Bluestockings by Jane Robinson
Bluestockings by Jane Robinson
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Published by Penguin Viking, out now, hardback, 288 pp, £20.
In a nutshell...
The quieter, more refined side of the fight for female emancipation.
What's it all about?
Jane Robinson presents the stories of the first women to demand an education in England, focusing particularly on the late 19th and early 20th centuries and finishing just before the Second World War. Through her anecdotal style, she muses on the reasons these women fought to be admitted to universities, the opposition and obstacles they faced, and the experiences they had.
Who's it by?
Descibed on the book jacket as having 'an appreciative eye for eccentricity', Jane Robinson's work has focused on unusual and avante garde women whose stories are often ignored by traditional history. Previous book titles such as Wayward Women and Unsuitable for Ladies give an idea of her research interests.
Robinson is an alumnus of Somerville College, Oxford, one of the first women's colleges to be founded and which features prominently in Bluestockings.
As an example...
"It may have been an odyssey, and the territory hostile, but led by some of history's most determined and diplomatic pioneers, the quest for women's higher education finally succeeded... 'There is a wonderful exhilaration about getting a degree,' wrote a female gradate of Manchester in 1926. "It is something more than the degree itself. It feels like coming into an inheritance of tradition.'"
Likelihood of it becoming a Hollywood blockbuster
Almost all of the stories featured in Bluestockings have the makings of a stirring period drama, complete with triumphs over adversity, struggles against old-fashioned family members, determined women and cloche hats.
What the others say
"One marvels at their perseverance... Robinson has the attuned ear of a first-rate social historian and though she picks up every note of anguish hidden between the sunny lines of letters sent home to anxious families wanting to know how their daughters were getting on, the entire book strikes a note of optimism." - Genevive Fox, Daily Telegraph
"Robinson... explores a quiet revolution, which has been all but forgotten next to stories of suffragettes throwing themselves before horses." - - Alexandra Roumbas Goldstein, TheFWord.org.uk
So is it any good?
Bluestockings< starts by regaling the reader with the story of Beatrice Pearson, a student at St Hilda's College, Oxford, in the 1930s. Pearson's working class family rallied round in order to help her fulfil her Oxford dream, nurtured by her teachers, so that she might lift them out of poverty. The story sets the scene for the rest of the book: it is composed of a multitude of individual stories, gleaned from letters, diaries and interviews, in order to give a thorough and deeply personal image of the lives of women at English universities before the Second World War.
This anecdotal approach can have its drawbacks, but in this case it is perfectly suited to the subject matter. Robinson neatly weaves hundreds of stories together to vividly evoke the 'undergraduette' experience, while making subtle points about the role of women in society - Victorian and contemporary. To give a fuller picture, it might have been useful to describe the links that existed between the struggle for women's education with other campaigns, for divorce law reform or for the right to vote. Without this back-story, the fight for education looks curiously isolated, even pointless: Robinson laments, for example, the paucity of options for women following university, but does not relate this to the campaigns for female access to medicine and other professions. The demand for education was, for the most part, not bred of a desire for education for its own sake, but was an integral part of first wave feminism in its wide-ranging efforts to improve the lot of women.
This is an optimistic, profoundly grateful book; Robinson seeks to celebrate "the achievements of ordinary, extraordinary women" who "cleared the path that hundreds of thousands of women have since followed; most of us without a backward glance". While acknowledging the trials that faced a woman before, during, and after her time at university, Bluestockings is primarily focused on their successes at overcoming this opposition. Another writer may have let this story descend into congratulatory worthiness, but Robinson's enthusiasm shines through every page.
8/10
Hannah Tipple