HERE ARE PORTRAITS of twelve remarkable women. All of them lived and worked in Cambridge during the century after women's education became established there in the early 1870s. All of them did their best work in the days before women were formally allowed to take the degrees which their examination results had deserved. The fact that they were not acknowledged as members of the University in no way dampened their passion for knowledge, their intellectual distinction and their powers of original and creative thinking.

Cambridge was in fact the last university in the British Isles to admit women to full membership. It took one world war to persuade Oxford to give degrees to women in 1921. It took two world wars to persuade Cambridge to do likewise, for it was not until 1947 that the proposal to admit women to the same degrees as men was passed without a division or a murmur of dissent.

Before 1947 two brave attempts were made to secure recognition for the academic attainments of the women students of Girton and Newnham Colleges. These two colleges, founded in the early 1870s, had within a decade, thanks to the courageous efforts of Professor Henry Sidgwick, Mrs Eleanor Sidgwick, Miss Emily Davies and a few other far-sighted pioneers, put up their first buildings in the Cambndge area. Permission was granted to the modest numbers of their students to attend lectures, heavily chaperoned, and to sit for the same examinations, assessed on the same standards, as were set for men undergraduates.

They were, however, in no way recognised as members of the University. They were not awarded degrees, nor could they be given any kind of University office. Stnngent rules hemmed in their social lives.

The first attempt, to secure the modest recognition of mere ‘titles of degrees’, was made in May 1897. ‘Titular degrees’ meant no more than degrees in name, with no substance or reality behind the name, and no membership of the University. But even so unambitious a measure in 1897 roused extraordinary passions on both sides. In the camp hostile to women it was alleged that women were dowdy swotters, firmly in the middle second class, but at the same time silly and frivolous, and likely to undermine the education of men.