Women at QMW
Mile End’s Queen Mary is one of the numerous colleges that make up the University of London. Under its many changing names it has been an integral part of the East End from its beginnings in the People’s Palace, back in 1886. Other colleges have been absorbed by Queen Mary over the years: the London Hospital Medical College, Barts Hospital medical school and Westfield College.
But for the early part of that story (the London Hospital Medical College was founded in 1785) women played almost no role - they simply weren’t permitted as students. An exhibition* at Queen Mary this autumn (marking the 120th anniversary of the founding of Queen Mary College, and the 125th anniversary of Westfield College) shows how pioneering women students changed all that, and helped form the unique history of the college.
It was nigh on impossible for women in the 19th century to get a propert education, while jobs were the preserve of the working classes. A middle class girl was expected to learn the piano, and to acquire the basics that would allow her to converse amusingly in company, but her path was clear: she would only leave home to marry and have children. Anything else simply wasn’t respectable, but as the century progressed many women began to challenge these views. A group of educational pioneers (led by Emily Davies, founder of Girton College, Cambridge), saw education as the answer to women’s lack of progress and rights (at this time women not only could not vote but had very limited property rights, being effectively the chattels of their husbands.
Constance Maynard studied at Girton before founding Westfield College in 1882. It was London’s first residential women’s college, and Maynard’s mission was to offer higher education based on Christian doctrine, and teaching of arts and sciences, including mathematics and botany.
Arts was one thing, medicine quite another. Elizabeth Blackwell had come to study at Barts in 1850, having been the first woman to get a medical degree in America. She was an inspiration to Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, who was born in Whitechapel. The young Elizabeth Garrett met Blackwell and Emily Davies in the 1850s and resolved to study medicine too, training at the London Hospital in the 1860s and becoming the first woman to gain a medical qualification in Britain.But it was hard for other women to follow these trailblazers. There was hug opposition to women in medicine: Ellen Colborne registered to study at Barts in 1865, but her presence so upset the male students that lectures were disrupted and a petition was started to throw her out. Colborne withdrew from the course.
But the scope of the exhibition goes far beyond women in medicine. There are other figures, less celebrated but no less important in the history of Queen Mary. Minnie James (1865-1903) was appointed assistant librarian at the People’s Palace for East London in 1887, and became head librarian in 1889. She would play a vital role in building the People’s Palace Library. Her mission was to bring literature to the library’s working-class clientele, whom she tried to accommodate with opening times that fitted around their working day, by the acquisition of novels and other light reading.
There is Mary Stocks (1891–1975), Principal of Westfield College from 1939 to 1951. A suffragette in the early years of the century (until the vote was won in 1918), she later joined the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship (NUSEC), persuaded them to adopt birth control as part of its platform, and helped establish the first provincial birth control clinic in Manchester in 1926.
And the exhibition takes in a number of themes, including the woman physician, the impact of the Great War, The World War 2 evacuation of the college, and Women in medicine and dentistry 1946-1959. The exhibition includes material from 1850 to the present day, including early photos of women students and teachers, alumnae memorabilia and a history of women in higher education. Audio recordings bring visitors voices from across the decades.
*Women@QM Exhibition
www.women.qmul.ac.uk
8 October 2007 - 20 December 2007
The Octagon, Queen’s Building
Queen Mary, University of London
Mile End Road
London E1 4NS
Email: womenatqm@qmul.ac.uk