Oxford in Wartime

This chapter introduces the remaining women—Iris Murdoch, Mary Scrutton (later Midgley), and Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe (Elizabeth to her friends)—and describes the state of women’s education in Oxford leading up to and during World War II. Somerville College, where all but Anscombe attended, was at that time one of the most selective institutions in the British Empire. This was due not only to its reputation within Oxford, but also to its small enrollment and the limited number of women’s colleges in general. Despite Somerville’s selectivity, the women still faced disadvantages. Oxford still treated its women as “on probation,” and few women had received the education in classical languages that was a gateway to the prestigious “Greats” degree. During the war, however, as Oxford was drained of fighting-age men, women students were able to benefit from more intensive mentoring and other learning opportunities formerly directed toward men.

Back to Noah Porter’s Yale

Yale under President Noah Porter in the post–Civil War decades illustrates the problems in trying to retain the old-time college ideal and a distinctly Christian viewpoint in the age of Darwinian science and the rise of the modern university. The most notorious challenge that Porter faced was that posed by a leading professor, William Graham Sumner. Sumner was an agnostic ex-clergyman, and a social Darwinist, and wanted to use Herbert Spencer’s The Study of Sociology as a textbook. Porter tried to disallow that text. At the time of the controversy, Porter specifically reiterated his the idea of a “Christian College” in a speech at Wellesley College. Wellesley had strong evangelical connections, and the new women’s colleges emphasized building Christian moral character. Porter hoped for the same for men’s colleges. But his arguments for Christian perspectives did not stand against more inclusive scientifically based university ideals. So the agnostic Sumner stayed at Yale.