A Short History of Newnham College, Cambridge. Alice Gardner

      Published by Good Press, 2019

       [email protected]

      EAN 4064066119089

Table of Contents

       PREFACE

       CHAPTER I INTRODUCTORY. NEWNHAM COLLEGE IN IDEA

       CHAPTER II NEWNHAM COLLEGE IN ADOLESCENCE

       CHAPTER III NEWNHAM COLLEGE IN PROGRESS

       CHAPTER IV NEWNHAM COLLEGE IN PROGRESS, 1892-1911—PRINCIPALSHIP OF MRS. SIDGWICK.

       CHAPTER V PROGRESS, 1900-1914

       EPILOGUE 1914 AND AFTER

       INDEX

PREFACE

       Table of Contents

      This little book is primarily intended for present and past students of Newnham College and for the numerous friends who have been helpers or sympathetic spectators of its early progress. At the same time I venture to hope that it may prove interesting and suggestive to a wider circle of persons practically or theoretically concerned in movements for the higher education of women.

      Of the deficiencies of this short history, no one could be more fully aware than the writer herself. But for the expressed wish of the Council of Newnham College, it would never have been attempted, nor could it have been written at all without the kind co-operation of friends, who, like myself, had known the College from the inside. I would especially thank the present Principal, Miss B. A. Clough, and the Registrar, Miss E. M. Sharpley, for supplying me with information and with kindly criticisms throughout my task. It has been gratifying to realize that the Publisher is son of an early friend of the College.

      One of the chief difficulties in writing the history of a comparatively young institution, and one raised by the labours, forethought, and sacrifices of many "pious founders and benefactors" is that the range of view possible to any former student and teacher must necessarily be limited. I have felt deep regret in realizing how many honoured helpers have—for lack of space—not even been mentioned. Similarly, among the former students whose labours, scientific, literary, and practical, have brought credit to the College, I have necessarily shown most appreciation of those with whose work and influence I have been personally best acquainted. Every past student will have to supplement the story with recollections from her own experience.

      I trust that, at least, I shall have brought home to many the conviction that Newnham College is unique, in the character and motives of its first founders, in the steady devotion to its best interests of successive governors, teachers and students, as also in its relations—complicated, but near, we may hope, to a solution—with the University under the protecting shadow of which it has grown to prosperity. My hope for this little work is that, besides helping to justify the existence of the College in the eyes of the world, it may in some measure preserve in its members the knowledge of our best traditions in the past and inspire a confident hope for the future.

      ALICE GARDNER.

      Bristol, April, 1921.

CHAPTER I

       INTRODUCTORY. NEWNHAM COLLEGE IN IDEA

       Table of Contents

      In tracing the history of educational institutions and of other foundations existing for the public good, we find it necessary to distinguish those that had and those that had not a definite beginning. Some of our colleges and great schools have—so to speak—sprung, adult and armed, from the brain of their founder—or possibly from the conjoint thoughts and efforts of a few generous and like-minded patrons. Their birthdays are easily determined. Their continuity can be traced both in material persistence and progress and in moral and intellectual development and adaptation to changing conditions. Others—and prominent among them the subject of this sketch—came into being so gradually that their length of days may be variously calculated. To the past students of Newnham College, the beginning seems to be most naturally and fittingly associated with the day when a comparatively small dwelling house was first opened, in Cambridge, by Professor Sidgwick and a small group of friends, and placed under the wise and devoted care of Miss Clough, for the accommodation of a few young women who wished to give their time to serious study under the tuition of such University professors, lecturers, and private teachers as might be willing to further their desire for higher education. Incorporation as a College was not to come for nine years, nor any measure of distinct recognition by the University for ten years. But no Newnham woman would reckon our beginnings from 1880 or 1881. An antiquarian spirit might fancy that the germs were in the room in Mr. Clay's garden, where lectures were first delivered to women students and others. But student life and university instruction had for us its first embodiment in the little community of five, and their teachers and helpers, whose relations with Cambridge began in 1871.

      This settlement of Miss Clough and the five students was the small beginning out of which grew an institution which many hundreds of women now regard with passionate loyalty, and which no opponents or doubters can venture to despise. To understand its origin we need to go back a little and consider how and why the movement towards higher education for women was then beginning to take form, and why it came to be specially associated with Cambridge.