In 1896 Girton College Cambridge was the first college to admit women.
If you were a young woman at University in the 1800’s you would face long walks from out of town colleges to attend lecture, mocked by other students and teachers, forced to sit at the back, have your work left unmarked or rejected, denied entry into lectures as tutors would deem you unworthy of their time, humiliated in the street and as universities were not set up for women you would have to carry a chamber pot and find a quiet place in the street. You would be banned from the canteen in case you distracted the men on lunch and told that you were unnatural. An oddity.
Men did not want to marry academic women, wanting quiet wives who were obedient and good mothers. Heaven forbid a woman dared to have an opinion, let alone wanting a job. The idea of women attempting to be more like men by pursuing a career was seen as the beginning of the end of society.
Blue Stockings is an empowering story of four young women fighting for their rights to a University education in a World that assumed that women belong in the home.
The Girton Girls study ferociously and match their male peers grade for grade. Yet when the men graduate the women leave with nothing but the stigma of being a Blue Stocking. An unnatural and educated woman. Denied degrees and go home unqualified and unmarriageable.
We see the four young women’s determination to win their right to graduate and their fight to change the future of education in their first academic year. They face many hurdles, the distraction of love, the class divide and an opposition that will do anything to stop them.
Which will they choose? Love or knowledge.
Blue Stockings Runs from 13th -20th June at Millgate Arts Centre
Book on www.millgatearstcentre.co.uk
