When co-founder of University College Mary Ann Baxter stipulated that the institution should be for promoting the education of both sexes, she was ahead of her time. Thereafter the University's role on the gender issue has often, but not always, been in the vanguard. For example the first woman professor in a Scottish University, Professor Margaret Fairlie, was based in Dundee. More recently the University became the first in the UK to host a Chair of Gender Relations, and this year Dundee was the focus of a major international conference, Gendering the Millennium.
Today women make up 58% of the student population at Dundee. Michael Bolik at the University Archives traces their history...
When University College, Dundee, was founded one of Mary Ann Baxter's stipulations when she provided the endowment was the equal participation of the sexes. Consequently women have studied here since 1883.
The College was unable to award degrees, so students had to graduate from the University of St Andrews - and until the 1890s also from London and Edinburgh. It was a young Dundee woman, Agnes Forbes Blackadder, who was the first woman to graduate from St Andrews University in 1895 and since she was also a UCD student we can perhaps lay some claim to this significant graduation - effectively the first female to graduate from Dundee.
But since we are looking at over a century of female involvement in University education at Dundee it is interesting to explore how the students themselves have perceived the growing involvement of women in student life.
The student's magazine College gives us some indication of prevalent attitudes. In the late 1880s Professor Steggall's opening address to the Students' Union was very much an exhortation to the men, while a year later the magazine referred in almost dismissive fashion to women students as "a budding generation of sweet girl graduates".
Indeed, the early perception was that femininity and intellectualism were virtually incompatible. An anonymous poet whose wife was "A Woman of Mind" penned the following in 1891:
"...she pays no regard to appearance,
And combs all her front hair behind,
Not because she is proud of her forehead,
But because she's a woman of mind...
Not a stitch does she do but a distich,
Mends her pens instead of my clothes;
I have not a shirt with a button,
Not a stocking that's sound at the toes."
However, it is surprising to find an editorial in the Summer 1906 edition so vigorously supporting the female cause when women medical graduates had been denied employment opportunities in Dundee Royal Infirmary:
"As a College we are particularly fortunate, as a Medical School we are perhaps unique, in the free and open ground on which men and women students meet...All the more remarkable is it that when student days are over our medical women should for the first time be made to feel the disadvantage of sex, and that in the very institution which has treated them as students with such magnanimous fairness."
That this was a somewhat advanced attitude for the time can be seen in the same magazine. A British student studying in Germany referred to the "women-student nuisance" and added: "A few such there are, but they are a subdued and apologetic few, and are treated with no more than the barest civility by Professors, and with scarcely that by the men."
Moving on to the early 1920s, and around the time of the decision by the governors of the London Hospital to stop training female doctors, we find the following echo of the above poem in the December 1921 edition:
"A charming woman student is one who can be a woman as well as a student. A university woman can be as intellectual as she likes so long as she doesn't look it."
Again, a "real" woman didn't engage in serious academic study. Any woman who dared to invade the primarily masculine world of the intellect had to have a redeeming "feminine" feature - and often this was an oh-so-endearing frivolity, as the April 1922 College reveals:
"Dame Chatterbox, according to the best authority, is to be found generally busy in our Women's Union; rarely in our Men's Union, because the inhabitants of the latter temple play pills, swear a little, drink a little, and consequently are too busy to discuss affairs of the heart ..."
Towards the end of the decade there emerged the liberated "it" generation of women; even so the writer in the April 1928
edition who was moved to poetry by the modern girl revealed a perception that the social advance probably had little
intellectual import:
"Cocaine and dopes your favourite meal-
Cocktails, champagne your only drink-
Morals you grind beneath your heel..."
And just to prove he might have been a great rap artist, he adds:
"Your money goes
On silken hose,
And cigarettes,
And greyhound bets;
And when it comes to cocktail mixin'-
By Jove, I'll tell the world, you vixen!"
In spite of the social advances during the 20s, 30s and also during the War we find in the May 1946 College that the term "woman student" was still something of an oxymoron in the general perception:
"The cry is often raised that the tone of the Universities is being lowered. This has been attributed to the lowering of the age of the entrants, but can it not be more truly attributed to the opening of their doors to women?
"...A woman has a mind and a brain just as a man has, but with one important difference. She has a woman's mind and a woman's brain...her intellect is essentially subjective, not objective. This is one reason why women rarely make good scientists or mathematicians.
...The logical and natural position of women in society is that of mother and home-maker..."
A year later feminine frivolity reappears: "Thus we reflected one morning till these lecherous old eyes were diverted by a charming bejantine descending the stairs in a most distracting manner...But then we were comforted by the thought that she probably chewed gum and thought Debussy was a kind of carpet."
And in 1948 the "real" reason for women attending university was revealed:
"Many misguided parents send little Mary to College to further her education but they don't mind if little Mary can't tell the difference between Kaiser and Caesar as long as she knows something. Besides, girls reputedly come to college to catch men..."
The decade of the sixties was of course the decade of change, although at times the change was more gradual than is generally remembered. For while in 1962 the St Andrews University (of which Dundee, as Queen's College, was a part) Men's Union and Women's Union were finally combined, according to the student newspaper Aien women were still only allowed into the bar on "guest nights." And just to show that men and women were still different creatures altogether, the following year it was the important duty of the Senior Men to "inspect" the six girls on the short leet for the title of "Charities Queen." Indeed, the same year Aien published a photograph of two female students with the caption: "Cuties collect Charities in Dundee." But the social advance was inexorable, for later in 1963 St Andrews had a first female president of the SRC - which was probably quite a coup given that Cambridge was yet to allow women into its Union.
But old perceptions die hard. An Aien reporter wondered:
"Do we really want the extra women? If they hadn't been accepted the male community would undoubtedly be richer . Few women pretend that they don't make a profit out of the men during their University careers. In terms of coffees, admission to cinemas and hops, the savings are considerable."
One assumes the sexes enjoyed greater and growing equality from the end of the sixties on - not only legally, but also in terms of the general perception, although porn-star Fiona Richmond's topless appearance in Annasach during her 1977 Dundee University rectorial campaign was something of a glitch.
It took over eighty years then for female students to be perceived in an equal way to male students. Now that we are in the post-feminist, Ally McBeal 1990s this difficulty in coping with the concept of the woman student is a curiosity which belongs in the archives, a historical but not a present reality.
I am reliably informed by some female students of today that gender is no longer an issue in academic life. Until graduation, that is.
