This month to celebrate International Women’s History Month, Her Campus Aberdeen has teamed up with the Feminist Society, the Debating Society and the We’re Here equality campaign to organise a number of events, articles and awareness days. We’ve all come together with the common goal of celebrating the women of the world and the progress that has been made by these women throughout history. We also decided we wanted to celebrate not just the women who have MADE history but those who are actively MAKING history right now. So this article is the first of two, on the ladies that helped pave the way in the past for future history to be made.
As female students at University we perhaps rarely sit down and think of the opportunity we’ve been given to educate ourselves. It’s sadly become quite taken for granted that we’re at university and it is perhaps only in big moments such as our graduation that we take a look at the bigger picture and realise our own achievements. Additionally, as I personally go through my university life I’d happily say that I can’t remember feeling less equal than my male counterparts in terms of university and being a female student. I’ve always felt just as educated, just as important and just as valued with the same academic opportunities. But it hasn’t always been this way.
In an effort to discover the women in history who first tread the path of a female undergraduate student in the United Kingdom I delved into the history books and discovered the group of women largely remembered in history as “The Edinburgh Seven”. The Edinburgh Seven were made up of Sophie Jex-Blake, Isabel Thorne, Edith Pechey, Matilda Chaplin, Helen Evans, Mary Anderson and Emily Bovell. These ladies were the first group of matriculated undergraduate female students at any British University – a university which happens to be on our doorstep in Edinburgh. The path that led to their education however was not smooth.
Sophia Jex-Blake applied to study medicine at the University of Edinburgh in March 1869 but was rejected on the basis that the faculty believed she would have to be educated separately from the men and therefore it would be too onerous to provide the separate classes for one woman. Sophia then set out to recruit other women who wished to study to make it a viable concern for the university and successfully reapplied some months later with a group of women. However, their admission was not the end of the hurdles put in the women’s way. Despite four of the women coming in the top five in their class they were refused their rightful chance to apply for the Hope Scholarship on the basis of growing resentment towards them from some teaching staff in the faculty and the belief that awarding the scholarship to a woman could be seen as “provocation to the male students”. Therefore the scholarship was awarded to the lesser performing male students. One of the lecturer’s beliefs which he widely spread was that women should “become midwives, not doctors!” The male students followed suit and started to be offensive and insolent to the female students. This behaviour culminated in the Surgeons Hall Riot. On the way to their anatomy exam in 1870, the women’s way was blocked by a crowd of several hundred who pelted rubbish and mud at them as well as shouting abuse and insults at them. This was purely down to the fact they were women in a perceived ‘man’s world’. They were refused entrance to the exam and suffered the abuse of the crowd until a sympathetic student allowed them entry. Sadly in the end the women lost their battle to graduate as in 1873 the Court of Session supported the University’s right to refuse women degrees and now shockingly decided the women shouldn’t have been admitted in the first place.
Despite the women’s personal disappointment of not graduating from Edinburgh, these women successfully fought to bring national attention to their plight and this won them many supporters including Charles Darwin. They put the rights of women to a university education on the national political agenda which eventually resulted in legislation to ensure that women could study at university in 1877. Their lack of University degree also did not stop the determined women who all graduated as doctors eventually from a number of other institutions across the world. One knockback simply spurred them on to excell in their fields further. Their fight has recently been recognised by a plaque put up in their honour at the site of the Surgeon’s Hall Riot.
It is now strange to look back upon the plight of The Edinburgh Seven when in our own university only 140 years later, females make up more than 55% of the undergraduate population (2013/2014). In Edinburgh, the Edinburgh 7 would be proud to know that this total is even higher with women making up more than 59% of undergraduate students. These women started the conversation which has led to women being educated equally to men in the United Kingdom and it seems strange now that this wasn’t the case in the first place. So now when we’re moaning about having to go to lectures or tutorials we should really be thankful for the Edinburgh 7 and other women in history who have fought and lost to allow us to do something that quite simply there should never have been any question over.