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Although my generation of girls was told “Science is for the boys,” and “What’s the point of going to university – you’ll get married and that will be the end of it!” we did, nevertheless, assume that a girl had as much right to a place in university as a boy.

Jane Robinson’s ‘Bluestockings‘ moves back only one or two generations and the picture is totally different. With detailed research and a wealth of anecdotes, she traces the story of women’s education from the 1860s to the 1930s.

Astonishing facts emerge. We are all aware that Cambridge was the last university in the UK to award women the degrees they had earned – that took place as late as 1948 – but I didn’t know that Cambridge men created an effigy of a cycling female mannequin that was subsequently torn to pieces and poked through the railings of the fledgling Newnham College.

The resistance was based on a deeply embedded belief that women were inferior to men, “Inferior to us God made you: and our inferiors to the end of time you will remain …” and that education would atrophy the womb, render women sterile and unfit to perform their ‘wifely duties’.

This carefully researched and well illustrated text is amusing and informative – a fine document of social history.

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