It's Always More Complicated

In the Thirkell bio I was reading, the author comments that Angela did not believe in Highah Educashun for Wymmynz - 'like George Eliot'.

I have the very strongest suspicion that their reasoning was entirely different and that Ms Evans had some concerns about the campaigns of her besties to get women into Oxbridge, not out of any belief that study would brush the dew from their petals or make them hard and unfeminine bluestockings, but much more likely out of a certain cynicism about the intellectual value of the Oxbridge education as it existed at that time.

I.e. there she was, a brilliant auto-didact who moved in circles that were mostly similar - Dissenters and freethinkers excluded from the hallowed portals even if blokes - and, we may add, the creator of Edward Casaubon... (dusty dead-end labyrinths of fruitlessness)

I was further like to think she was Not Entirely Wrong, however important to the women's cause it was to prove that they could compete intellectually on equal, or even superior, terms with men, come on down, Philippa Fawcett, marked above the Senior Wrangler at Cambridge, 1890, after brooding upon the position of the women philosophers in The Women Are Up to Something.

Partly one perceives - though I don't think Lipscomb really leans into that - that they were Of A Period when women were supposed to downplay gender difference and eschew fusty feminism, even if it was only a very unusual concatenation of circumstances that got them into a favourable position (okay, not quite as bad as the lady doc I met, who had qualified at a time of rigid quotas of 20% max and usually less at medical schools, who said she had never experienced discrimination or prejudice...) (how different my experience at the anniversary conf of Lady Docs Org when after my lecture it was like a testimony speak-your-pains session on Medical Professional Sexism).

But also, and he does, to give him credit, pick up on it, they were still imbricated, even while resisting certain hegemonic philosphical paradigms of the day, in the world of Oxford philosophy. Which he indicates was pretty much toxically macho and about about competition and 'winning' and a lot of it about 'puzzle-solving' rather than engaging with problems. And it all seems (to a historian!) terribly self-referential, and one madly cheers Mary Midgeley, who moved to a Provincial Red-Brick, and did other things and read widely over a range of fields (and her next-door neighbour was Eva Ibbotson!) and did her best work in later life on the basis of, well, that.

I thought I did see (would have liked this better explored!) the ways they negotiated being women, however much based at a women's college, in a predominantly male academic world, and I though Anscombe was modeling the scruffy eccentric prof thing, and Foot was more the over-conscientious 'good-girl' care-taking style, and Murdoch could not even and went off into bohemia and wrote novels (which I will continue to murmur are fairly awful at the women characters).