Edinburgh Seven Transcript (Scotland: A Scottish History Podcast)
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Scotland - A Scottish History Podcast
Episode 50 - Edinburgh Seven
MICHAEL PARK: It is July 2019. At McEwan hall in Edinburgh, seven young women step onto the stage in front of hundreds of their fellow students and are tapped on the head with the so-called Geneva bunnet by the Principal of the University of Edinburgh.
These seven women are students of the Medical School, but they are not up there on that stage to receive their own degrees.
Instead, they are representing seven remarkable women who paved the way for them 150 years previously.
This is Scotland, a podcast about history and where we made it. I’m Michael Park.
It is 1869 and an essay has just been released titled “Medicine as a Profession for Women”, written by one Sophia Jex-Blake. In it she argues that since the education system limited women to so-called domestic crafts, they were unable to compete with men through the unfairness of the system.
The essay argued further that women had a natural instinct which led women to care for the sick and that there was no objective proof of women’s intellectual inferiority to men.
The matter could be easily tested, Jex-Blake said, by giving women
SOPHIA JEX-BLAKE: ‘a fair field and no favour’.
Men, being the delicate little flowers that they are, were ragin’.
Originally from Sussex, Jex-Blake decided that coming North of the border was the right place for her to receive a medical education and applied to attend the summer’s medical lectures at the University of Edinburgh.
The University Court were initially fine with it and the vote passed. Then the delicate flowers reared their heads and began to bang their little drums at the status quo being interrupted. Claud Muirhead, the Senior Assistant Physician at the Royal Infirmary whipped up 200 whiny-faced students and they petitioned the Court to overturn the result.
The Court capitulated, and suggested that they couldn’t take on the additional expense of teaching a separate class for women in the interests ‘of just one lady’.
So, undeterred, Jex-Blake writes in national newspapers, encouraging other women to apply alongside her. By the time the second application is submitted in the Summer of 1869, there are five of them.
By the time it is accepted by the University Court, there are seven of them.
Now all they have to do is pass the entrance exam.
No mean feat.
The exam was in two parts. The first covered English, Latin and Mathematics and then for the second each candidate had to choose two subjects from Greek, French, German, higher mathematics, natural philosophy, logic, and moral philosophy.
152 candidates sit the exam on 19th October 1869. Four of the seven top scoring candidates are women.
The delicate flower of educational masculinity is wilting in the sun and the Edinburgh Seven haven’t even enrolled yet.
Of course there are petitions, signed by some of the most prominent men of the university whose arguments seem ridiculous to us but at the time… are also ridiculous.
Robert Christison, Professor of Materia Medica and Therapeutics tells the University Court that
ROBERT CHRISTISON: ‘the poor intellectual ability and stamina of women will lower professional standards’.
Aye. Yup. Okay. Cool.
Sophia Jex-Blake, Isabel Thorne, Edith Pechey, Matilda Chaplin, Helen Evans, Mary Anderson and Emily Bovell are now students of the venerated University of Edinburgh.
SOPHIA JEX-BLAKE: It is a grand thing to enter the very first British University ever opened to women, isn't it?
MICHAEL PARK: But their problems don’t stop there. The University decides to charge higher fees to the women since their class size would be significantly smaller. After all, the men can’t possibly be expected to learn in the same room as - women!
There is also a loophole in the wording of the Court’s decision. Because of course there is. The university’s lecturers are permitted to teach women. They are not required to teach women. Jex-Blake and her classmates have to arrange their own lectures.
You see. There’s a difference between breaking down the walls of oppression and discrimination and being accepted and welcomed into the establishment whose walls have just been knocked in.
I don’t want to spend an episode knocking the attitudes of Victorian men and thus denigrating the achievements of these trailblazing Victorian women.
But unfortunately, it was the insecurities of pathetic denizens of the University which came to define the academic lives of the Edinburgh Seven while they were there.
Male students would slam doors in their faces, howl at them, send them disgusting, threatening letters, behave aggressively and generally show a lack of grace in the face of a new world. That didn’t really bother the Edinburgh Seven - they’d largely expected it.
They’d probably have a thing or two to say about social media too.
What they hadn’t expected was to find themselves graded on a different curve to the men. They were taking the same classes, sitting the same exams, but the teachers of the University of Edinburgh made sure to limit their academic opportunities by grading harshly and making them ineligible to win prizes.
It is April 1870. A debate is being held by the University Court on intermixing the classes and allowing the Edinburgh Seven - and any subsequent female students - to be allowed the same rights and privileges as male students.
Professors Laycock and Christison are the arch-snowflakes in this story and their conspiracy-laden diatribes in this debate leads a Times reporter to remark in print:
THE TIMES: “It is the strongest argument against the admission of young ladies to the Edinburgh medical classes that they would attend the lectures of Professors who are capable of talking in this strain.”
MICHAEL PARK: Unfortunately the national press didn’t affect the behaviour of Edinburgh University’s whining majority and they escalated their campaign of bullying against their female counterparts.
It is Friday 18th November 1870. The Edinburgh Seven are getting ready to sit their anatomy exam at Surgeons’ Hall. As they approach they find a crowd of several hundred men blocking their path.
They attempt to pick through the crowd, all the while having the most vile insults thrown in their faces and being pelted with mud and rubbish.
The Seven reached the gates of the Hall only to find them being shut in their faces. They were left to stand in the street, facing up to a braying mob of desperate, insecure little toads who were so threatened by seven women studying the same course as them that they came onto the streets to cover them in the detritus of Victorian Edinburgh.
I’m sorry, I hate to break from the script but that’s just so pathetic.
The Seven are eventually allowed into the hall by a sympathetic student and, if you can believe it, sit the exam. Then when it’s over they decline to be led out by a side entrance and walk out the way they came in, much to the chagrin of the braying mob.
Some supportive students walked them back to their lodgings, acting as bodyguards for The Seven as they went about their revolutionary business of receiving a higher education.
The Edinburgh University magazine ran an article in February 1871 which concludes:
“Let us here, however, simply in self-defence state our firm belief that it is a sign not of advancing but of decaying civilisation when women force themselves into competition with the other sex.”
Miserable. Pathetic. Indefensible. Scumbaggery of the highest order.
By 1873 many more women were studying at the University and the tide was turning toward common sense. But the Edinburgh Seven are still denied the right to graduate, despite completing their studies.
Five of the seven were eventually granted medical doctorates later in the 1870s and Sophia Jex-Blake, after a period of time spent establishing the London School of Medicine for Women, returned to Edinburgh and set up as the city’s first female doctor.
She established a clinic for poor patients and as soon as Scotland started licensing women doctors, she helped establish the Edinburgh School of Medicine for Women.
Scottish universities finally began accepting female undergraduates in 1892.
And so. It is 2019. Better late than never. The Edinburgh Seven finally receive their degrees from the University of Edinburgh, an institution that has now firmly taken these remarkable women to its heart.
Only 150 years too late.
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You’ve been listening to Scotland, it was written and produced by me, Michael Park and is a production of Be Quiet Media.
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