Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Anyone who thinks that educational management is a matter of dull necessity would benefit from reading this study in which Samuel Rutherford concludes that ‘some of the most pivotal moments in the history of sexuality in twentieth-century Britain were entwined with the history of university administration’ (222). Some useful background is provided on the institutional histories of the so-called ‘ancient’ universities and the period of expansion in the nineteenth century after the founding of the University of London. The main focus of this book is on the network of new civic campuses that appeared as a result of local philanthropy, state encouragement and envy of German technical education. Such innovation was needed, it was thought, in order to produce a more efficient and competitive nation and empire. Associations for Promoting the Higher Education of Women sprang up in cities and operated, for a while, almost in parallel with the fledgling universities. Rapid integration of women by 1910 (see table 0.1) into these latter institutions was, according to Rutherford, incidental to their development, and it is interesting to observe that this seems to have evoked relatively little opposition. A parallel trajectory in educational development derived from the idea that women needed not only an education for married life or careers but also an expanded separate sphere outside the patriarchy. This produced a variety of women's colleges which, with very few exceptions, were later absorbed into the integrated university system (a process largely completed in Scotland during the interwar period but delayed until the late 1970s and early 1980s at Oxford and Cambridge). In the process, notions that women required a curriculum specific to their needs, focused perhaps on Domestic Science, were largely set aside. Co-educational civic universities rapidly became the norm for higher education in Britain. That left the gender-segregated Universities of Oxford and Cambridge as—admittedly prestigious—anomalies. Students there, well into the twentieth century, remained subject to institutional barriers to mixing between the sexes, which had essentially fallen away elsewhere by the First World War. These changes played a vital role in the ‘rise of heterosexuality’ in Britain, understood not as a medicalised phenomenon but as a new, if not precisely radical, system of social regulation. In the process, ‘a homosocial masculinity in which women's role was to serve as a detached and disembodied check on men's morals’ was replaced by one that ‘delighted in direct social and physical contact between men and women’, brought about through such pursuits as going out dancing (106). The effect of this was to reinforce the gender binary. Rutherford does not focus on such issues as the sexual abuse of women by male students, but he does explore various violently masculine public excesses that took place during student ‘rags’. These were given impetus by ex-soldiers coming back to university after the First World War. Rutherford provides a graphic account of the annual tradition at Liverpool of burning ‘Sister Jane’. This had ‘much in common’ (131) with fascist mob events, yet, as is made clear, few students joined Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists. More might have been said, in relation to such incidents, about sectarian religious prejudice in the city. Overall, this section of the book could have been developed further through consideration of other ways in which to understand rag behaviour as an aspect of anarchic youth culture or in relation to the anti-authoritarian carnivalesque. Oxford allowed women to take degrees in 1920, while it took another world war for Cambridge to follow suit, perhaps because of the supposed masculinity of science in which the latter institution prided itself. Life for the woman academic who wanted a same-sex community in these decades was challenging. A high point of this book is the engaging and moving account of the social reformer and college leader Margery Fry, who ‘struggled to conceptualize her own non-normative life trajectory outside of the paradigm of heterosexuality’ (19). Queer men seem to have had it slightly easier because they could fall back on traditional misogyny as a justification for failure to heterosexually integrate with women. This led to some grotesque situations, such as the bizarre attempt by the donor Edward Perry Warren to reimagine Corpus Christi College, Oxford, not only as a bastion of Greek culture but one as free from women as Mount Athos. A tunnel would ensure that scholars need not walk on the integrated public road. Other academics, however, such as G. L. Dickinson, historian and political scientist at King's College, Cambridge, were complex and thoughtful figures. Lytton Strachey also makes a brief appearance, and he was hardly a masculinist conservative. The book concludes by briefly bringing the story up to the present day and by making, in the process, the important assertion that homosexuality and heterosexuality can each be seen as an ‘unsatisfactory norm that crowded out other possibilities’ (194). Like all intriguing studies, the reader is left with further questions. What precisely was there before heterosexuality/homosexuality? Loves that dared not speak their names, or were just lacking labels? Was integration incidental because late Victorian gender prejudice was less significant than we might have expected? The suggestion that, before the First World War, ‘open misogyny was rare’ (97) might benefit from further exploration of the forms misogyny could take. Queer and trans avenues for analysis do appear relatively briefly, such as in an intriguing reference to a transmasculine community constructed through male impersonation in women's college drama. Female impersonation is largely read as a conservative formation, but could it, too, have had within it possibilities for queer and transfeminine identification? It would also be good to hear more from the viewpoint of students and to think further about learning gender as well as teaching it. Rutherford has thus produced a well-written study that highlights a range of avenues for further research as well as directing attention to youth as innovators in gender and sexuality.
Source: Gender & History
Author: Dominic Janes
Institution: Keele University
Language: English
Subfield: Gender Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W7124994131
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