Summary

In 1897 the Victorian women of the University of Cambridge got rather fed up with not being allowed to graduate like their male classmates. Therefore on 21st May 1897 they rallied together to bring about an official vote on the matter. However nearly three times as many men voted against them as for them and women were not awarded degrees at Cambridge until 1948.  The men made fun of the protesting women and hung an effigy of the woman on the bike at top of market place. Eglantyne Jebb, a campaigner for women’s rights and social reform, campaigned for better living conditions in Cambridge, and we’ve written a song about her amazing work.

Story

This history trail is narrated by the poet Michael Rosen, with script researched by Helen Weinstein and the team at Historyworks. This recording is part of a series of Cambridge history trails which have lyrics inspired by 'history beneath our feat' performed by local schoolchildren, with poems by the top poet Michael Rosen and songs by the funny team at CBBC's songwriters commissioned by Historyworks. 

Although you will see many women celebrating their graduations alongside their male classmates nowadays, this wasn’t always the case. Women’s colleges were founded in the mid-1800s, but despite doing all of the hard work and exams, women weren’t full members of the University and so were not awarded any degrees in Cambridge until after World War Two, in 1948! 

Unsurprisingly, the women of the University became rather fed up with this lack of equality. They rallied together to bring about an official vote on the matter on the 21st of May, 1897. The day of the vote brought lots of protestors to Cambridge, men who had degrees from the University and were outraged about the campaign for women to be awarded degrees were given voting rights, even if they had graduated years before!

Unfortunately for women almost three times as many men voted against them as for them. Thrilled, some male students made fun of female students and even made effigies of a woman on a bike representing emancipated women and also the leading female campaigners. They hung these figures up along wires above the queue of voters going into the Senate, and afterwards burnt the effigies in the Market Square.

They hung these figures up along wires above the queue of voters going into the Senate, and afterwards burnt the effigies in the Market Square. 
You can see the photographs from the newspaper of the time, showing a woman in stripey stockings riding a bike up above the corner of the market square, with hundreds of men in boaters beneath waiting in line to vote against women to have equal rights to education. Gah!

By the middle of the 1800s, women had grown sick and tired of being seen as inferior to men. Women, who were, by law, owned by their husbands, banded together to campaign for rights, like access to education and the ability to vote in a general election. The passionate campaign by the Suffragettes in London is well known, but the Suffragettes’ actions in Cambridge are less famous, although they were just as violent. The Cambridge Suffragettes gave numerous speeches to crowds, both in surrounding villages, and in famous places like Parker’s Piece and the Market Place. These speeches were sometimes received well, but often, angry townsmen or undergraduates tried to interrupt!

The men would drown out the speakers with whistles and bells, and even by singing famous songs like ‘Have a banana’. Once, when Mrs Brailsford was speaking on a van on Parker’s Piece, children and teenagers began moving the lorry, pushing her slowly into the middle of a cricket match! But, the Suffragettes did more than talk – their motto was “Deeds not words”. In 1913, the Suffragettes in Cambridge planted two homemade bombs, one at a railway crossing and another at the Varsity Rugby Pavilion.

The latter was made in a mustard tin! In the same year, the Suffragettes placed a package reading “Votes for Women” in the lounge of a famous hotel! There was panic when the package was found, but it turned out only to be a block of wood! Some women achieved the vote in 1918, but it wasn’t until 1928 that the United Kingdom had universal suffrage!