REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE CENTENARY OF THE ADMISSION OF WOMEN STUDENTS TO TRINITY
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE LAUNCH OF CELEBRATIONS TO MARK THE CENTENARY OF THE ADMISSION OF WOMEN STUDENTS TO TRINITY
A cháirde. Tá an-áthas orm bheith arais linn anseo inniu.
It is good to be back in this familiar landscape among so many friends, old and new. I would like to thank Vice-Provost Jane Grimson for inviting me today to mark what is a very special anniversary for Trinity College and for Ireland.
Your timing would be hard to better since as many of you will already know, today is the actual anniversary of the foundation, on the 3rd March, 1592, of the College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity near Dublin.
The College was founded, of course, by a woman but it took a very long time for the penny to drop that a college founded by a woman might actually allow women to attend as students. Chances are had the idea been put to those who founded the College it would never have opened its doors, so utterly anathema would the notion have been. For centuries throughout Europe there was little private, and no public recognition of the right of women to be educated. The abiding image of those centuries is the blind Milton teaching his favourite daughter to read to him in Latin and Greek but refusing to teach her what the words meant. Poor Milton, blind in more ways than one! But pity the women, their lives corralled in narrow domestic spheres, all other roads signposted “for men only”. Frustrating times for women of intelligence and ambition though in that very frustration lay the seed of change. Frustrating too for men of broad vision and liberal instincts like Daniel Defoe (1660 - 1731) who in 1719 wrote “ I have often thought of it as one of the most barbarous customs in the world considering us as a civilised and a Christian country that we deny the advantages of learning to women”
The first person to make the case here in Ireland was probably William Thompson of Co. Cork in 1825 who wrote his Appeal on Behalf of Women and called upon women to assert everywhere their right as human beings to equal education.
“From want of education, of early culture, equal to that of men, in every branch of useful knowledge, women lose the immense accession to their happiness which intellectual culture would afford them.”
There was no big rush to vindicate Thompson’s appeal but there were stirrings usually progressed by doughty individuals but they waxed and waned as the struggle got too much or the effort slackened. But in the Nineteenth Century the work became the labour of institutions and the gains started to accumulate.
On the Protestant side there were developments such as the establishment of Alexandra College in 1866 to provide a sound and solid and better tested education for women in the middle and upper classes in Ireland. Probably more importantly it aspired to provide secondary and university-level education for young women, not just flower arrangement and deportment! As one of the leading educational institutions in Dublin it provided a healthy challenge to others to equal, if not surpass, the quality of their offerings for young women.
On the Catholic side the teaching orders of nuns made a huge impact on the education of girls. The Dominicans, the Loreto Sisters, the Mercy and the Ursulines, especially, made immense progress by establishing secondary schools of a very high standard. For the first time there was continuity in education of girls down the generations. Advances could be made permanent.
The education of young women to a high standard of secondary education meant that many were now educationally qualified to attend university. Trinity was not the first university in Ireland to grant degrees to women, nor the first university to allow women students. From 1879 the Royal University of Ireland had granted degrees and the Queen’s Colleges in Belfast, Cork and Galway admitted women to lectures. Although Trinity also was slow to allow women to attend lectures, once committed, it advanced more rapidly than some of its British counterparts when it allowed them to receive degrees in 1904 as compared with Oxford’s 1919 and Cambridge’s remarkable 1947.
I am very much looking forward to reading Susan Parkes history of women in College, but looking at the actions of opponents of women’s admission to Trinity is a very dismal experience. To think that such fine minds as George Salmon’s, or A.A. Luce’s, both keen and nuanced thinkers, could be so blind to the injustice they were perpetuating is disheartening. When Trinity finally was compelled to permit women to stroll among its groves, the opposition to that move was strident. The only comfort is in knowing the same ridiculous rigmarole was replicated in the United States and in Europe, with intellectuals of outstanding reputation asserting one more outlandish claim and grim prediction after another - mind you in one respect they were right - life as they knew it was definitely never the same again. Thank God.
Those half–baked views still trap women in a multitude of cultures throughout the world and they are not entirely gone from our own culture. I still remember my first law book, back in 1969 in which Professor Glanville Williams had a chapter ominously and tersely entitled “Women”. Needless to say there was no corresponding chapter entitled “Men” No, his clear opinion was that women had no place in the law except to be on the hunt for eligible husbands and in particular the very idea of a woman as an advocate was batty – everyone knew the female voice did not carry as far as the male voice. There was a man who could have learnt a lot from an Irish mother! Thirty-five years on and law schools are dominated by women, medical schools the same. Engineering has a way to go to catch up but the direction is right. Women can be found in almost all the jobs and professions that used to be the exclusive preserve of men and their numbers in colleges and universities gives us great encouragement for the future. We need that encouragement for there are many imbalances in gender roles which are still inhibiting our society from achieving its fullest potential. From politics to board-rooms, from senior academia to the bench, women have yet to take on the fifty percent role that nature gave them and culture denied them.
At the moment, I believe the ratio in Trinity is now 60% women and 40% men. At the last census it reported that of almost four hundred thousand people in Ireland with a degree or higher qualification, just over 51% were women. A century ago that number would have been closer to zero. So the good news is that we have come a long way and the challenge is that we still have a long way to go both nationally but more especially globally. That is the job of our generation if we are to honour and vindicate the huge achievement by Alice Oldham and her supporters which led to the admission of women to College a hundred years ago.
Today we celebrate an event in the life of Trinity College, one step in the march towards equality but a hugely important step for generations of women and for our country. Talent, ingenuity, creativity and imagination, that would in another time have been wasted were revealed, released and harnessed to the enormous benefit of women and of society. The relentless opposition of the unenlightened forces hell bent on preserving the status quo was quelled, made uncomfortable in its vanities and certainties and little by little not just overcome but converted. We are the fortunate generation, a century on, to feel the surge of power and purpose that comes from flying on two wings and not one.
Gura fada buan sibh. Go raibh maith agaibh.