Somerville College, Oxford
Somerville College is one of the constituent colleges of the
University of Oxford in the
United Kingdom, and was one of the first
women's colleges to be founded there.
In June
1878 the
Association for the Higher Education of Women was formed, aiming for the eventual creation of a college for women in Oxford. Some of the more prominent members of the association were Dr. Bradley, master of
University College,
T. H. Green, a prominent liberal philosopher, and Edward Talbot, Warden of
Keble College. The latter insisted on a specifically
Anglican institution, which was unacceptable to most of the other members. The two parties eventually split, and one went on to found
Lady Margaret Hall. Thus, in
1879, a second committee was formed
"in which no distinction will be made between students on the ground of their belonging to different religious denominations". The members of this second committee included Dr. John Percival, Dr. G. W. Kitchin, A. H. D. Ackland, T. H. Green, Mary Ward, William Sidgwick,
Henry Nettleship and A. G. Vernon Harcourt. This new effort resulted in the founding of
Somerville Hall, named for the then recently deceased
Mary Somerville, one of the greatest English mathematicians of the
19th century. The hall was renamed
Somerville College in 1894.
Somerville remained a women's college until
1994. Today around 40-50% of students are men.
*
Madelaine Shaw-Lefèvre (Principal of Somerville Hall
1879 -
1889)
*
Agnes Catherine Maitland (Principal of Somerville Hall 1889 -
1894, Principal of Somerville College 1894 -
1906)
*Dame
Emily Penrose (1906 -
1926) - classical scholar
*
Margery Fry (
1927 -
1930) - social reformer
*Helen Darbishire (1930 -
1945) - literary scholar
*Dame
Janet Vaughan (1945 -
1967) - haematologist and radiobiologist
*
Barbara Craig (1967 -
1980)
*Daphne Park,
Baroness Park of Monmouth (1980 -
1989)
*Catherine Pestell (1989 -
1991, as Catherine Hughes 1991 -
1996 [As the statutes of the College did not permit the Principal to marry, Miss Pestell resigned, married and was re-elected as Principal, however there was a two week period when the College had no Principal.])
*Dame
Fiona Caldicott (1996 - present)
See also Former students of Somerville College, Oxford*
Vera Brittain, novelist
*
Indira Gandhi, former prime minister of
India*
Helen Goodman, politician
*
Dorothy Hodgkin,
Nobel Prize winner for her discovery of the structure of
Vitamin B12*
Winifred Holtby, novelist
*
Margaret Jay, Baroness Jay of Paddington, politician
*
Kathleen Kenyon (
1906-
1978), archaeologist
*
Kathleen Ollerenshaw, mathematician
*
Rose Macaulay, novelist
*
Iris Murdoch, author of
The Good Apprentice*
Esther Rantzen, journalist and children's welfare ambassador
*
Dorothy L. Sayers, author of the
Lord Peter Wimsey books and translator of
Dante's
Inferno.
*
Margaret Thatcher,
Prime Minister of the United Kingdom 1979-90
*
Shirley Williams, politician
*
Enid Starkie*
Angela VincentSomerville for women: an Oxford college 1879 - 1993, Pauline Adams (OUP, 1996) ISBN 019920179X
