Programme of events associated with the exhibition at the University Library sponsored by the University and Cambridge Assessment
The actual exhibition The Rising Tide: Women at Cambridge is one of the best I have seen at the University Library in fifty years. Subsequent to my experience of the PR, I have visited it twice, spending a total of an hour and a half there.
It’s excellent because it is comprehensive (although Germaine Greer seems to have been airbrushed out), it tells the history very clearly, is documented from a really impressive variety of sources, is visually varied and attractive, contains much good humour, and, most effective of all, the exhibits are as closely patterned as is possible without looking cramped. The latter means that your attention is drawn through the narrative of each case rather than contemplating a series of objects set in white space.
The exhibition begins with a wall covered in signatures from the 1880 petition for the students of Girton and Newnham women’s colleges to be granted degrees. Incredibly, this campaign was won only in 1948; it rightly occupies almost half of the exhibition. Along the way, we read Emily Davies, founder of Girton, writing in 1867: ‘On general moral grounds, we think it very desirable that men and women should have substantially […] the same education.’ Later she insists that when the men’s colleges admit women, Girton must admit men. The tone of all the women’s utterances is unpofacedly serious, sensitive, reason-based and unaggressive. They are true egalitarians.
The emotional reality for the male opposition, however, is vividly revealed by the exhibits illustrating the following moment (I quote from the caption):
The 1897 proposal to grant women the titles of their degrees was rejected [in the University’s Senate] by 1713 votes to 662. When the vote was announced a hostile mob marched on Newnham and the doors and shutters of local shops were torn down to feed a huge bonfire in Market Square. Girton and Newnham women were deeply shocked by the scale of the defeat and by the violence.
As I wrote in my biography of George Calderon regarding his involvement eleven years later in the Men’s League for Opposing Woman Suffrage, ‘there was, of course, a faction who simply did not like women’. In Cambridge in 1897 it was a case of visceral misogyny.
A brilliant aspect of the exhibition is that the curators have rescued from outer darkness all the women who as laundresses, bedders, cooks and servants had in fact played vital roles in Cambridge University for centuries. My favourite is Chrystabel Proctor, Garden Steward at Girton, whose personal Dig for Victory campaign included in 1942 growing 19 tons of potatoes on College property.
Other gems are the great lavatory paper debate (when Clare College went mixed in 1972 the Fellows decided the Ladies should have soft paper, but then the Gents demanded it too); the wonderful vignettes (twenty-one-year-old Agnata Ramsay gained the top First in Classics in 1887 and promptly married the fifty-four-year-old Master of Trinity — no snowflake she); a section about Emma Thompson, Sandi Toksvig and other undergraduate actresses staging an all-women Footlights show, ‘Women’s Hour’, in protest at the Footlights quota of one woman per review programme; and (on the earphones) Joanna Womack talking about alumni creating the Joint Colleges Nursery when the University refused to set one up that would give its employees equality of work-time.
It has been an epic struggle for women to obtain what is their right at Cambridge University. As the final panel of the exhibition puts it, ‘equality remains a goal, not an achievement […] and the persistent pay gap is just one of the issues that continues to drive women’s activism’. But the big message that the exhibition sends me, at least, is that since the founding of Girton in 1869 it has all been achieved without the activists inflicting violence and misandry [hatred of men]. It was done in those days by sober, unrelenting, unaggressive moral reasoning and example. But that is not surprising, for both Emily Davies and Millicent Fawcett (co-founder of Newnham) were suffragists, not suffragettes, and there seems to me no evidence in this exhibition that suffragettism ever had a hold in Cambridge. The National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, which before 1914 had almost fifty times as many members as Mrs Pankhurst’s Women’s Social and Political Union, was completely opposed to the latter’s militancy and urban terrorism.
And this is why I think the PR/marketing of the University Library’s exhibition is so misjudged. It employs the techniques of suffragettism, not suffragism. The poster of Elizabeth Hughes suggests, as you approach it, a swivel-eyed Edwardian woman out of self-control (when you get close up to it, you may read her face differently) and there is no source given for her supposed words on it, so in these days of fake news you wonder whether the caption was made up. It is a bucketful of aggression in your face. You can be pretty sure that Davies, Fawcett, and those other Cambridge women whose portraits hang in the upper corridor would have deplored it.
Similarly, replacing all the events flyers with ones featuring women and, unprecedentedly in my experience, removing every male portrait in the upper corridor to replace them with women, when it would have been usual to display them in the reception hall, sends the message not of gender equality but female hegemony — precisely the argument that misogynists have used against women’s rights throughout time.
Finally, there is the slogan ‘Behave Badly’, around which the whole marketing effort seems to have been conceived. It simply sends the archetypally suffragette message ‘be antisocial’. As a visitor wrote on one of the feedback sheets at the exhibition, this is hardly enough in 2019; s/he suggested that what we want is ‘kindness’… Another argued that ‘Behave Badly’ is gratuitously aggressive and ‘trivialises’ the issue, with which I would agree. We are told on the merchandise stand that in the 1970s the badge was meant to signify ‘be strong, be proud, be together’. Any one of those epithets would have been better, because they are positives. ‘Behave Badly’ plays straight into the hands of the misogynists who have claimed that women are merely ‘contrarian’ and ‘anarchical’.
It’s been suggested to me that the people who have devised the PR/marketing of this great exhibition do not know the difference between suffragists and suffragettes. I suppose it is possible, because one of the biggest and most fantastical public myths of our time is that the suffragettes, and Emmeline Pankhurst personally, won the vote for women. In fact, by June 1914 their actions had completely alienated public opinion and in the words of Philip Snowden, suffrage supporter and Labour MP, they had ‘so set the clock back that the suffrage question was temporarily as dead as Queen Anne’.
Really I hope that the suffragette ‘in yer face’ attitude of the exhibition’s marketing is the result of ignorance, naivety, or self-induced wokeful anger; because if it is inspired merely by a belief in the need to ‘challenge’ and that ‘there’s no such thing as bad publicity’, it is dishonest. I can’t believe that of such an eminent institution as Cambridge University Library, but I still find the militancy alienating and I did witness embarrassment at the merchandise display (by the way, ‘Votes For Women’, which is all over the mugs and tote bags, is not really a theme of the exhibition). Individuals approached the stand containing the thousand Behave Badly badges, but stopped about a foot away from it, as though looking into a craterful of magma… No-one bought anything.
SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS
‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement
‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine
‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian
‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review
‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter
‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer
‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18
A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.
Guest Post: Alison Miles on ‘What Can We Hope For?’ from the edge of the epicentre
John Polkinghorne lives near us and we have known him for many years. In 2015 the Church Times published an interview in which he answered questions about science and religion put to him by my husband, Patrick. It celebrated John’s 85th birthday.
Patrick is neither a mathematical physicist nor a theologian so to prepare for interviewing John, he read many of John’s books as well as doing additional research on topics relevant to John’s lifetime’s work. Patrick and John recorded their discussions and our son, Jim, transcribed them. Jim had transcribed recordings during his Year 10 work experience, using a transcription kit with pedal. This time he wrote some software to enable him to manage and pace the recording while typing the text. Patrick edited the typed version ready for John to give feedback, then they completed the final stages ready for submission to the Church Times.
A short while later, John invited Patrick to read his recent books about ‘eschatology’ and discuss them. So the new topic was ‘the future’ of us and the universe. At the time, Patrick was also working on his biography of George Calderon, which was coming up for publication under the Sam&Sam banner. Patrick managed that project and Jim was the technical supremo, including typesetting the book ready for printing by Clays of Bungay. So they were both occupied with the first book when the second began, but ‘If you want something done, ask a busy person’!
The new series of discussions between Patrick and John started; they usually took place on Thursday mornings lasting about an hour. Patrick’s questions were submitted to John a week in advance. Over thirteen months they covered a huge range of aspects of our human and cosmic ‘future’. Again, it was all recorded on our small dictaphone which Jim downloaded after each session. He transcribed the interviews word for word including hesitations, interjections, duplications etc.
Once the transcription was complete it was time to review what was there and decide on the next steps. Seven years ago John said he had ‘written his last book’ but here was a different text that could become a short book. He agreed with Patrick that it was worth going ahead with this as a real viva voce script rather than a ‘set piece’ philosophical dialogue. So together they edited down the transcript of 60,000 words into one of 31,000 words in five chapters. John proposed the title What Can We Hope For? and Patrick the sub-title ‘Dialogues about the Future’. The result was a ‘manuscript’ that they both liked, so the next step was publication.
Many publishers were approached. John and Patrick agreed that the book needed to be reasonably priced and there was a feeling that it should be produced relatively quickly, ideally for John’s 89th birthday (16 October 2019). Commercial publishers could not match these requirements so Jim and Patrick investigated Amazon ‘print on demand’ and agreed that, for a book of this size, it was a definite possibility. As before, Patrick was the project manager and Jim the typesetter (to find out more about what he did go to ‘How to typeset a second book’). The book went through seven sets of proofs including being read by me (someone has to be ‘keeper of the comma’ – but all I found was one inconsistent indentation!).
At the point when the project moved to Amazon print on demand, Patrick moved straight out of his comfort zone and Jim moved quickly into his. Patrick is very familiar with the traditional ‘Gutenberg’ publication process (manuscript/typescript/proofs/print) while Jim understands how online processes work. They both looked into Amazon’s terms and conditions and the procedures for print on demand. As a result they decided to go ahead. This included finishing off the book (cover, spine, back page author blurbs and photos, ISBN etc) before submitting the pdf to Amazon.
In his blog post ‘A Tale of Two Front Covers’ Patrick describes what happened as he and John discussed and chose the cover(s). I remember him arriving home with a print of Naum Gabo’s Opus 9 from Kettle’s Yard. At the time (as with so many art, poetry and drama references) I hadn’t a clue who Naum Gabo was and promptly forgot his name! That aside, from 1 December we have had two editions available to accommodate the two authors’ cover preferences.
Celebrating the publication of the ‘second’ (Gabo) edition
Then there were the ins and outs of the Amazon printing process. The overall impression that I have, as the spectator on the edge of the epicentre, is that Amazon has set up an interactive process that (for the IT savvy, i.e. Jim) makes it relatively easy to submit a book, to make amendments after submission if required, to set a price (£5 as opposed to one publisher’s suggestion of £12.50) and to check the product, all before (and, amazingly, also after) going live. Jim regularly comes round to our house with author’s copies that he has ordered on Patrick’s behalf from Amazon. Initially the proofs had ‘not for resale’ printed on them, and Patrick and Jim went through them with a fine-tooth comb for any errors etc. A few changes had to be made because one or two layout issues turned up and also Amazon requested 100 pages if there is text on the spine. This led to production of about twenty copies of the first edition with additional blank pages headed ‘For Notes’. These copies are now rarities as those ‘extra’ pages have become an appendix containing the full initial texts of the Church Times interview. Various interesting facts have emerged. Printing seems to happen anywhere, for example some copies have come from Poland. Author copies can take at least a week to arrive but normal copies, printed by Amazon UK, arrive very quickly, particularly for Amazon Prime users. For me insight into this automated and hugely efficient production process has been fascinating. Whatever we all think about Amazon’s monopolistic, exploitative qualities it is clear that they have nailed almost every aspect of print on demand for paperbacks, at least for a relatively straightforward one like this.
The book is now well and truly published, so all that remains for me is to make the celebration cake for the tea party we are having with John, in a week or so.
The left cover can be found on amazon by clicking here and the right cover can be found on amazon by clicking here.