They had men as supervisors and often as research partners.
Its students were not isolated from male company. Newnham, founded in 1871, was within easy walking distance of the Cam, the city centre and the splendour of King’s College. And they were all studying for honours degrees. They were delighted not to have to wear academic gowns, which, short as these were, might have got caught in their bicycle spokes, and to be free of the proctorial discipline enforced on the men. They giggled to hear themselves addressed collectively as ‘Gentlemen’. To the contrary, Newnham and Girton students considered themselves lucky to be among the chosen 500 (the quota set for women so that their numbers would not exceed 10 per cent of the male undergraduate body). They were not offended by these restrictions. If they came in late, they were liable to be pelted with paper or greeted with stomping feet. Female students were admitted to men’s lectures but, at least until the early 1930s, were expected to sit together in the front rows. They were not entitled to the degree of BA Cantab., or to any degree at all, but rather to ‘decrees titular’. Nor were the female students considered undergraduates, merely ‘students of Girton and NewnhamĬolleges’. Cambridge had admitted women since 1869, and Jews since 1871, but unlike Oxford, which had granted women degrees since 1921, it refused to accept them as ‘members of the University’. I congratulate you on the new standard that you have set yourself, and assume that you will be top each week in future. It is of course a mere coincidence that you happen to be top on such an occasion. this is the first occasion on which you have told me your place in form without being pressed for it.
The sound of the paternal voice, heavy with irony, comes through a letter to his second son, Colin, still at his public school, Oundle when Rosalind went up to Cambridge. Moreover, he expected to be kept informed - weekly, at very least - of their progress and wrote them in return as his part of the dialogue. But as Rosalind entered university, Ellis wanted her to do well as he did all his children. But he had long been aware that his elder daughter was nothing like them, or even like his assertive sisters who made their mark in public life but stopped short of gaining professional qualifications. Ideally Ellis Franklin may have preferred his elder daughter to be like his wife, or his mother Caroline Jacob, with her diploma from Bedford College and her service on the Bucking- hamshire Education Committee. He would not have sent her, or later, his daughter Jenifer, to St Paul’s if he had wanted a mere finishing school for his girls. FOUR Never Surrender (October 1938-July 1941) THE MYTH HAS GOT INTO potted biographies of Rosalind Franklin that her father opposed her going to Cambridge.
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