A new play at Shakespeare's Globe examines women’s struggle for higher education.
It is Girton College Cambridge 1896 and its principal Elizabeth Welsh (Gabrielle Lloyd ) is determined that her small group of female students will be allowed to graduate at the end of their studies.
Welsh had sacrificed everything to establish the college and provide an education for women. She has had to beg lecturers to teach them.
Some, like Mr Banks (Fergal McElheron), are happy to help.
The play opens with him enthusiastically leading a session on the mechanics of the bicycle, but we soon learn what the young women are up against when one, Tess Moffatt (Ellie Piercy) is thrown out of a lecture by the misogynist Professor Maudsley (Edward Peel) for daring to argue that hysteria was not caused by the womb floating around the body.
It may be hard to believe now, but that is what medics believed then.
They also believed that education, or the exercise of the brain, harmed a woman’s ability to perform other functions, like childbirth. Even Queen Victoria subscribed to this view.
Women who pursued an education were effectively assigning themselves to a life of spinsterhood and financial hardship - for who would employ an educated woman?
The men will graduate, but the women will leave empty handed, with nothing but the stigma of being a ‘blue stocking’- an unnatural, educated woman.
The young women grapple with these dilemmas as they struggle to motivate themselves to finish their studies and match the grades of their male counterparts.
Tess thinks she has found a kindred spirit when she falls for Ralph, until he bows to peer pressure and drops her for a student at the less political Newnham College.
The women have their supporters, but they too have to make sacrifices; Mr Blake is forced to turn down a fellowship as it would mean he was no longer able to teach the women.
Other women lend their support. The women are not supposed to leave their quarters at night, but a maid smuggles Tess out through the kitchen so she can meet her sweetheart.
And the audience broke into spontaneous applause as a female shop assistant tells a particularly offensive group of male students to get out of her shop.
There are arguments among the women about tactics. Miss Walsh wants to operate by stealth, focusing on the fight for degrees, but her colleague Miss Blake (Sarah MacRae) wants to link the struggle for women’s education to the wider suffragist movement.
Blue Stockings is the first play written by Jessica Swale, artistic director of the Red Handed Theatre
Company. In 2010 she directed Bedlam, the first play by a female playwright - Nell Leyshon - to be staged at Shakespeare’s Globe.
Swale believes the Girton women’s struggle for education is relevant today.
She began researching Blue Stockings when Malala Yousafzai was shot for standing up for girls’ education in Kashmir - and has dedicated Blue Stockings to her.
Swale also recognises that the right to higher education is under threat nearer to home.
In the programme Swale writes: “Recently a young friend was devastated when he realised that university was no longer a feasible option because of the fee increases.
“After so many years fighting for access to higher education, how are we once again in a position where able, passionate students don’t have access to higher education?”
Blue Stockings is on at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, London, until 11 October.
Story published on Women's Views on News, 25 September 2013.
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