Steamboat ladies

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A group of Steamboat ladies in front of Trinity College , Dublin (1904/06)

Steamboat Ladies were called students of the women's colleges of the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge , who obtained the ad-eundem degree from Trinity College Dublin between 1904 and 1907 . At the time, their own universities refused to give women degrees. The term referred to the fact that women usually with a Steamboat ( Steamboat translated) from England to Dublin.

history

From 1869 Trinity College offered exams for women, but they only received a certificate and no academic degree. In 1892 a petition, signed by over 10,000 Irish women, was presented to the college's board of directors calling for women to be admitted; three years later the request was rejected, despite the advocacy of a delegation of men. The expressed fear was that the presence of young women at the university could pose a threat to moral and social life. In the following decade, however, the opinion of the board changed: The aging provost George Salmon , who had spoken out strongly against the admission of women ("Only through my corpse do women come to this university"), lost influence, on the other hand, younger men had a say who advocated the study of women. In 1904 the new Provost Anthony Traill announced the admission of the first female students to study art and medicine. However, women were still denied engineering studies until 1920.

In June 1904, at the request of an Irish student from Belfast who had attended Girton College , Cambridge, the Senate of Dublin University passed a decree granting female students the privilege ad eundem ('mutual recognition'), according to which the three universities Oxford, Cambridge and Dublin recognized each other's degrees - a practice that had been in place for male students for decades. This meant that female students who had successfully passed their university exams at one of the women's colleges in Oxford or Cambridge could apply for a Bachelor's or Master's degree in Dublin. At English universities women had been admitted to the courses and exams since the 1880s, but without granting them degrees, since it was felt that as women they would not need such degrees anyway.

The first six Steamboat ladies to collect their diplomas in Dublin were greeted with hoots and boos from the male students there. It is likely that Trinity College initially assumed that the ad eundum rule would only affect a small number of Irish female students who had attended Oxford or Cambridge. In fact, by 1907, around 720 mostly British women applied for graduation from Dublin College. They usually crossed from Holyhead by mail boat, a steamship, to Ireland, where they only stayed one night. The college was surprised but also embarrassed by the number of women.

The women were mostly undergraduates from Girton and Newnham Colleges in Cambridge and Somerville College in Oxford, and all of them had passed exams that would have earned them degrees had they been men. Many then made a reputation for themselves as outstanding scientists, such as the human geneticist Julia Bell .

The graduates had for obtaining the bachelor's degree, a fee of £ 10.3 s pay for the master 9.16s.6 £ p , plus an additional fee of 10 shillings. So at the beginning of £ 1500 came together, which is why the Irish Times suspected that the University of Dublin was purely financial. On the other hand, Provost Traill, in a reply in the same newspaper, denied that Trinity was "driven not by any dirty motives, but by a true spirit of liberality towards a class for which having a degree is essential".

In 1907 the agreement ended ad eundum, also because Dublin University feared that Irish students would prefer Oxford and Cambridge as study locations in order to have their degrees confirmed in Dublin. Most of the academic grade fee money paid by the Steamboat Ladies - ultimately a total of £ 16,000 - was used to purchase Trinity Hall , a non-university dormitory for female students that opened in 1908. It was not until 1920 that women were able to obtain an academic degree in Oxford, in Cambridge this was possible from 1921 and for a full degree only from 1948. The first woman to graduate from Cambridge was Queen Elizabeth , wife of King George VI. , which was awarded an honorary doctorate .

Steamboat Ladies (selection)

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k l Steamboat ladies (act. 1904–1907). In: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Accessed April 17, 2021 .
  2. ↑ a b c d e f Molly Furey: In 1904, the 'Steamboat Ladies' Kicked Off a Trinity Equality Battle. It's still going. In: universitytimes.ie. Retrieved April 18, 2021 .
  3. ↑ a b Girton Community. In: girton.cam.ac.uk. Accessed April 22, 2021 .
  4. ↑ Sabine Schuchart: Famous discoverers of diseases: Julia Bell, the argumentative, clever "Steamboat Lady" . In: Deutsches Ärzteblatt . tape 115 , no. 46 . Deutscher Ärzteverlag , 2018, p. [64] .
  5. ↑ United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on Foreign Relations: Congressional Serial Set. US Government Printing Office, 1910, p. 574 ( limited preview in Google Book Search).
  6. ^ Women at the University of Oxford: Revolutionaries in a Male-Dominated World. In: medium.com. March 24, 2017, accessed April 22, 2021 .
  7. ^ Stuart Roberts: The Rising Tide: Women at Cambridge. In: cam.ac.uk. October 14, 2019, accessed April 22, 2021 .
  8. ↑ Peter S. Harper: A Short History of Medical Genetics . Oxford University Press , 2008, ISBN 978-0-19-972013-2 ( google.com ).

literature