Emily Davies

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Emily Davies, oil painting by Rudolph Lehmann, 1880
Blue plaque, 1978 from the Greater London Council at 17 Cunningham Place, St. John's Wood, London NW8 8JT, City of Westminster
Emily Davies' home in London
Cambridge. Girton College, main entrance, 1869
Frances Balfour, Millicent Fawcett, Ethel Snowden, Emily Davies and Sophie Bryant stand together at an election demonstration

Sarah Emily Davies (born April 22, 1830 in Southampton , United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland , † July 13, 1921 in Hampstead (London) , United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland) was an English feminist and activist . She co-founded Girton College at the University of Cambridge , which was the first university in England to educate women.

life and work

Davies was the fourth child and second daughter of evangelical minister and teacher John D. Davies and his wife Mary Hopkinson. She and her older sister Jane, unlike their brothers, received no schooling because they were expected to be content with household chores and work in their father's parish. She cared for two of her siblings who were suffering from tuberculosis , her sister Jane and her younger brother Henry in Algiers . There she met Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon , who was her first encounter with feminist ideas and with women's political campaigns.

The commitment to equal education began when a group of like-minded women met who decided to do something about the problems themselves and founded the Langham Place group . The group got its name from the office of the English Woman's Journal, which was launched in 1858 and founded in 1859 at Langham Place, London . In 1859 these women, including Davies, founded the Society for the Promotion of the Employment of Women (SPEW). Davies worked for their cause for a while in Gateshead , where she lived with her parents. In Gateshead, between 1860 and 1861, she established a branch of SPEW in Northumberland and Durham . A Newcastle newspaper published articles advocating women's education and employment. After the death of her father, she and her mother moved to London in 1862. From then until her death, she was involved in campaigns to improve the status of middle class women in Britain. In 1862 her work "Medicine as a Profession for Women" was presented at the Congress of the Social Science Association. That same year, she won support for the efforts of Elizabeth Garrett and her father to enable women to graduate from London University . She wrote for the English Woman's Journal between 1862 and 1864 and served as its editor in 1863. She was also the founder of Victoria Magazine.

Commitment to the higher education of women

Together with Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, Barbara Bodichon, Dorothea Beale and Frances Buss , she became a founding member of the Kensington Society Discussion Board for Women. It was through this group that she first worked for women's suffrage and helped attract nearly 1,500 women to sign a petition that John Stuart Mill presented to the House of Commons on June 7, 1866. In the same year, at a meeting in her house, she founded the London Schoolmistresses Association, of which she was its secretary until it was dissolved in 1888. Early members included Frances Buss, Jane Chessar, Charlotte Manning, and Millicent Garrett Fawcett . At a meeting of school principals in Manchester in 1866, she concluded that there was a strong demand for a college for women. Converting Queen's College, London into an institution for preparing women over eighteen for graduation seemed the most readily available option. When that was impossible, she formed an executive committee, which met for the first time on December 5, 1867, to raise £ 30,000 to build a college for women in Cambridge. She founded Girton College in 1869 with the help of Barbara Bodichon and Lady Stanley of Alderley and with the support of Frances Buss, Dorothea Beale. Davies was the mistress of Girton College from 1873 to 1875 and strongly advocated a curriculum consistent with that of male students. In 1877, Caroline Croom Robertson joined the management team as secretary to relieve Davies. It was not until 1940 that the college gave women full degrees from the University of Cambridge, and in 1948 women became full members of the University of Cambridge.

Davies advocated women's rights to education, degrees and teaching qualifications. She served on the London School Board and the Schools Inquiry Commission and was instrumental in getting girls admitted to official secondary school exams. She continued to advocate the admission of women to the Universities of London, Oxford and Cambridge, which, like all universities at the time, admitted only men. Davies had been elected to public office in the first election under the Education Act of 1870 as a member of the London school board that represented Greenwich. She did not run for re-election in 1873 and instead focused on Girton College.

Work for women's suffrage

After she had given up her official position at Girton College in 1904, she returned to active suffrage work and became secretary of the National Society for Women's Suffrage in London , whose committee she joined in 1889. She played an active role in the National Union of Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), but was completely against the militant tactics of the suffragettes. On May 19, 1906, she headed a franchise for Henry Campbell-Bannerman . She did not support the idea that all adults should vote and resigned in 1912 when the organization decided to support the Labor Party. She joined the much smaller Conservative and Unionists Women's Franchise Society and became one of its vice presidents.

The death of Elizabeth Garrett Anderson in 1917 left Davies as the only surviving member of the original Langham Place group. In 1918 women over 30 were given the right to vote if they were on the electoral register of the local government or married to men who were. Davies was able to vote for the first time. Finally, in 1928, women were allowed to vote on the same basis as men, but they were still not allowed to get their college degrees from Cambridge University.

Honors

In 1901 Davies received an honorary doctorate in law (DLL) from the University of Glasgow. On June 30, 2019, at Girton College, Cambridge , a blue plaque in memory of founders Emily Davies and Barbara Bodichon was unveiled by Baroness Hale , President of the Supreme Court and a graduate of Girton College, as part of the college's 150th anniversary celebrations .

literature

  • Sarah Emily Davies: The Higher Education of Women 1866. Adamant Media Corporation, 2006, ISBN 978-0-543-98292-6
  • Daphne Bennett: Emily Davies and the Liberation of Women (André Deutsch, 1990) ISBN 978-0-233-98494-0
  • Ann B. Murphy, Deirdre Raftery: Emily Davies: Collected Letters, 1861-1875 (University of Virginia Press, 2003) ISBN 978-0-8139-2232-4
  • Barbara Nightingale Stephen: Emily Davies and Girton College. Hyperion, 1976, ISBN 978-0-88355-282-7
  • Margaret Forster: Significant Sisters. Secker and Warburg, 1984, ISBN 978-0-14-008172-5
  • Val. Campion: Pioneering Women. Hitchin Historical Society, 2008, ISBN 978-0-9552411-3-0
  • Gillian Sutherland: Emily Davies, the Sidgwicks and the education of women in Cambridge. Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp. 34-47

Publications (selection)

  • 1866: The Higher Education of Women. Andesite Press, 2015, ISBN 978-1296579371 .
  • Secondary Instruction for Girls. 1866.
  • Thoughts on Some Questions Relating to Women: 1860 1908. Ams Pr Inc; Reprint Edition, 1973, ISBN 978-0404567415 .

Web links

Commons : Emily Davies  - Collection of Pictures, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ The Langham Place group | First 100 Years. Retrieved January 22, 2021 .
  2. ↑ Langham Place group (act. 1857-1866). Accessed January 22, 2021 .
  3. ↑ Langham Place group (act. 1857-1866). Accessed January 22, 2021 .
  4. ↑ Emily Davies. Accessed January 22, 2021 .
  5. ↑ Cambridge college unveils blue plaque for 'pioneering' women founders . In: BBC News . July 1, 2019 ( bbc.com [accessed January 22, 2021]).
  6. ↑ On the education of the female sex for commercial activity. In:  Die Debatte , June 6, 1866, p. 1 (online at ANNO ).Template: ANNO / Maintenance / ddb
personal data
SURNAME Davies, Emily
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Davies, Sarah Emily
SHORT DESCRIPTION English activist
DATE OF BIRTH April 22, 1830
PLACE OF BIRTH Southampton , United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland
DATE OF DEATH July 13, 1921
PLACE OF DEATH Hampstead (London) , United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland