The Opening of University Education to Women in Ireland (review)

Abstract

In The Opening of University Education to Women in Ireland, Judith Harford introduces a new complexity in the story of the long struggle in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries over control of the country's burgeoning system of higher education: that of women. The decades-long debate pitched Protestant educational and political leaders against a Catholic hierarchy fearful of losing its growing influence over Irish culture. By the turn of the twentieth century—when qualified Protestant and Catholic women alike were seeking full acceptance into Irish universities—the debate over the control of these institutions of higher learning had raged for more than a half century. Adding women to the mix, Harford tells us, added a new complication to the already fraught question of who would control the hearts and minds of the emerging Irish middle class.
Building on the work of earlier scholars of women's higher education in Ireland (such as Susan Parkes and Nadia Clare Smith), Harford's study offers new insight into the effort by Irish women to secure places for themselves in Irish institutions of higher learning and, eventually, to secure the same rights as men in terms of access to university courses, examinations, degrees, and facilities. They met with vociferous opposition at each step of the way. Their eventual success at winning access by the early years of the twentieth century to the most elite and conservative institution, Trinity College Dublin, is thus a remarkable achievement.
Harford also examines an evolutionary cul de sac in the history of opening higher education to Irish women: the woman's college. Excluded from the classrooms of Ireland's leading universities on account of their sex, Irish women leaders, both Catholic and Protestant alike, founded women's colleges designed to provide a separate but equal education to women as that offered in the all-male colleges and universities. Despite the success of these institutions in creating a new generation of women intellectuals, however, they were victims of their own success. By the early years of the twentieth century, the long struggle for equal educational rights for women had succeeded in securing access to Irish universities for qualified females. Pioneering women's colleges like Dublin's Alexandra and Belfast's Victoria were forced to focus on secondary education and teacher training as a result, losing their status as institutions of intellectual rigor on par with their male-only counterparts.
Like other revisionist historians, Harford sees the Catholic hierarchy as a major impediment in the liberalization of Irish higher education. Male church leaders—steadfastly opposed to all reforms that threatened the sanctity of women's place in the home—railed against the steady gains in women's higher education even when these gains were the result of the remarkable work of Catholic women religious. In fact, Harford tells us, Cardinal Cullen, "was adamantly opposed to mixed education," and coeducation was almost as divisive an issue as religious control over education in the generations-long debate over the creation of the Irish university system.
Harford draws on a wide variety of archival and contemporary published sources. Her generally lively, clear style ismarred by occasional repetitions that should have been winnowed out in the editorial process. In all but one chapter, she takes the perplexing step of announcing her conclusions—though, in fact, none of these do more than reiterate points already made clear (and chapter three, for some reason, has no concluding section at all). Here, one faults the editors for these unnecessary additions.
Despite the courageous work of pioneering reformers and talented aspiring students, the proud history of women's educational success in Ireland remains at best unfinished and at worst, unfulfilled. Susan Parkes notes in her introduction to The Opening of University Education to Women in Ireland that women university students were marginalized in male-majority institutions of higher learning well into the twentieth century. Their victory, in other words, required more than will and talent. As the sad cliché runs, in Irish universities, women had to be twice as good to be seen as half as good.