual touch.
And I'm quoting again from her letter here, relying on the fact that I had put on my best coat and skirt and a becoming hat.
I assumed my most womanly smile and said, Oh, don't you think it is?
He smiled. I was encouraged to give my reasons. He smiled and agreed, at any rate.
He passed me. And I think that vignette gives you a sense of.
Sort of. A woman student this way of being that it's a little bit different and sort of an intrusive hand fighting back.
So to conclude then at Somerville, students had to navigate a classic double bind,
on the one hand that they didn't want to seem to woman student ish or to freakishly absorbed in learning.
On the other hand, expressions of femininity brought different sorts of criticism and scrutiny down upon them as porters,
lecturers, male undergraduates and others resisted the integration of women into Oxford within its walls.
Somerville College tried to balance these imperatives, offering a combination of Oxford student life and the trappings of middle class domesticity.
But most importantly, I think a space for transformation, for trying on ways of being.
In giving this taxonomy today, these five ways of being, I'm not describing obviously stable identities, they're contingent.
They're temporary. Karris Burnett was an honourable gentleman defending a point one day the attractive young lady in a silk dress,
the next Dorothy L. Sayers could be both an insular fellow and an intrusive hen.
None of these options is a satisfactory resolution to the problem posed by the fact that undergraduates were assumed to be men.
And obviously none of them created a stable,
fully fledged version of Studentship of being a student that was compatible with also being a woman or as another member of this group put it,
with living in the social category defined as women. But the variety and the kind of creativity of these ways of being are also worth noting.
They remind us, for one thing, that no one is ever simply a man or a woman, masculine or feminine, for all time.
And in all contexts. And just the same way. So if gender is kind of it.
But, Larry, in performance, it's one whose terms can be and are varying all the time.
And they also, I think, underscore how, despite the limitations and the sexism of the broader context, pre 1920,
Somerville College student life also provided students with a space to try on different
ways of being to experiment with different modes of interaction and to consider how to be,
in the end, not just a woman or a student, but a full human being.
Thank you.