In this blog, Tanya Fitzgerald explores the history of women’s access to higher education in Aotearoa New Zealand across the end of the nineteenth century.
In July 1877 amidst much fanfare witnessed by approximately 1,000 invited guests, Kate Milligan Edger graduated with a Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree from the University of New Zealand. The first female graduate in New Zealand, Kate had obtained a mathematics scholarship to support her studies and had completed her degree in minimum time. Four years later, Helen Connon, the first woman student to attend Canterbury University College graduated with a Master of Arts (MA) degree, became the first woman in the British Empire to receive an Honours degree.
From the outset, attendance at lectures and eligibility for examination was, for women students, a matter of right rather than privilege. There were no regulations in place to formally exclude women students from higher education. It may well have been the case that university administrators, many of whom had been recruited from Britain and North America did not conceive of the possibility that young women of the colony would want or desire access to higher education. Thus, any attempt to exclude women would have required a legislative change.
What was unclear however, was whether women could be admitted to the same subjects and degrees as male students. Across the four constituent colleges (Otago, Canterbury, Auckland, and Victoria University College of Wellington), there were seldom more than a handful of women students in any one lecture hall and women rarely occupied the library or walked the campus paths alone. G.M. O’Rourke (Speaker, House of Representatives) pointed to the potential ‘dangers’ women students faced:
I think the timetable …should be adapted to the attendance of women; and I consider night hours, or any hour after dusk, quite unsuitable for any woman in this country. There is no protection afforded by the police at this end of town, and females walking out at night alone are liable to insult. Indecent exposure of the person has not been uncommon here of late, and there have been several convictions for that offence, which has in most cases been committed during or after the hours of twilight.
Furthermore, social conventions dictated the subjects and degrees that could be studied, and women’s presence on campus was subject to intense public scrutiny. Yet despite this inhospitable climate, the university could not afford to deny access to women students in periods where there was a marked absence of male students. During the economic slumps of the late nineteenth century and Word War I, fees paid by women students were critical to the university’s financial survival. This did not however, persuade university administrators to open up the subjects and degrees available to women students.
Concerns remained about the dangers of women sharing classes with men and the importance of an appropriate education for young women. Indeed, a comment by John Macmillan Brown, Chancellor of the University of New Zealand and a vocal supporter of women’s higher education that a “university education is the best for the noblest of all professions, the maternal, then let us have an advanced type of education that will fit them for that profession” foreshadowed a focus on Home Science as an appropriate form of higher education for women.
Accordingly, the establishment of a Department of Home Science at the University of Otago in 1911 presented university administrators with a seamless opportunity to physically and intellectually separate women and men students. Although male students were neither excluded from this subject nor the range of undergraduate and postgraduate degrees offered in Home Science, nonetheless this highly feminised field was almost exclusively occupied by women students and staff.
Thus, while on the one hand women competing with men for admission was considered a potential ‘problem’ for university administrators, on the other, women competing with one another for limited positions was not deemed to be especially problematic.
From the outset, the intention of university administrators was not to offer women students an academic subject or qualification, but rather to emphasise, through manual training, that domestic work was the sole preserve and their ‘natural’ occupation. The educational blueprint, as historian Melanie Nolan outlines, was to confirm women’s place in the home or the centrality of their role as teachers (of students and those training to be teachers) of this domestic knowledge. The preservation of women’s domestic and moral responsibilities relied, therefore, on women’s promotion of this powerful ideology; an ideology that was marked by gender and class boundaries.
Home Science provided the vehicle for the promotion of a vocational education that secured a level of commitment to home and family and at the same time offered a level of reassurance to the wider public that underpinning gendered ideologies would remain. Home Science, as a subject, department and area of work was, rather, a matter of privilege, rather than right. The majority of students were the daughters of professional men (lawyers, bankers, clergy, doctors). These middle class girls were encouraged to study for a diploma or degree and trained to manage their households.
This study and training would have further prepared these young women to have a degree of independence in their own homes, make use of their leisure time, and capable of managing the domestic labour of their servants. Girls from working class backgrounds were offered a certificate course in Home Science and were exposed to the new technologies of the home (new machines for washing, cleaning and ironing to reduce time and increase efficiency).
A further possibility for this gendered and classed education was that the ‘true’ vocation for a woman graduate was to marry a male graduate and provide for him the ‘ideal’ family home based on her education and training that reinforced the values of the middle class home. In other words, Home Science offered an education by right based on privilege.
At a surface level, the term ‘Home Science’ underscored the emphasis and importance of an appropriate education for women students. For students and staff in the department, however, Home Science was an academic and scientific subject. Obtaining a degree in Home Science created the possibility that graduates could teach Science in schools, pursue employment opportunities as scientists, professionalise their work and take up further postgraduate study in subjects such as public health, chemistry and biology.
Catherine Landreth, for example, graduated with a Bachelor of Home Science in 1920, and completed a Master of Science at Iowa State College and then a PhD at the University of California, Berkeley. Across her 40-year career she won a number of prestigious awards, grants and fellowships. Similarly, Neige Todhunter graduated with a Master of Science in 1925, was employed as a research scientist in New Zealand, and then pursued doctoral studies at Colombia University in 1933.
Women students and women staff at the University of New Zealand trod an unknown path and ventured into a world in which they encountered privilege, resistance, moral outrage and unwelcome hostility. There is much more to this story to be told of both women students and women academics.
Dr Tanya Fitzgerald is an historian of women’s higher education who lives and works on Whadjuk Noongar boodja. One current research project is a history of women’s transnational networks, connections, and intimate friendships.
Tanya’s research has been funded by the Spencer Foundation (US), Australian Research Council, Royal Society (NZ), and the Economic and Social Research Council (England).
With Judith Harford (University College Dublin), Tanya is co-editor of a forthcoming issue of Women’s History Review.
Copyright remains with individual authors who grant VIDA holding a perpetual, world-wide, royalty free and non-exclusive license to use, distribute, reproduce and promote content. For permission to re-publish any VIDA blog post, in whole or in part, please contact the managing editors at auswhn@gmail.com.au