In my history course, I had the exhilarating opportunity to explore the history of women's colleges at Oxford. Lady Margaret Hall (LMH) was the first women's college followed by Sommerville and eventually St. Hugh's, St. Anne's, and St. Hilda's. St. Hilda's was a single-sex school until 2008. I started my study with a tour of the women's colleges led by my tutor, which is probably the first reason I found the topic as exciting as I did, but I also attended a single-sex high school making the topic personally relevant. Alumni from the different former women's colleges range from Margaret Thatcher to Vera Brittain of Sommerville to Aung Sun Suu Kyi at St. Hugh's and Benazir Bhutto from LMH. One aspect of the former women's colleges that I found most intriguing were the precautions that each college took to protect their female students.
The street sign for the road LMH is on
According to a book about St. Hugh's, there were chaperones, housing with special rules, and naturally a dress code (Griffin, P., 1986). I cannot imagine having such strict controls over my life as a college woman. I am an adult and should be recognized as such by my academic institution not treated as incapable of making my own decisions. Things have changed drastically since the early days of women's education at Oxford, but even after examining women's history and feminist theory, some of these ideas about "protecting women" just seem utterly ridiculous.
How do we learn from these strict regulations that women had to live with? How did those rules and regulations serve the women during those times? What regulations are in place in our lives and how "ridiculous" will some of them look to someone fifty to one-hundred years from now?
Bibliography
Griffin, P. St. Hugh's: 100 year's of Women's Education at Oxford. London: MacMillan, 1986.
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