Students: A Gendered History

Carol Dyhouse

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134245871
• Subtopic: History of Education
• Index: History

This compelling and stimulating book explores the gendered social history of students in modern Britain.

From the privileged youth of Brideshead Revisited, to the scruffs at 'Scumbag University' in The Young Ones, representations of the university undergraduate have been decidedly male. But since the 1970s the proportion of women students in universities in the UK has continued to rise so that female undergraduates now outnumber their male counterparts.

Drawing upon wide-ranging original research including documentary and archival sources, newsfilm, press coverage of student life and life histories of men and women who graduated before the Second World War, this text provides rich insights into changes in student identity and experience over the past century.

The book examines :

• men's and women's differing expectations of higher education
• the sacrifices that families made to send young people to college
• the effect of equality legislation
• demography
• changing patterns of marriage and the impact of the 'sexual revolution' on female students
• the cultural life of students and the role that gender has played in shaping them.

For students of gender studies, cultural studies and history, this book will have meaningful impact on their degree course studies.

Part I

Access and ambitions

Chapter One

Going to university in England between the wars

Access, funding and social class

The socialist politician Jennie Lee is probably best remembered for her vision of expanding popular access to university education in Britain through the establishment of the Open University in the 1960s. Writing as a young woman, some twenty years before this event, she reflected on her own educational experiences and entry into political life in a volume of autobiography entitled This Great Journey.¹ She noted that she had often been asked how it had been possible for her, as the daughter of a coal-miner, to go to university (she had studied at the University of Edinburgh between 1922 and 1926). This had been possible, she explained, through a combination of public support and private (i.e. parental) self-sacrifice. Fife Educational Authority provided schooling up to university entrance, and then presented her with a maintenance allowance of £45 per annum whilst at university. The Carnegie Trust took care of half of her class fees. She lived in a rented room rather than a women’s hostel, a much more economical option at the time. Her parents struggled to help. There is a moving account of how her mother, normally cautious and risk averse, defied her father’s strict opposition to gambling in any form by putting a shilling each way on the Derby one year ‘with a view to assisting Provi-dence’.² Clothes suitable for college had to be obtained on credit: equally against the grain. Patricia Hollis, Jennie Lee’s recent biographer, describes how on Saturdays, when Jennie’s father was free from work, he would cycle the twenty miles from the family home to Edinburgh, bringing home-cooked food supplies and freshly laundered clothes, and taking back clothes to be washed or mended.³

Scottish universities have long prided themselves on their ‘democratic’ tradition, and on having been able to offer access to talented youngsters from impecunious homes. Fees might be considered to have been less of a deterrent after the Carnegie bequest in 1901/2, which guaranteed the fees for students of Scottish birth attending universities in Scotland.⁴ By 1938 the ‘age participation ratio’ (i.e. the proportion of the age group attending university) in Scotland was 3.1 per cent, as compared with only 1.5 per cent in England and Wales.⁵ Although there were differences in the recruitment pattern between institutions – Glasgow, for instance, seems to have drawn from a wider social base than did Edinburgh – R.D. Anderson has suggested that the Scottish ‘democratic myth’ did indeed have substance, in that ‘perhaps twenty per cent of Scottish university students could properly be described as “working class”’,⁶ whilst another 20 per cent or so were the children of ‘intermediate’ or lower middle-class homes, the sons and daughters of shopkeepers, clerks and so forth. It is probably safe to conclude that at least 40 per cent of the students in Scottish universities between the wars came from families beneath the strata of the economically secure professional and managerial classes.

Although age participation rates remained low by international standards, the number of students in English universities rose significantly between 1900 and 1935. Oxford and Cambridge doubled their intake during these years, whilst the number of full-time students in the other nine universities with charters and five university colleges which existed by 1939 more than trebled (Table 1.1).⁷ Contemporaries were conspicuously divided in their judgement about whether this expansion was ‘a good thing’ or not. Some suggested that the country was producing too many graduates in the hostile labour market of the later 1930s, expressing concern about whether this would breed discontent amongst the ‘overqualified’.⁸ The problem of graduate unemployment was widely discussed as a European phenomenon.⁹ Since a smaller proportion of the population in England (as compared with Scotland, Wales, Germany or North America) enjoyed the benefits of a university education, English observers were not above congratulating themselves on this very limited access to higher education, which they saw as keeping the problem of graduate unemployment within bounds.¹⁰

Table 1.1 Numbers of full-time students, England only, 1901, 1937/8

On the other side were those who kept up a chorus of protest against the ‘waste’ of talent, drawing attention to the insuperable social, educational and economic difficulties faced by highly intelligent children from working-class homes who had little chance of continuing their education beyond the elementary school. In Social Progress and Educational Waste (published in 1926), Kenneth Lindsay had estimated that less than 1 per cent of those attending the public elementary schools went on to university.¹¹

Students: social background

Controversy of this kind, and the somewhat patchy evidence available, have made it much more difficult to generalize about the social background of those studying in English as compared with Scottish universities before 1939. In 1938, Lancelot Hogben’s Political Arithmetic included an essay by David Glass and J.L. Gray on ‘Opportunity in the older universities’, which submitted that ‘there were no grounds for complacency towards the rate at which the older universities are opening their doors to students of the poorer classes.’¹² They were referring here to Oxford and Cambridge. Studies of Oxbridge make it clear that these institutions catered for a social elite: students from working-class homes, and women, were very much outnumbered by those who might be seen as having regarded college life as something in the nature of a ‘finishing school for young gentlemen’.¹³ But if Oxford and Cambridge can in the main be seen as having functioned to confirm privilege rather than to offer opportunities for social mobility on any scale, can the same be said of England’s ‘other’ universities? Alongside the three-fold increase in full-time student numbers between 1900 and 1937/8 shown in Table 1.1, many contemporary observers saw the university population as having been ‘democratized’. Doreen Whiteley, whose report on funding and social access to higher education was published in 1933, concluded that by that time going to university could certainly no longer be regarded as ‘the privilege of the well-to-do’.¹⁴

Richard Hoggart, whose background was far from ‘well-to-do’, ‘went up’ to his local University of Leeds in 1936. In the first volume of his autobiography, published just over half a century later, he attempted a social portrait of the student body in Leeds during the 1930s.¹⁵ There had been around 1700 students (two women to every seven men), the great majority of them (1300) being local. The students, he recalled, fell into ‘three easily identifiable, locally drawn groups’. The first group were unambiguously middle-class, the sons of millowners studying textiles in order to take over family businesses, or ‘the gilded youth of West Yorks coming in from the hills each day in two-seater sports coupés’, many of whom were studying medicine. The middle group were less well-off but had parents who could either shoulder fees ‘or find charities which would pay’ – the children of parsons, teachers and the like. The third group were ‘the really local and the poorest’, lower-middle and working-class students on scholarships or (more importantly) Board of Education grants for intending teachers. These were the ‘RSTs’ or Recognised Students in Training, who were committed to following their degrees with one year’s teacher training and a certain number of years’ schoolteaching: if they chose not to honour this commitment, they were in danger of being asked to repay their grants. Students in this third group (in which Hoggart numbered himself) had to be economical in their habits, they dressed cheaply and commuted to the university daily by bus or by tram.

Hoggart’s picture is not dissimilar to that drawn by ‘Bruce Truscot’ in Redbrick University (1943), where the opportunities and lifestyle of the Oxbridge undergraduate are compared with the experience of ‘Bill Jones’ of Redbrick:

Poor Bill Jones! No Hall and Chapel and oak-sporting for him; no invitations to breakfast at the Master’s Lodgings; no hilarious bump suppers or moonlight strolls in romantic quadrangles; no all-night sittings with a congenial group round his own – his very own – fireplace. No: Bill goes off five mornings a week to Redbrick University exactly as he went to Back Street Council School and Drabtown Municipal School for Boys – and he goes on his bicycle, to save the twopenny tramfare.¹⁶

Truscot’s description goes on in this vein, highlighting the shortcomings of provincial university buildings and facilities (‘dirty, sordid’ staircases, ‘grimy’ classrooms, etc.) and the depressing prospect facing ‘Bill Jones’ of an evening spent at home in a crowded living room helping sisters with homework and listening to ‘Dad’s politics’ and ‘Mum’s grievances’ when his mind should be thrilling to new worlds.¹⁷ It is difficult to know how to interpret this kind of tone and stereotyping, which sounds uncomfortably patronizing today. Even Truscot probably felt that he had been rather carried away by his own rhetoric, adding (rather lamely) a footnote to the effect that ‘not all Redbrick undergraduates come from these particular varieties of Drabtown school and home’. Many, he conceded came from good schools (though seldom the best) and comfortable homes. Nonetheless, he stoutly maintained that the average student’s background was aptly portrayed by his description.¹⁸

This chapter will introduce material to clarify our understanding of the social background of those who studied in English universities before 1939 and explore the ways in which they financed their studies. It will be suggested that, leaving aside Oxbridge, the social composition of the student body was not dissimilar to that in Scotland. Notwithstanding the differences in the age participation ratio mentioned above, the many differences in educational history and provision between these two countries, and differences in social structure, it would appear that the proportions of lower middle-class and working-class students in universities on both sides of the border were much the same.

In the attempt to assess the social significance of the expansion of university education in the early part of the twentieth century, this and the following chapter draw partly on archival material, but principally on surveying the experience of around 1,200 men and women who studied in universities (other than Oxbridge) before the Second World War.

In 1995 I carried out a survey of the social background, educational careers and life histories of a sample of women who graduated from six English universities or university colleges before 1939. Around 800 four-page questionnaires were distributed to groups of women who had studied at the Universities of Manchester, Bristol and Reading; at University College London, and at Royal Holloway and Bedford Colleges (now amalgamated) of the University of London. This choice of institutions reflected a desire to select different kinds of institution (older and newer foundations, institutions in different parts of the country, mixed as well as single-sex colleges), but equally depended upon the interest and co-operation of Alumni and Development Officers with access to lists of current addresses of former students (Data Protection Legislation bars any simple issuing of lists of addresses, and in each case the questionnaires had to be mailed by the institutions concerned). The rate of response was excellent, with over five-eighths (63.5 per cent) of the questionnaires being returned (see Table 1.2).¹⁹ Many of the women wrote long letters, or sent pieces of autobiographical writing; even more took the trouble to answer my questions (several of which were open-ended) in elaborate detail.

The response to this inquiry proved a rich source of data, affording detailed information about why these women had chosen to go to university, the attitudes of their parents, and the ways in which they had financed their studies. The evidence suggested interesting questions (and potentially some answers) relating to the issue of how different social groups had looked upon higher education as an investment; albeit an often costly investment requiring considerable financial sacrifice on the part of parents living through the Depression. However, I soon realized that it would not be possible to understand the picture fully without collecting similar data for male graduates. My study of women had been made possible by a grant from the Spencer Foundation. In 1998 I was fortunate to receive funding from the Economic and Social Research Council, which allowed me to conduct a similar study focusing upon male graduates.

Collecting similar data from male graduates posed certain problems. Women have a longer life expectancy than men, many male graduates tragically lost their lives in the 1939–45 war, and a gap of three years between contacting the female and the male graduates in the research had a significant impact. Women represented only about one-quarter of the student population in the 1930s, but even so, to achieve my goal of collecting a similar number of completed questionnaires from each sex I had to extend the number of universities from six to eight for the sample of male graduates. In the end I distributed 1085 questionnaires to male graduates from the Universities of Manchester, Bristol, Reading, Liverpool and Leeds, from University College London and King’s College, London, and from the former University College of Nottingham. The rate of response (over 53 pe...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Introduction
• PART I Access and ambitions
• PART II Coeducation and culture 119
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Select bibliography: works used in the text
• Index