The Galton Lecture 1969: Women in academic life

Extract

I do not believe that I am the right person to give this Galton Lecture. I am not in the least a dyed-in-the-wool woman academic. To be that one has to have been man-and-boy in the job. Most of my colleagues at Oxford and sister colleagues at Cambridge could have given the lecture much better. Having written this introductory sentence, it was borne in on me that there were two separate breeds (I am not quite sure whether in this scientific milieu I should say species or genera) of academic women. At Oxford and Cambridge, at Durham, and up to recently in London, there has been the phenomenon (I cannot, in fact, think of any other classificatory term, for obviously one cannot use either breed or species or genera in the generally accepted sense about a single-sex organization) of associations of undiluted women academics, associations to be diluted by about 1972. In other universities, the female of the species is absorbed in the whole. Again, having reached this stage in my meditations, my sense of inadequacy in my present situation is slightly mitigated by the fact that I have at least had some experience of a community in which sex-differentiation was nominally not observed. Between my period as an Oxford undergraduate and my past 7 years as Principal of an Oxford women's college, I had 27 years at the University of London, though I must admit it was at an eccentric and utterly atypical institution.