Abstract
Ellen McArthur was one of the earliest students of Girton College, Cambridge. Although excluded from full membership of Cambridge University (women were only admitted as faculty members in 1926, and as students in 1948), she went on to pioneer the new field of academic history and to teach in Cambridge for a quarter of a century, as well as at the newly formed London School of Economics in the 1890s and at Westfield College in London. McArthur campaigned tirelessly for suffrage and to admit women to Cambridge University, while teaching an entire generation of women university historians, ranging from medievalists to modernists. This article examines her intellectual and political context and influence.
Her sense of justice and her consistency in acting up to her ideal, the absolute sincerity of her belief in the right of human beings to freedom of thought, lead where it may, won for her the respect and admiration of all with whom she came in contact. (M.[innie] B.[eryl] Curran, “Ellen Annette McArthur. 1862–1927”, The Girton Review, Michaelmas 1927, 5)
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- 1.
T. C. Barker, “The Beginnings of the Economic History Society”, Economic History Review, 30:1 (1977), 1–19; D. C. Coleman, History and the Economic Past (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987); Miles Taylor, “The Beginnings of Modern British Social History?” History Workshop Journal, 43 (1997), 155–176; Keith Tribe, “Historicization of Political Economy?” In British and German Historiography, 1750–1950: Traditions, Perceptions and Transfers, ed. Benedikt Stuchtey and Peter Wende (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 211–228.
- 2.
Maxine Berg, “The First Women Economic Historians”, Economic History Review, 45:2 (1992), 308–329, and A Woman in History: Eileen Power, 1889–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
- 3.
Joan Thirsk, “The History Women”, in Chattel, Servant or Citizen: Women’s Status in Church, State and Society, ed. Mary O’Dowd and Sabine Wichert (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, Queen’s University, 1995), 1–2, 10. There is no mention of the extension service in the entries on Stopford Green and Creighton in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), hereafter ODNB.
- 4.
For background on women in Cambridge in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Gillian Sutherland’s articles at http://www.newn.cam.ac.uk/about/history/history-of-newnham/ and http://www.newn.cam.ac.uk/about/history/womens-education/, or for a full treatment, Rita McWilliams Tullberg, Women at Cambridge, revised edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998; originally published London: Victor Gollancz, 1975). Page references are to the revised edition. For background on the university see Gordon Johnson, University Politics: F. M. Cornford’s Cambridge and his Advice to the Young Academic Politician (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
- 5.
“McArthur, Ellen Annette (1862–1927)”, Amy Louise Erickson in ODNB.
- 6.
McWilliams Tullberg, Women at Cambridge, chaps. 5 and 6.
- 7.
History was originally only a part of the moral sciences tripos, then had been combined with law in a joint degree from 1870 and became independent in 1875. For dates of triposes see http://www.queens.cam.ac.uk/life-at-queens/about-the-college/university/tripos-subjects
- 8.
Johnson, University Politics, 11.
- 9.
Gerard M. Koot, “William Cunningham, (1849–1919)”, or http://www.hetwebsite.net/het/profiles/cunningham.htm
- 10.
“Gardner, Alice (1854–1927)”, Gillian Sutherland in ODNB.
- 11.
Gillian Sutherland, In Search of the New Woman: Middle-Class Women and Work in Britain 1870–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 24–25.
- 12.
For the history of the campaigns, see McWilliams Tullberg, Women at Cambridge, chaps. 5–10.
- 13.
Marshall married one of the first Newnham students, and she taught alongside him in economics at Bristol and then at Oxford University, but he became anti-feminist later in life. “Marshall, Mary (1850–1944)”, Rita McWilliams Tullberg in ODNB. Economics became a separate degree in 1903.
- 14.
Cunningham , “The Perversion of Economic History”, The Economic Journal, 2:7 (Sept. 1892), 494.
- 15.
For different views, see Berg, “First Women”, 315–316, Tribe, “Historicization”, 220–226, and Alon Kadish, Historians, Economists, and Economic History (London: Routledge, 1989), 212–218.
- 16.
- 17.
- 18.
She was recommended on 2 November 1893 to the lectures committee and approved in 1894 by the syndicate. CUL: BEMS 5/1.
- 19.
McWilliams Tullberg, Women at Cambridge, 87–88.
- 20.
Cambridge University Library (hereafter CUL) Manuscripts: Board of Extra Mural Studies (formerly University Extension Lecture Syndicate) (hereafter BEMS) Annual Reports listing certificates from 1895.
- 21.
Cambridge University Reporter, 13 November 1894, 198.
- 22.
The records of the extension syndicate list McArthur only for “England under the Tudors”, in 1905 in Sussex. CUL: BEMS 17/4/97.
- 23.
Founded in 1885, the English Historical Review was the only academic journal in the field until the Economic History Review in 1927, co-founded by McArthur’s student, Eileen Power. See http://www.history.ac.uk/makinghistory/journals/
- 24.
R. H. I. Palgrave, ed., Dictionary of Political Economy, 3 vols. (1894–99).
- 25.
Outlines cost only 4 shillings, whereas Cunningham’s original cost 16 shillings for the first volume and 18 shillings for the second. Advertisements in the front matter of the Economic Journal in 1896, 1897, and 1898.
- 26.
Originally published as a single volume in 1882, the work had expanded to two volumes in 1890–92, and later to three volumes by the third edition of 1896. http://www.hetwebsite.net/het/profiles/cunningham.htm
- 27.
The exception was Henry R. Seager in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 7 (Jan. 1896), 122–124. Other positive reviews not quoted in the text appeared in the British The Bookman, 8:4 (May 1895), 47, and the American The Bookman, 1:6 (July 1895), 402–403.
- 28.
Similar reviews appeared in the Times and the Speaker.
- 29.
Outlines in The Athenaeum, 3522 (27 April 1895), 530. Keith Tribe is incorrect in describing Cunningham’s Growth volumes as, (a) the first textbook on economic history, and (b) “concise”, in “Historicization”, 214, 220.
- 30.
Subsequent editions appeared in 1898, 1904, 1910, 1913, 1920, and 1928 in the UK. In New York, Macmillan published editions in 1895, 1896, 1898, 1905, and 1908. For the 1905 edition’s certification, see https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25931681M/Outlines_of_English_industrial_history
- 31.
Preface to first edition of Outline of English Industrial History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1895).
- 32.
For the function of Norwich House, see Peter Searby, “A Failure at Cambridge: Cavendish College, 1877–1891”, Proceedings of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society, 72 (1983), note 32. The hostel residents may have been at the Training College (founded 1885, now Hughes Hall) but the Ladies’ Lecture courses set up by the Sidgwicks were suggested to me by Alison Duke in a personal letter of 9 October 1995. All students at Girton and Newnham were accommodated in those colleges. Norwich House is referred to in McArthur’s obituaries (Times and Girton Review) as “a sort of Cavendish College for younger students but an experiment that failed”. Cavendish College (1873–91) was an institution to offer affordable education for younger men from farming backgrounds (whose buildings later became Homerton College). Both institutions were developed by Joseph Brereton, whence probably arises the confusion.
- 33.
She served as Registrar 1900–20, as Secretary to the Council 1901–10 and again for three years during the war, as Chairman 1921–22 and then as Vice-Chairman. Hughes Hall Report for the Year 1926–27, Presented at the General Meeting of the College Saturday 19 November 1927, provided by college archivist Peter Brook. Correspondence from McArthur to Oscar Browning, head of the Men’s Teacher Training College, is held at King’s College, Cambridge Archive, especially PP/OB/1/593/C. For more on the origins of teacher training of both women and men in Cambridge, see Pam Hirsch and Mark McBeth, Teacher Training at Cambridge: The Initiatives of Oscar Browning and Elizabeth Hughes (London: Woburn Press, 2004).
- 34.
Original leaflet on the Historical Association in the collection of King’s College, Cambridge Archive, Oscar Browning Papers, PP/OB, probably sent to him by McArthur.
- 35.
The Historical Association, 1906–1956 (London, 1957), 13, 22.
- 36.
- 37.
See http://www.lse.ac.uk/about-lse/our-history, which omits Ada Wallas and Charlotte Payne-Townshend Shaw and relegates Beatrice Webb to “supporting” her husband. For the women, see Sue Donnelly’s LSE blogs, “An unsung heroine of LSE – Charlotte Shaw” (http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsehistory/2014/01/24/an-unsung-heroine-of-lse-charlotte-payne-townshend/) and “Beatrice Webb – the early years” (http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsehistory/2015/01/22/beatrice-webb-the-early-years/), and Gianna Pomata, “Rejoinder to Pygmalion: The Origins of Women’s History at the London School of Economics”, Storia della Storiografia, 46:4 (2004), 79–104.
- 38.
Carol Dyhouse, No Distinction of Sex? Women in British Universities, 1870–1939 (London: UCL Press, 1995), 3.
- 39.
TCD closed the arrangement in 1907, and with their profits from fees financed a new residence hall for women. S. M. Parkes, “Steamboat ladies (act. 1904–1907)”, ODNB.
- 40.
She was the only DLitt and there were three awards of the DSc in 1905. A further four doctorates in addition to these were awarded on an honorary basis by TCD.
- 41.
Sandy Bardsley, “Women’s Work Reconsidered: Gender and Wage Differentiation in Late Medieval England”, Past & Present, 165 (1999), 3–29, and the ensuing debate with John Hatcher in Past & Present, 173 (2001), 191–202.
- 42.
“‘The boke longyng to a justice of the peace’ and the Assessment of Wages”, English Historical Review, 9 (1894), 305–314, 554.
- 43.
“A Fifteenth-Century Assessment of Wages”, English Historical Review, 13:50 (1898), 299–302.
- 44.
“Prices at Woodstock in 1604”, English Historical Review, 13 (1898), 711–716.
- 45.
“The Regulation of Wages in the Sixteenth Century”, English Historical Review, 15 (1900), 445–455.
- 46.
The Standard (London, England), Wednesday, 18 July 1900; p. 4; Issue 23731. British Library Newspapers Online, Part II: 1800–1900.
- 47.
Myra’s Journal (published 1875–1912), 1 June 1898, 13. Also included were Jane Harrison of Newnham College, and Eugenie Sellers, McArthur’s contemporary at Girton and a lecturer on Greek sculpture, later keeper of the Duke of Devonshire’s sculpture collection.
- 48.
Her reviews were mentioned in her obituary in the Cambridge Review of 14 October 1927.
- 49.
There is an acknowledgement of such a request in King’s College, Cambridge Archive, PP/OB/1/1008/A.
- 50.
King’s College, Cambridge Archive, MS Add. 8119/I/M3.
- 51.
Personal communication from Sophie Badham, archivist at Royal Holloway & Bedford New College, now Royal Holloway, University of London. The two historic women’s colleges having merged in 1985, the “Bedford” element was dropped from the name in 1992.
- 52.
Archives of the Royal Historical Society, University College London.
- 53.
When McArthur had taught at the LSE in the 1890s it was not part of the University of London so she had not acquired that status.
- 54.
Janet Sondheimer, Castle Adamant in Hampstead (London: Westfield College, 1983), 61.
- 55.
Curran, “McArthur”, 3.
- 56.
Cambridge Review, 14 October 1927.
- 57.
Sondheimer, Castle Adamant, 66.
- 58.
Curran, “McArthur”, 4. Records of the Cambridge Association for Women’s Suffrage, Cambridgeshire County Record Office.
- 59.
The Times, 3 July 1908.
- 60.
Sondheimer, Castle Adamant, 66. “Women Petitioners and the Long Parliament”, English Historical Review, 24 (1909), 698–709.
- 61.
Search of Jstor and Bibilography of British and Irish History.
- 62.
Hilda L. Smith, All Men and Both Sexes: Gender, Politics, and the False Universal in England, 1640–1832 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002).
- 63.
Pomata, “Rejoinder to Pygmalion”, 79.
- 64.
Dyhouse, No Distinction of Sex, 158–160.
- 65.
The Times, 6 September 1927. The position went instead to Raymond Beazley. http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/facilities/cadbury/documents/staff-archives-guide.pdf
- 66.
Dyhouse, No Distinction of Sex, 134, 139.
- 67.
Queen Mary, University of London (hereafter QMUL) Archives, PP11/CS/1/1/1: McArthur to Skeele, 24 July 1925. Westfield College was amalgamated to become Queen Mary and Westfield College in 1989, and in 2013 “Westfield” was lost when it became Queen Mary, University of London.
- 68.
Curran, “McArthur”, 4.
- 69.
Hughes Hall Report for the Year 1926–27, Presented at the General Meeting of the College Saturday 19 November 1927, provided by college archivist, Peter Brook.
- 70.
The notice in The Girton Review, January 1897, 15, says, “It may interest those old students, who at various times have discussed the possibility of starting a Hostel for advanced students in Cambridge, to hear that Miss McArthur is trying the experiment on a small scale this year. For the present the venture is a private one, but if, as seems likely, the demand for some such house should continue, the scheme may take a more permanent form.”
- 71.
Mary Dockray-Miller, “Mary Bateson (1865–1906)”, in Women Medievalists and the Academy, ed. Jane Chance (Madison WI and London: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), 72.
- 72.
K. T. Butler and H. I. McMorran, compilers, Girton College Register 1869–1946 (Cambridge: Girton College, 1948).
- 73.
She published Emily Davies and Girton College (1927) and Girton College 1869–1932 (1933). Butler and McMorran, Girton College Register.
- 74.
Dyhouse, No Distinction of Sex, 248–249.
- 75.
Leonard must have remained a student in some capacity because she is recorded as the first female president of the Students Union in 1907 (age 41). http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsehistory/2016/03/24/ellen-marianne-leonard/
- 76.
“Knowles, Lilian Charlotte Anne (1870–1926)”, Maxine L. Berg in ODNB.
- 77.
Skeel’s papers are at QMUL Archive. “Skeel, Caroline (1872–1951)”, Janet Sondheimer in ODNB.
- 78.
“George , (Mary) Dorothy (1878–1971)”, Mark Pottle in ODNB.
- 79.
Awarded for work partly done while at Girton, according to the preface of the thesis at http://www.ucc.ie/celt/online/E900040.html
- 80.
Berg , A Woman in History.
- 81.
Jon Adams, “Finding the First Thesis”, LSE Connect, Winter 2010, 19. Adams’ assertion that the third person, Amy Harrison, was also a Girtonian is incorrect. Harrison was an undergraduate at Aberystwyth. Personal communication with a photograph of the Aberystwyth Register from archivist Julie Archer.
- 82.
Ilaria Porciani and Lutz Raphael, eds., Atlas of European Historiography: The Making of a Profession, 1800–2005 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), xvii, 36.
- 83.
QMUL Archive, PP11/CS/1/1/1: McArthur to Skeele, 24 July 1925.
- 84.
I am indebted to Jeremy Goldberg for this observation in his unpublished paper “Women in the Later Medieval English Economy” at https://www.york.ac.uk/teaching/history/pjpg/Women_Economy.docx
- 85.
Abram , “Newcastle”, in Married Women’s Work: Being the Report of an Enquiry undertaken by the Women’s Industrial Council, ed. Clementina Black (London: G. Bell, 1915), 195–203.
- 86.
“Abram , Annie (1869–1930)”, Janet Sondheimer in ODNB.
- 87.
McWilliams Tullberg, A Men’s University, 174–175.
- 88.
Barbara Megson and Jean Lindsay, Girton College 1869–1959: An Informal History (Cambridge: Girton Historical and Political Society, 1961), 55.
- 89.
Butler and McMorran, Girton College Register. Jones was awarded honorary doctorates late in her career.
- 90.
The Times, 6 September 1927. Personal communication from Jane Claydon, Archivist at St Leonards School.
- 91.
Curran was long-time secretary and librarian to the Royal Historical Society and the Historical Association. Butler and McMorran, Girton College Register, and The Historical Association, 1906–1956 (London, 1957), 3.
- 92.
The Economic Journal did publish an obituary of William Ashley by Clapham in December 1927, and the English Historical Review, 22 (1907), 64–68, published one of McArthur’s friend Mary Bateson.
- 93.
In D. C. Coleman’s History and the Economic Past (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), McArthur has one index entry, where her name is misspelled in a list of those who taught at the LSE in its early years. Cunningham has nineteen entries.
- 94.
Christopher Brooke, A History of the University of Cambridge, vol. IV: 1870–1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
- 95.
Jane Chance, ed., Women Medievalists and the Academy; Edward Shils and Carmen Blacker, eds., Cambridge Women: Twelve Portraits (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
- 96.
Berg , “First Women Economic Historians”, 314.
- 97.
Koot, “Cunningham”.
- 98.
The Historical Association, 1906–1956 (London, 1957), 1–3. Alice Gardner of Newnham was also written out of the founding history. Reid, with degrees from London, replaced McArthur at Girton in 1908–9 after she had moved to teach at Westfield, almost certainly brought in by McArthur herself. Butler and McMorran, Girton College Register, 643.
- 99.
Berg , “Knowles”, and Sondheimer, “Skeel”.
- 100.
Pottle, “George”, quoting a report in the Girton Review, 187 (1972), 23–24, from a rather catty comment that George made late in life, recollecting her college days.
- 101.
Sondheimer, “Abram”.
- 102.
Barbara Stephen, Girton College 1869–1932 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933), 96, 185–186. Barbara Megson and Jean Lindsay, Girton College 1869–1959: An Informal History (Cambridge: Heffers for Girton Historical and Political Society, 1961). Muriel C. Bradbrook, That Infidel Place: A Short History of Girton College (London: Chatto & Windus, 1969).
- 103.
Butler and McMorran, Girton College Register, 65.
- 104.
Leonard’s was dedicated to Cunningham , and the preface thanks Hewins and Hall at the LSE, and Maud Syson, her contemporary at Girton. Skeel’s thanks Hubert Hall and I. S. Leadam as well as a long list of those who provided archives and help. Knowles’ was dedicated to Cunningham , with thanks to Mrs [Mabel] Buer and Mrs [Dorothy] George who read parts in manuscript. Abram thanked Hubert Hall and Ellen Marion Delf, a contemporary at Girton and at Westfield. Alice Effie Murray thanked Webb and Hall, together with her LSE colleague Amy Harrison.
- 105.
Curran, “McArthur”, 5.
- 106.
Hughes Hall Report for the Year 1926–27, Presented at the General Meeting of the College Saturday 19 November 1927, provided by college archivist Peter Brook.
- 107.
Concise Economic History of Britain from the Earliest Times to 1750 (1949). “Clapham, Sir John Harold (1873–1946)”, Martin Daunton in ODNB.
- 108.
The Times, 6 September 1927.
- 109.
John Barnes, Models and Interpretations: Selected Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) from an essay published in 1947, based in part on E. E. Evans-Pritchard’s concept of “genealogical amnesia”, published in 1940.
- 110.
For the podcasts of these lectures, see: https://www.hist.cam.ac.uk/research/research-funding/ellen-mcarthur
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Erickson, A.L. (2018). Ellen Annette McArthur: Establishing a Presence in the Academy. In: Smith, H., Zook, M. (eds) Generations of Women Historians. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77568-5_2
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