Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 (72 page)

Throughout 1920 I spent many agreeable evenings at the Blackwells’ house in North Oxford; even for this innocent amusement I had elaborately to obtain permission, stating exactly where I was going and undertaking to return at a specified hour. Early in the summer, Basil Blackwell asked me if I would act as one of the three editors of his annual publication,
Oxford Poetry
; the 1920 edition would be, he thought, unusually interesting, for it would represent the literary gleanings of no less than seven years. I agreed to interrupt still further my tattered and torn work for the History School by this singularly congenial task, and was shortly afterwards invited to one of the Blackwells’ literary ‘socials’ to meet my co-editors, the fair and immaculate C. H. B. Kitchin, of Exeter College, and the swarthy Alan Porter, of Queen’s.

Throughout that summer term and vacation, the three of us ploughed through oceans of MSS., enthusiastically submitted to us by literary aspirants of all ages from eighteen to twenty-eight. We also laboured, not unnaturally, to produce some contributions of our own which we felt that we could justifiably include in the volume. C. H. B. Kitchin’s poems were long and persevering, while those submitted to his own inspection by Alan Porter - for whom Clifford Kitchin and myself, especially myself, were so much bird-seed - ran to nudity and prostitution. The chief merit of my own disillusioned productions lay in their brevity.

Eventually the selections were made and the book was ready for publication; at the beginning of the Michaelmas term the
Oxford Chronicle
reported a remark by Basil Blackwell to the effect that it would be ‘the best single volume I have turned out’. ‘
Oxford Poetry
, 1920,’ continued the reporter, ‘will be a notable little volume. Mr Alan Porter (Queen’s), Mr Louis Golding (Queen’s), Mr Robert Graves (St John’s), Mr Edmund Blunden (Queen’s), Mr L. A. G. Strong (Wadham), Mr C. H. B. Kitchin (Exeter), Mr Edgell Rickword (Pembroke), Mr L. P. Hartley (Balliol), Miss Vera M. Brittain (Somerville), and Mr Eric Dickinson (Exeter) are among the contributors . . .’

In view of the reputation now attached to some of these names, Mr Blackwell’s estimate of the book’s value may perhaps be regarded as justified and our editorial selections as endorsed, particularly as they also included poems by Roy Campbell, Richard Hughes, Winifred Holtby, W. Force Stead and Hilda Reid. Viola Garvin, who was then in her third year at Somerville, dreamily impressive with her dark loveliness like that of some mediæval saint, did not send us an example of her sensitive poetry; to her, who had known from childhood the finest writers and journalists of the day, our earnest activities must have seemed amateurish and irrelevant.

Nevertheless, young literary Oxford was beginning to make itself felt in the wider world; in the winter of 1920 the eternal controversy eddying round the
Autobiography
of Margot Asquith sometimes gave way to a discussion of Louis Golding’s first novel,
Forward from Babylon
, while the youthful Beverley Nichols was said to have his second novel,
Patchwork
, ready for publication in the autumn. Like Winifred Holtby, I had already begun to make notes for my own first novel, but in the winter of 1920-21, I contented myself with writing a short story, ‘All Souls’ Day’, for the
Oxford Outlook
. The fiercest polemic that I ever contributed to that shining organ of undergraduate opinion had already appeared in the late autumn of 1919 under the title of ‘The Degree and
The Times
’.

9

The fight for Degrees for Women at Oxford had always been closely connected with the feminist movement as a whole, and in 1919 it shared in the impetus given everywhere to the women’s cause by the ending of the War. Except for Lord Curzon, Lord Birkenhead and Mrs Humphry Ward, no anti-feminists of any importance appeared to be left in the country, and on July 22nd, 1919, while a regular chorus of praise of women’s war-work was accompanying their gradual replacement by men in every type of occupation, the House of Commons passed the Second Reading of the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Bill, with its comprehensive opening words: ‘A person shall not be disqualified by sex or marriage from the exercise of any public function, or from being appointed to or holding any civil or judicial office or post, or from entering or assuming or carrying on any civil profession or vocation.’

This Act, which became law on December 23rd, 1919, also stated in its ‘permissive’ Clause III that nothing in the statutes or charter of any university should be deemed to preclude the authorities of such university from admitting women to its membership, and at Oxford the advocates of Degrees for Women acted upon this clause so promptly that by November 27th of that year, the day before Lady Astor was first returned as Member of Parliament for the Sutton Division of Plymouth, I was able to write to my mother: ‘The statute for Degrees for Women has just been published; in it they give us absolutely everything we ask for and it will be discussed at the beginning of next term. If they pass it - and everyone seems to think they will - it will come into force on October 9th next year, which means that when I do my Finals I shall also get my Degree and you will see me going about in a mortar-board and gown . . . before I go down.’

To a
Times
leader-writer, however, the publication of the statute merely suggested that women at Oxford were seeking an extension of their ‘present advantages’ without corresponding obligations, and if admitted to full membership of the university, must undergo ‘stricter discipline than is at present in force’. Raging with partisan fury, I took up my pen; the
Oxford Outlook
, I had heard, was now occasionally read by persons of discrimination in London, and whether this was so or not, it certainly represented the only medium in which I was likely to be given the chance to express my indignation. My article, ‘The Degree and
The Times
’, disputed with meticulous fierceness the major premisses of the solemn leader:

‘We would ask for a more exact definition of that “stricter discipline” to which
The Times
writer refers. We should like to know from what rules and regulations, written or unwritten, we are supposed to be so conspicuously exempt. Is it generally presumed outside the precincts of this university that, whereas undergraduates are induced by the vigilance of authority to enter their college gates at a reasonable hour of the night, the women students are free to wander whithersoever they will from darkness to dawn? Do our critics really think so ill of us as to imagine that we always arrive late, or not at all, at the lectures we are not officially entitled to attend? Or are we pictured as Mænads dancing before the Martyr’s Memorial, or as Bacchantes revelling in the open spaces of Carfax and the High? If such notions as these really do exist abroad, we can but protest that we are law-abiding citizens, keeping the rule of those whose work we share in full and whose privileges we enjoy in part, perhaps more religiously than those for whom it was first made.’

But the university and
The Times
alike proceeded majestically along their dignified paths, completely unaffected for good or for ill by the explosive ebullitions of feminine wrath. In the Hilary term, when Congregation was to discuss the proposed new statute, Winifred and I slipped into the Divinity School at the tail of a group of Somerville dons; we were evidently regarded by the ushers as belonging to them, for no one challenged our occupation of the limited space available to non-disputants. Almost the only women students present, we listened, our hearts surging warm with hero-worship, to Professor Geldart and young Dr Moberly - who had come back from the War with a D.S.O. and two mentions in dispatches - putting in their plea for the women, and realised from the small opposition encountered by their speeches that the battle was almost won. The statute was actually passed on May 11th, 1920; before it came into force on October 7th, the universal tide then flowing so strongly towards feminism throughout the world had swung woman suffrage into the American Constitution.

That Michaelmas term saw both the largest number of undergraduates ever known in Oxford - there were 4,181 men and 549 women - and the greatest change that had taken place in the constitution of the university. One of the first duties of Dr Farnell, the Rector of Exeter, who began that term his adventurous Vice-Chancellorship, was the matriculation of nearly a thousand women. Winifred and I were among the number, together with several headmistresses, whose hair had grown grey in the process of training generations of girls to educate and work for their still handicapped sex.

‘One is a little puzzled,’ the
Oxford Chronicle
remarked complacently, ‘to know why what Oxford did with such graceful unanimity is still a matter for hesitation and controversy at Cambridge. ’ Nevertheless I felt afraid - not, as time has proved, without justification - that the university might feel too proud of itself, too sure that it had done everything which could be done to put women undergraduates on an equal footing with men; ‘if freedom at Oxford broadens down from precedent to precedent a little less slowly than at Cambridge, this is the utmost that can be said for it,’ I protested, in a
Chronicle
article advocating (then very daringly) the amalgamation of the Women’s Dramatic Society with O.U.D.S.

On October 14th, I joined the crowds of young women in the Sheldonian Theatre to see the first Degree-giving in which women had taken part. It was a warm, scintillating autumn day, and the crimson hoods of the M.A.s rivalled the wine-red amphilopsis which hung with decorative dignity over walls and quadrangles. Within the Sheldonian, rows of eager childish faces looked down, awed and marvelling, upon the complicated ceremony in the arena below; the excited atmosphere was tense with the consciousness of a dream fulfilled which had first been dreamt, years before these feminine Masters and Bachelors were born, by women long dead - women who did not care whether they saw the end so long as they had contributed to the means. Everyone pretended to ignore this atmosphere - the men assumed an attitude of determined conviction that nothing special was happening, the women wore an expression of demure severity, as though Degrees were commonplace to them - but there was no gainsaying the nervous tension of the hour, and after much robing and unrobing and clicking of Press cameras, the harassed Vice-Chancellor, in dignified confusion, tapped one candidate on the head with his mortar-board instead of with the Testament.

Before the usual ceremony began, the five Principals of the women’s societies - now all vanished from the Oxford limelight - became M.A.s by order of Convocation, and the theatre vibrated with youthful applause as they put on their robes and sat down behind the Vice-Chancellor - a ceremony which the Principal of Somerville had practised with other Degree-taking Somervillians for nearly an hour the previous day. What a consummation of her life-work this was for her! I reflected, with a feeling of partisan warmth towards the intellectually arrogant college whose Principal, more than any other Oxford woman, had been responsible for the symbolic celebrations of that morning. Brought up in the nineteenth-century educational tradition, she was an academic Metternich of an older régime - but it was a Metternich that the War and post-war periods had required. Her task, during those complicated years, of reconciling college and university, don and student, man and woman, war-service and academic work, conscience and discretion, had been colossal in its demands upon tact and ingenuity, and probably no woman living would have done it so well. The wide gulf fixed during her period of authority between the Senior and Junior Common Rooms at Somerville had been largely of her own creation, as a means to an end; she herself for thirteen years had reigned above them both, a lonely Olympian, secure in the legend of her purpose, her omnipotence and her inhumanity. Who knew what Spartan ideal of justice, endurance and self-sacrifice had inspired the ruthless impartiality of that splendid isolation?

When the men, in turn, had received their Degrees, renewed cheers echoed wildly to the vaulted roof as the first women stood before the Vice-Chancellor; among them were Dr Ivy Williams, Dorothy L. Sayers, and D. K. Broster, once at St Hilda’s. Even the unchanging passivity of Oxford beneath the hand of the centuries must surely, I thought, be a little stirred by the sight of the women’s gowns and caps - those soft, black pseudo-mortar-boards with their deplorable habit of slipping over one eye - which were nevertheless the visible signs of a profound revolution.

For the rest of the term, at any rate, the male undergraduates were very much stirred indeed. ‘I realised with a pang,’ wrote one typical humorist in an Oxford journal after describing the ‘strange vision’ of a woman in cap and gown descending from a bicycle, ‘that I was in the presence of my equal, and Schools assumed a new terror for me. The woman undergraduate stood revealed. Two senile, placid dons passed me. “
Monstrum horrendum informe
,” I heard one murmur. I wonder how the charming ladies will enjoy their new status . . . Shall we behold them in white ties when the last dread moment comes?’

And so on. Quite soon, we all got used to it and didn’t read it, but the men - no doubt hopefully supposing that we did - still continued to write it.

10

By November the excitement of these triumphs was dying down, and I read - with a feeling that by going back to Oxford I had strayed away from the life that really mattered into a world of small things - about the burial in Westminster Abbey on the third Armistice Day of the Unknown Warrior who might so well have been Geoffrey, and the opening of the first League of Nations Assembly by M. Hymans on November 15th, while Convocation was discursively making up its mind to establish, a fortnight later, the new School of ‘Modern Greats’. But when, in December, Olive Schreiner died in Capetown, early memories of
Woman and Labour
and
The Story of an African Farm
put the women’s movement back into perspective in my mind, and my feminist enthusiasm had completely revived by the time that Queen Mary came up to Oxford to receive the Honorary Degree of D.C.L., and to visit Somerville and Lady Margaret Hall.