Bluestockings

I have to confess to a strange, somewhat perverse prediliction: I have a weakness for what you might call "vintage sexism". While the racial attitudes of bygone eras leave me more nauseated than amused, I find hilarious comments from Victorian and Edwardian chaps along the lines of "The fairer sex should not tax their minds unduly with education, or their reproductive organs will wither and die." (Needless to say, their modern-day equivalents, the posts on newspaper comment pages and the BBC's "Have Your Say" section that read along the lines of "Women can regurgitate facts but they lack the incisive analytical minds men have", all posted by men who appear to spend their days spurting verbal diarrhoea all over the Internet, are less funny - to say nothing of the repulsive attitudes towards women's education still found in some parts of the world).

Anyway, to return to my initial subject, it was my amusement at the sexist attitudes of the past, coupled with my belated realisation that my own current institution (Cambridge University) did not grant degrees to women until 1948, that led me to pick up Jane Robinson's "Bluestockings: The Remarkable Story of the First Women to Fight for an Education". I expected to find it fascinating, and it was - I raced through it over the weekend, and by the end I was still desperate to know more. As a women who has gone through the education system to postgraduate level without my gender being an issue or even being mentioned (the only sexism I've ever encountered was at Oxford, and that came from old members of my college unhappy about the negative impact the admission of women had had on the performance of Trinity's rugby team - an infrequent and minor annoyance rather than a persistent obstacle to my enjoyment of the university experience), it was truly humbling to think about those pioneering young women who challenged the universities, the Establishment and often their families as well, to achieve something to which their intelligence and ambition should have entitled them automatically. I was left wondering: would I have possessed the courage and spark to do likewise, orwould I have resigned myself to a life of respectable but dull domesticity, circumscribed by the narrow limits of home, family and propriety? I don't know - and reading "Bluestockings" reminded me how lucky I am that I never need to find out. I want to put a copy of this book into the hands of every girl or young woman who's ever told me that she's not a feminist, or that women's lives weren't so bad back in the days before feminism. This was a welcome reminder of just how far we've come.