Degrees on Arrival: The Steamboat Ladies
This episode features the story of how a group of more than 700 pioneering women in the UK smashed through barriers to higher education and claimed degrees from Trinity College Dublin. Denied their degrees at Oxford and Cambridge because of their gender despite successfully completing their exams, the “Steamboat ladies” made use of an early 1900s loophole to earn official recognition by making a trip across the Irish Sea. The episode also explores the broader suffrage movement at the turn of the century and profiles figures like Eleanor Rathbone and Margaret Hills, whose efforts paved the way for academic and professional equity for women attending universities in the UK and around the world.
Sources & Resources:
Wayback Machine – Women of Trinity College Dublin
Newnham College : Steamboat Ladies Gown, between 1904-1907
How women students put a rocket up Cambridge
‘Under Siege by Women’: Everything We Take for Granted at Oxford
10 Strange Episodes In The History Of Schools – Listverse
The Steamboat Ladies – Trinity News
‘If a female had once passed the gate …’ — Google Arts & Culture
Timeline | Education and Activism: Women at Oxford: 1878-1920).
Guide to incorporation | Bodleian Libraries
About Trinity – Trinity College Dublin
Oscar Wilde: Biography, Author, Playwright, Imprisonment
‘100% feminist’: how Eleanor Rathbone invented child benefit – and changed women’s lives for ever
Family Allowances Act 1945 – Wikipedia
Family Allowances Act 1945 – House of Lords Library
Can you help uncover the history of a ‘dangerous woman’ of Stroud?