What is it about?
This article tracks the history of women classical scholars from 1882 to 1922 at Newnham College, Cambridge. It looks at how Newnham began as heavily dependent on male classicists to provide classical teaching, but gradually began to draw on its own resources as it produced graduates who knew the Cambridge system and could teach to its demands.
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Why is it important?
This chapter offers a fresh perspective on the history of classics as a discipline by tracking how a community of female scholars started to build itself and both relate to and differentiate itself from the wider academic world within which it existed.
Perspectives
I did my BA and MPhil at Newnham, so I am one of the 'daughters of the house'! Tracking down the evidence about how classics at the college got started involved working through a lot of historical documents that don't usually get used for this purpose, and there were plenty of odd finds along the way. Seeing the ways in which women found roles within the academic world of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries also feels surprisingly resonant in the age of the academic precariat in which we currently find ourselves.
Dr Liz Gloyn
Royal Holloway University of London
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This page is a summary of: This is Not a Chapter About Jane Harrison, October 2016, Oxford University Press (OUP),
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198725206.003.0008.
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