pure oil perfume: Cufflink Blanks

Friday, 27 July 2012

Cufflink Blanks

When St Hugh’s College, Oxford was founded in 1886, it was born amid fierce debate about women’s emancipation and the very question of what it meant to be a woman. Higher education for women was still a new and hard-won achievement at that time, and despite modest beginnings (St Hugh’s began with just four students), the creation of the early women’s university colleges was of enormous symbolic importance in furthering the cause of female rights and education. For over a hundred years, until the first male students arrived in 1987, its identity was inextricably bound up with ideas about women, their behaviour and their role in society. On one level, A Serious Endeavour is a concise and highly readable account of the eventful and sometimes turbulent history of St Hugh’s up to the present day. I