Five decades after Cambridge colleges went co-ed, too little has changed

The writer is a former journalist and speechwriter for Unesco

Exactly 50 years ago, three previously all-male Cambridge colleges admitted a handful of female undergraduates, thus ending centuries of exclusion.

The university is poised to commemorate this landmark in gender equality and rightly so. Oxford colleges did not follow suit for another two years. (Both Yale and Princeton, by contrast, voted to formally accept female students in 1969). Expect celebratory accounts of barriers falling, glass ceilings broken, and history being made.

But, as one of that tiny group admitted to male domains back in 1972, I am struck by the extraordinarily dogged resistance to change at both universities. While women now account for half the student intake, and half the heads of Cambridge colleges, the dominant culture has hardly changed. Then, as now, opportunities for women — and those from ethnic minorities and working-class families — come at the price of accepting the institutional culture. To enter the inner circle, assimilation is non-negotiable.

Today’s eminent female heads of college have met every challenge, yet still tolerate being called Masters. This point is usually met with donnish chortles about the impossibility of calling them Mistresses, or for emotive appeals to “respect tradition”.

Words matter. Changing the title of “Master” to “Principal” when we were admitted 50 years ago would have been a hugely important signal of intent on institutional change. That presumably is why it has still not happened.

Arriving as 1972 freshers, we women were admitted as an experiment. Our numbers were restricted to some 30 first-year women apiece at King’s, Clare and Churchill colleges. However brilliant our academic results, we were not allowed to be awarded a scholarship or exhibition. A tutor told me this was because the college needed more time to ensure awarding women did not infringe the terms of its endowments.

The conditions of our admission had a built-in methodology: institutional norms were preserved; cultural change resisted absolutely. I arrived to find that Clare College had fitted out a sewing room for us. The college also decided that rather than reducing the number of male undergraduates to accommodate women students, “the size of the student body as a whole should be somewhat increased”.

This decision is blithely recalled in a 50th anniversary article in the Clare alumni magazine. It is cited not to highlight the protection of privilege but to explain the need for extra beds. The author also explains that benches had to be unscrewed from the walls in hall to let female students leave without climbing across the table. Cue sniggers about skirts and knickers.

Earlier this year, Oxbridge’s first black ‘Master’, Sonita Alleyne, battled in vain to remove a memorial to a benefactor linked to the slave trade from the chapel of Jesus college, Cambridge. Controversy flared over the £120,000 in college funds she used for the church court challenge, yet no one questioned the Anglican hold on college life.

Each small breach of tradition, each institutional adaptation, has come in response to pressure. Social pressure for women’s rights in 1972, the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, all inched things forward. Barriers were partially breached, and began to teeter.

The wonder is they never fell. The demographic of applicants has utterly changed. But inside the institution, the solidly male, upper class, Anglican culture persists.

This autumn’s commemoration of the anniversary could be a watershed moment. Let the female Masters refer to themselves as Principals. Let the three pioneering colleges of 1972 publish the names of the women whose entrance examination results attained scholarship level. They never even knew, so let them be told and honoured now. If the release of this information breaks rules, then let us celebrate the anniversary with disobedience.

This piece has been amended to reflect the fact that five previously all-male Oxford colleges began admitting women in 1974. In 1979, the date originally given, the majority of Oxford colleges became co-educational.

​Letters in response to this article:

Perhaps Cambridge heads are happy with their titles? / From Duncan Reed, London SW1, UK

It’s the students who spurn old Oxbridge stereotypes / From Dame Madeleine Atkins, President, Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge, UK