Programme of events associated with the exhibition at the University Library sponsored by the University and Cambridge Assessment
The actual exhibition The Rising Tide: Women at Cambridge is one of the best I have seen at the University Library in fifty years. Subsequent to my experience of the PR, I have visited it twice, spending a total of an hour and a half there.
It’s excellent because it is comprehensive (although Germaine Greer seems to have been airbrushed out), it tells the history very clearly, is documented from a really impressive variety of sources, is visually varied and attractive, contains much good humour, and, most effective of all, the exhibits are as closely patterned as is possible without looking cramped. The latter means that your attention is drawn through the narrative of each case rather than contemplating a series of objects set in white space.
The exhibition begins with a wall covered in signatures from the 1880 petition for the students of Girton and Newnham women’s colleges to be granted degrees. Incredibly, this campaign was won only in 1948; it rightly occupies almost half of the exhibition. Along the way, we read Emily Davies, founder of Girton, writing in 1867: ‘On general moral grounds, we think it very desirable that men and women should have substantially […] the same education.’ Later she insists that when the men’s colleges admit women, Girton must admit men. The tone of all the women’s utterances is unpofacedly serious, sensitive, reason-based and unaggressive. They are true egalitarians.
The emotional reality for the male opposition, however, is vividly revealed by the exhibits illustrating the following moment (I quote from the caption):
The 1897 proposal to grant women the titles of their degrees was rejected [in the University’s Senate] by 1713 votes to 662. When the vote was announced a hostile mob marched on Newnham and the doors and shutters of local shops were torn down to feed a huge bonfire in Market Square. Girton and Newnham women were deeply shocked by the scale of the defeat and by the violence.
As I wrote in my biography of George Calderon regarding his involvement eleven years later in the Men’s League for Opposing Woman Suffrage, ‘there was, of course, a faction who simply did not like women’. In Cambridge in 1897 it was a case of visceral misogyny.
A brilliant aspect of the exhibition is that the curators have rescued from outer darkness all the women who as laundresses, bedders, cooks and servants had in fact played vital roles in Cambridge University for centuries. My favourite is Chrystabel Proctor, Garden Steward at Girton, whose personal Dig for Victory campaign included in 1942 growing 19 tons of potatoes on College property.
Other gems are the great lavatory paper debate (when Clare College went mixed in 1972 the Fellows decided the Ladies should have soft paper, but then the Gents demanded it too); the wonderful vignettes (twenty-one-year-old Agnata Ramsay gained the top First in Classics in 1887 and promptly married the fifty-four-year-old Master of Trinity — no snowflake she); a section about Emma Thompson, Sandi Toksvig and other undergraduate actresses staging an all-women Footlights show, ‘Women’s Hour’, in protest at the Footlights quota of one woman per review programme; and (on the earphones) Joanna Womack talking about alumni creating the Joint Colleges Nursery when the University refused to set one up that would give its employees equality of work-time.
It has been an epic struggle for women to obtain what is their right at Cambridge University. As the final panel of the exhibition puts it, ‘equality remains a goal, not an achievement […] and the persistent pay gap is just one of the issues that continues to drive women’s activism’. But the big message that the exhibition sends me, at least, is that since the founding of Girton in 1869 it has all been achieved without the activists inflicting violence and misandry [hatred of men]. It was done in those days by sober, unrelenting, unaggressive moral reasoning and example. But that is not surprising, for both Emily Davies and Millicent Fawcett (co-founder of Newnham) were suffragists, not suffragettes, and there seems to me no evidence in this exhibition that suffragettism ever had a hold in Cambridge. The National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, which before 1914 had almost fifty times as many members as Mrs Pankhurst’s Women’s Social and Political Union, was completely opposed to the latter’s militancy and urban terrorism.
And this is why I think the PR/marketing of the University Library’s exhibition is so misjudged. It employs the techniques of suffragettism, not suffragism. The poster of Elizabeth Hughes suggests, as you approach it, a swivel-eyed Edwardian woman out of self-control (when you get close up to it, you may read her face differently) and there is no source given for her supposed words on it, so in these days of fake news you wonder whether the caption was made up. It is a bucketful of aggression in your face. You can be pretty sure that Davies, Fawcett, and those other Cambridge women whose portraits hang in the upper corridor would have deplored it.
Similarly, replacing all the events flyers with ones featuring women and, unprecedentedly in my experience, removing every male portrait in the upper corridor to replace them with women, when it would have been usual to display them in the reception hall, sends the message not of gender equality but female hegemony — precisely the argument that misogynists have used against women’s rights throughout time.
Finally, there is the slogan ‘Behave Badly’, around which the whole marketing effort seems to have been conceived. It simply sends the archetypally suffragette message ‘be antisocial’. As a visitor wrote on one of the feedback sheets at the exhibition, this is hardly enough in 2019; s/he suggested that what we want is ‘kindness’… Another argued that ‘Behave Badly’ is gratuitously aggressive and ‘trivialises’ the issue, with which I would agree. We are told on the merchandise stand that in the 1970s the badge was meant to signify ‘be strong, be proud, be together’. Any one of those epithets would have been better, because they are positives. ‘Behave Badly’ plays straight into the hands of the misogynists who have claimed that women are merely ‘contrarian’ and ‘anarchical’.
It’s been suggested to me that the people who have devised the PR/marketing of this great exhibition do not know the difference between suffragists and suffragettes. I suppose it is possible, because one of the biggest and most fantastical public myths of our time is that the suffragettes, and Emmeline Pankhurst personally, won the vote for women. In fact, by June 1914 their actions had completely alienated public opinion and in the words of Philip Snowden, suffrage supporter and Labour MP, they had ‘so set the clock back that the suffrage question was temporarily as dead as Queen Anne’.
Really I hope that the suffragette ‘in yer face’ attitude of the exhibition’s marketing is the result of ignorance, naivety, or self-induced wokeful anger; because if it is inspired merely by a belief in the need to ‘challenge’ and that ‘there’s no such thing as bad publicity’, it is dishonest. I can’t believe that of such an eminent institution as Cambridge University Library, but I still find the militancy alienating and I did witness embarrassment at the merchandise display (by the way, ‘Votes For Women’, which is all over the mugs and tote bags, is not really a theme of the exhibition). Individuals approached the stand containing the thousand Behave Badly badges, but stopped about a foot away from it, as though looking into a craterful of magma… No-one bought anything.
SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS
‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement
‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine
‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian
‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review
‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter
‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer
‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18
A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.
Related
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
Captain of the 11
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913?
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
George Calderon, 1912
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
George Calderon c.1901
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
And the exhibition?
Programme of events associated with the exhibition at the University Library sponsored by the University and Cambridge Assessment
The actual exhibition The Rising Tide: Women at Cambridge is one of the best I have seen at the University Library in fifty years. Subsequent to my experience of the PR, I have visited it twice, spending a total of an hour and a half there.
It’s excellent because it is comprehensive (although Germaine Greer seems to have been airbrushed out), it tells the history very clearly, is documented from a really impressive variety of sources, is visually varied and attractive, contains much good humour, and, most effective of all, the exhibits are as closely patterned as is possible without looking cramped. The latter means that your attention is drawn through the narrative of each case rather than contemplating a series of objects set in white space.
The exhibition begins with a wall covered in signatures from the 1880 petition for the students of Girton and Newnham women’s colleges to be granted degrees. Incredibly, this campaign was won only in 1948; it rightly occupies almost half of the exhibition. Along the way, we read Emily Davies, founder of Girton, writing in 1867: ‘On general moral grounds, we think it very desirable that men and women should have substantially […] the same education.’ Later she insists that when the men’s colleges admit women, Girton must admit men. The tone of all the women’s utterances is unpofacedly serious, sensitive, reason-based and unaggressive. They are true egalitarians.
The emotional reality for the male opposition, however, is vividly revealed by the exhibits illustrating the following moment (I quote from the caption):
As I wrote in my biography of George Calderon regarding his involvement eleven years later in the Men’s League for Opposing Woman Suffrage, ‘there was, of course, a faction who simply did not like women’. In Cambridge in 1897 it was a case of visceral misogyny.
A brilliant aspect of the exhibition is that the curators have rescued from outer darkness all the women who as laundresses, bedders, cooks and servants had in fact played vital roles in Cambridge University for centuries. My favourite is Chrystabel Proctor, Garden Steward at Girton, whose personal Dig for Victory campaign included in 1942 growing 19 tons of potatoes on College property.
Other gems are the great lavatory paper debate (when Clare College went mixed in 1972 the Fellows decided the Ladies should have soft paper, but then the Gents demanded it too); the wonderful vignettes (twenty-one-year-old Agnata Ramsay gained the top First in Classics in 1887 and promptly married the fifty-four-year-old Master of Trinity — no snowflake she); a section about Emma Thompson, Sandi Toksvig and other undergraduate actresses staging an all-women Footlights show, ‘Women’s Hour’, in protest at the Footlights quota of one woman per review programme; and (on the earphones) Joanna Womack talking about alumni creating the Joint Colleges Nursery when the University refused to set one up that would give its employees equality of work-time.
It has been an epic struggle for women to obtain what is their right at Cambridge University. As the final panel of the exhibition puts it, ‘equality remains a goal, not an achievement […] and the persistent pay gap is just one of the issues that continues to drive women’s activism’. But the big message that the exhibition sends me, at least, is that since the founding of Girton in 1869 it has all been achieved without the activists inflicting violence and misandry [hatred of men]. It was done in those days by sober, unrelenting, unaggressive moral reasoning and example. But that is not surprising, for both Emily Davies and Millicent Fawcett (co-founder of Newnham) were suffragists, not suffragettes, and there seems to me no evidence in this exhibition that suffragettism ever had a hold in Cambridge. The National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, which before 1914 had almost fifty times as many members as Mrs Pankhurst’s Women’s Social and Political Union, was completely opposed to the latter’s militancy and urban terrorism.
And this is why I think the PR/marketing of the University Library’s exhibition is so misjudged. It employs the techniques of suffragettism, not suffragism. The poster of Elizabeth Hughes suggests, as you approach it, a swivel-eyed Edwardian woman out of self-control (when you get close up to it, you may read her face differently) and there is no source given for her supposed words on it, so in these days of fake news you wonder whether the caption was made up. It is a bucketful of aggression in your face. You can be pretty sure that Davies, Fawcett, and those other Cambridge women whose portraits hang in the upper corridor would have deplored it.
Similarly, replacing all the events flyers with ones featuring women and, unprecedentedly in my experience, removing every male portrait in the upper corridor to replace them with women, when it would have been usual to display them in the reception hall, sends the message not of gender equality but female hegemony — precisely the argument that misogynists have used against women’s rights throughout time.
Finally, there is the slogan ‘Behave Badly’, around which the whole marketing effort seems to have been conceived. It simply sends the archetypally suffragette message ‘be antisocial’. As a visitor wrote on one of the feedback sheets at the exhibition, this is hardly enough in 2019; s/he suggested that what we want is ‘kindness’… Another argued that ‘Behave Badly’ is gratuitously aggressive and ‘trivialises’ the issue, with which I would agree. We are told on the merchandise stand that in the 1970s the badge was meant to signify ‘be strong, be proud, be together’. Any one of those epithets would have been better, because they are positives. ‘Behave Badly’ plays straight into the hands of the misogynists who have claimed that women are merely ‘contrarian’ and ‘anarchical’.
It’s been suggested to me that the people who have devised the PR/marketing of this great exhibition do not know the difference between suffragists and suffragettes. I suppose it is possible, because one of the biggest and most fantastical public myths of our time is that the suffragettes, and Emmeline Pankhurst personally, won the vote for women. In fact, by June 1914 their actions had completely alienated public opinion and in the words of Philip Snowden, suffrage supporter and Labour MP, they had ‘so set the clock back that the suffrage question was temporarily as dead as Queen Anne’.
Really I hope that the suffragette ‘in yer face’ attitude of the exhibition’s marketing is the result of ignorance, naivety, or self-induced wokeful anger; because if it is inspired merely by a belief in the need to ‘challenge’ and that ‘there’s no such thing as bad publicity’, it is dishonest. I can’t believe that of such an eminent institution as Cambridge University Library, but I still find the militancy alienating and I did witness embarrassment at the merchandise display (by the way, ‘Votes For Women’, which is all over the mugs and tote bags, is not really a theme of the exhibition). Individuals approached the stand containing the thousand Behave Badly badges, but stopped about a foot away from it, as though looking into a craterful of magma… No-one bought anything.
SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS
‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement
‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine
‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian
‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review
‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter
‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer
‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18
A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.
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