The History Woman

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Professor Pat Thane has just been awarded a Leverhulme Trust Scholarship of over £60,000 to continue her research into the history of women's University experiences.

In "the most ambitious collective history of educated women so far" Pat's research has led her into conversation with hundreds of women who have graduated from Girton College every decade this century since 1920. This study gives an invaluable insight into women's ambitions, the way these ambitions have measured up to their experience, and the way that women's lives have changed over the last eighty years.

Pat's research shows, ironically, that the 60s generation respondents - who had the most chances and the highest expectations - were the most unhappy and the least fulfilled. The earliest generations seemed to feel that they were especially privileged to have gone to University at all, and for many of them a straight choice between marriage and career was something that they didn't question. Only 54% of women from Girton, compared to 89% of the population as a whole, married in the first three decades of this century.

Even so, the choice not to marry usually led them straight into the one career path available - teaching. Although a few women became doctors, over fifty percent of the earliest graduates went into teaching, and the number remained at over one third even into the 1970s. However, the limited choice between marriage or a career in teaching didn't prevent many of these women from feeling privileged in comparison to generations before them.

Similarly, women from around the period of World War II felt deeply privileged - many of them "felt that the war had been an immensely liberating experience," says Pat, "giving them more opportunities than they would ever have had otherwise." Although these women acknowledged that they had suffered discrimination, "they just didn't want to bang their heads against a brick wall for the rest of their lives. They made the choice to make the best of what they've got."

Many of these women felt that they were more fortunate both than the generations before them and the generations after them - although suffering perhaps more discrimination, their expectations were not so high, and many of them perceived this to be positive - "they feel that younger generations are under so much more pressure." In contrast, the post-60s women were "much less likely to be blase about discrimination. They were more unhappy - more of them were divorced, many of them had failed to achieve career ambitions. They were more likely to have had aspirations which were very difficult for them to fulfil."

The study shows that women's lives and expectations have changed hugely over this century, and as Pat says, "what is notable is that men haven't changed - they haven't yet accepted that they ought to relax their careers a bit and take on more of a household role. In general, the changes in women's lives have been dramatic, in a very short space of time, and the changes in men's lives have been minimal."

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Friday 13th November 1998

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