Case 3: Words & Deeds: Women in Print(ing)
One hundred years after the foundation of the first colleges for women in Oxford and almost 60 years after women received degrees from Oxford University, St John’s College admitted female students in 1979. The Library’s historic collections mirror this sequence of events, holding only a few snippets of women’s history.
The lives and writings by Margaret Cavendish (Phi.3.20) and Mary Wortley Montagu
(Beardsworth/TEN(2)) illustrate the struggle female writers faced to be accepted among their male contemporaries in early modern England. The first female printers appeared when widows continued their late husbands’ businesses. One of the first to use her own name during widowhood was the French Charlotte Guillard (HB4/1.a.18). Not much changed over the centuries, as even among the private presses of the late 19th/early 20th centuries the Irish Cuala Press (Hassett 3 and 4) was the only one entirely run by women. The Library has hardly any publications connected to the British suffragette movement. Among the few is a first edition of Christabel Pankhurst’s memoir from 1959 (Vet.Pol.1), published 20 years before the first female students attended St John’s College
