In the mid-1890s, Daisy Warwick shocked society with her interest in socialist politics. At the time, British Socialism was a growing menace to the aristocracy and landed gentry, who viewed these working class rabble-rousers with disdain and anxiety. Daisy’s conversion to socialism came about when the Clarion, a weekly socialist newspaper lambasted the lavish house-warming ball and party the naive Daisy felt sure was alleviating the poverty of the area. She traveled to Fleet Street as soon as possible to confront the editor of the newspaper, Robert Blatchford, only for him to rip apart everything she believed to be true. From then on, Daisy was determined to use her wealth and position to help the less fortunate. This of course caused much strain on her personal relationships, particularly with the Prince of Wales, and their romantic relationship quickly cooled–though they remained great friends.

A few years into her new political beliefs, Daisy grew just as interested in women’s rights, and was keenly interested in their education and employment. To that end, she decided to train educated women (that is, middle-class women) in horticulture and agriculture. She had already established a hostel for women pupils attending Reading College, and it seemed to her that “training at the Reading College in dairy work, market gardening, poultry-farming, bee-keeping, fruit growing, horticulture and grading, packing and marketing of produce, would appeal to many women of education, and would do something to meet the complaint that foreign competition was proving too much for our market gardeners.” She soon separated her hostel from Reading College and moved it to Studley Castle in Warwickshire in 1903, where it was named Studley Horticultural & Agricultural College for Women.

© Warwickshire County Council

A contemporary description of the college:–

The park in which the College is situated is 340 acres in extent, and includes gardens and glass houses. The founder is responsible for the maintenance of the College, and Lady Warwick is assisted in its management by a committee of ladies and gentlemen. Instruction is given in horticulture, dairy-work, poultry keeping, bee keeping, fruit bottling and preserving, marketing, manual processes, and business methods, and students are prepared for the National Diploma in Dairying, the Certificates and Diplomas of the British Dairy Farmers’ Association, the College Certificate and Diploma in Dairying, and the examinations of the Royal Horticultural Society. The Certificate Courses are usually for one year, and the Diploma Courses for two years, with three years in the case of horticulture and bee keeping combined. The session is of forty weeks’ duration, and consists of three terms of about thirteen weeks each, beginning in September, January, and May. The number of students is between 30 and 40.

Fees.—Full training, with board and residence, £80 to £120 ($400 to $600), according to accommodation required, with extras for bee keeping, fruit bottling, etc. Non-resident students, £1 5s. a week or £13 6s. 8d. per term.

Nature Study Courses of two weeks for men and women are held in the summer, the women being accommodated at the College, and the men in farm lodgings. Fees, £5 5s ($25)., inclusive.

Staff.—Founder: Lady Warwick. Warden: Miss Mabel C. Faithfull. Horticulture: Mr. W. Iggulden, F.R.H.S.; Mr. W. Sarsons. Botany: Mr. W. B. Groves, M.A. (Cantab). Poultry: Mr. George A. Palmer. Dairy Farming and Agriculture—Dairy Instructress: Miss K. A. Baynes, N.D.D., B.D.F.A., Diploma. Book Keeping and Business Training: Mr. A. E. M. Long (Chartered Accountant). Apiculture: Mr. W. Herrod, F.E.S. Fruit Bottling and Jam Making: Miss Cran. Cooking Lessons: Miss Faithfull.

© Best Western Studley Castle Hotel

As it turns out, Daisy was right on the nose, for Edwardian England’s greatest garden designer was a woman–Gertrude Jekyll, whose partnership with Edwin Lutyens produced some of England’s finest gardens. Jekyll, however, studied at the South Kensington School of Art, but famous alumni of Studley College included Adela Pankhurst and Taki Handa a “student and instructor at Doshisha Women’s College of Liberal Arts, Japan, who studied at Studley from 1906-1907, and designed a garden at Cowden Estate in Muckhart, Scotland.” Studley College remained an all-female agricultural college until it closed in 1969 (the castle is now a Best Western hotel), long after Lady Warwick’s death, and it joined Swanley Horticultural College for Women in Kent, and Frances Wolseley’s School of Gardening for Ladies, as a tangible method for “surplus” Victorian and Edwardian women to control their destinies.

Further Reading:
History of Studley Castle
Photographs of Studley College, ca 1910-1930
“Horticultural Education in England, 1900-40: Middle-Class Women and Private Gardening Schools” Garden History
Vol. 31, No. 1 (Spring, 2003) by Anne Meredith

Winchester is older, Rugby the most progressive, and Harrow boasts the most illustrious alumni, but when one thinks of the English public school, one thinks of Eton. Located near Windsor, almost in the shadow of the eponymous Royal Castle–which no doubt showered the college with royal favor–Eton came to symbolize all that was right and good with Edwardian England. Eton was founded by Henry VI in 1440, who drew the rules for governing this “college” from that of Winchester’s, and even took half of that college and settled them at Eton.

The new school was considered a sister college to its elder until it formed its own character (the aforementioned “royal favor”) and became the school of choice for the aristocracy and nobility. By the nineteenth century, Eton had educated more sons of the upper classes than the other public school, and its reputation as the birthplace of the empire’s brightest and highest in the land was solidified by the number of statesmen, military heroes, athletes, and writers, among others, who came out of the school.

Unlike at Winchester, the lines between Collegers and Oppidans, or the poor boys whose tuition and board were supplied by the college, and the boys whose parents paid for tuition and lived in their own houses with a Master, were fiercely drawn. The Collegers, no matter what form (grade in US English), were consigned to the worst food, lodgings, and treatment, and well into the nineteenth century, “the sixteen senior collegers had no water except what they made the lower boys fetch in for them overnight from the pump in the yard.” The lower boys had no basins or water at all, and they bore the brunt of the system of fagging, where “any neglect of duty was met with brutal punishment.”

This state of affairs, as well as the neglect and greed of headmasters, raised public outcry in the 1860s, and a Royal Commission was created in 1861, the effect of which was the Public Schools Act 1868, which “removed these schools from any direct jurisdiction or responsibility of the Crown, established church or government, establishing a board of governors for each school and granting them independence over their administration. The Act led to rapid development of the schools, away from the traditional classics-based curriculum taught by clergymen, to a broader scope of studies.”

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The agitation for education for all classes, also extended to higher education for women. At Oxford, lectures and classes were started for women in 1873, and examinations were instituted for them two years later. In 1878, a group of English liberals formed the Association for the Higher Education of Women, whose aims were pretty self-explanatory. The association split over religious differences, with those aspiring for an Anglican institution founding Lady Margaret Hall. The group reformed the following year to found Somerville Hall, “in which no distinction will be made between students on the ground of their belonging to different religious denominations.”

The Hall was named for the recently-deceased Scottish mathematician and scientist Mary Somerville, who defied 19th century prejudices towards educated women and exhortations that women could not balance marriage and motherhood with a profession. A self-taught science writer and polymath, Somerville published The Mechanism of the Heavens in 1831, and her best-known book, On the Connection of the Physical Sciences in 1834, which brought the achievements of great contemporary scientists to the attention of a wider public. In 1835 she became one of the first women members of the Royal Astronomical Society, and in 1869, she was awarded the Victoria Medal of the Royal Geographical Society. She was also the first person to sign John Stuart Mill’s 1868 petition to Parliament in support of women’s suffrage.

The institution opened in the autumn of 1879 with twelve students and under the leadership of its first Principal, Madeleine Shaw-Lefèvre, sister of a Liberal MP, and daughter of Sir John Shaw Lefevre, a former Vice-Chancellor of London University. According to Miss Shaw-Lefèvre’s diary “for the first few years two cows and a pig formed part of the establishment, but these were later replaced by a pony and a donkey which might be seen disporting themselves in the field, adding to the picturesque and homely character of the place”. Under her ten-year tenure, Somerville Hall enlarged from a hall of residence to a large block of buildings erected to the west in 1886-87, from the designs of H. Wilkinson Moore. During the tenure of the Hall’s second Principal, Agnes Catherine Maitland, the number of students rose from thirty-five to eighty-six, and the buildings were proportionately extended. She developed the tutorial system with a view to making Somerville a genuine college and no mere hall of residence, and she urged the students to take the full degree course so as to prove their title to the degrees. Somerville was the Hall become the first of the women’s halls to adopt a qualifying exam for candidates (1891), and in 1894 it was incorporated as the first women’s college in England.

Miss Maitland (with dark bonnet) is surrounded by her staff and students, including future principal Emily Penrose (3rd from the right in the 3rd row), pioneering Indian lawyer Cornelia Sorabji (far left end of the second row from the front) Indian princesses Bamba and Catherine Duleep Singh (front row far left) and Clara Pater (on the right of Agnes Maitland).

Somerville and Lady Margaret Hall were joined soon after by St. Hugh’s Hall (1886) and St. Hilda’s Hall (1893), though women students had the option of belonging to the Society of Home Students, which comprised students who resided in private families and were supervised by the council of the association. In 1884, “honour moderations and final honour schools of mathematics, natural science, and modern history were opened to women, and from time to time admission to the examinations of other schools was granted, but it was not until 1894 that they were free to present themselves for examination in all the subjects in which men may take the B.A. degree.” However, women remained ineligible for degrees, and Congregation rejected a proposal, in 1896, to admit women to degrees or to grant them diplomas recording their success in the final schools examinations. Nonetheless, these colleges, and their sister colleges at Cambridge, Girton and Newnham, struck the first blows at the prejudice against women’s higher education, and prepared a new generation of women for a liberated life.

When Sophia Smith made plans to bequeath her fortune to the foundation of a women’s college in the sleepy town of Northampton, Massachusetts, she laid the foundation for one of America’s premiere women’s colleges: “1) the educational advantages provided by it would be equal to those afforded by young men in their colleges; 2) Biblical study and Christian religious culture would be given prominence; 3) the cottage system of buildings, or homes for the students, instead of one mammoth central building, would prevail; 4) men would have a part in the government and instruction in it as well as women, ‘for it is a misfortune for young women or young men to be educated wholly by their own kind.’”

After Miss Smith’s death in 1870, her estate, appraised at $500,000, went almost entirely to the college for which she had designed it, and in September of the following year, the first building acquired by Smith College was purchased. A committee was formed to select a president for Smith, and Reverend Lauremus Clark Seelye, LL.D., was chosen. This careful, intelligent man enhanced Sophia Smith’s vision for her women’s college; after surveying women’s colleges and universities at home and abroad, and consulting with the leading educators of the time, he determined that Smith should have no preparatory department connected with it and decided that it should be a college where young women would have superior opportunities for increasing their education. Up to the founding of Smith, no other college for women had been founded without a preparatory department, none had required Greek for entrance, and the majority of them demanded little more, and often less, than that accomplished in the best secondary schools. But Seelye was determined that Smith be different, and in the summer of 1875, College Hall, the first academic building, was finished and dedicated, and at a quarter to nine, September 9, 1875, Smith College opened at morning prayers with four residing teachers and fourteen students. From then on, Smith College devoted itself to excellence in women’s higher education, and began to carve its own niche amongst its “seven sisters.”

The college year at Smith opened with a dance known as the “Freshman Frolic,” then in October, came the reception given by the sophomores to welcome the entering class. A new girl would be escorted to this occasion by an upper class partner, who, in addition to filling out her dance card and sending her flowers, saw to it that the freshman met the right person for each dance. The upper class partner entertained the freshman during refreshments and then saw her home. A dance of the same sort was given by the junior class members as a farewell to the senior class. Other important events were Mountain Day, where everyone took the day off for outdoor excursions, and Rally Day, which was held informally in the mid 1890s, and was celebrated in the Spring.

Since there was no preparatory department attached to Smith, its curriculum was vigorous and thorough, “a year’s work being required of all students in certain specified studies. A certain number of papers was to be submitted to the English department for criticism every year in which the requirement in English was not taken. All required studies except Philosophy must be taken in the first two years. Each student must pursue a main study which shall consist of related three-hour courses, taken consecutively through the Junior and Senior years, and based, so far as is specified by the several departments, upon preliminary work of the earlier years.” Physical training was also required, and each member of the first and second classes was required to take gymnasium work for half hours a week from November 1st to the spring recess. Juniors and Seniors were required four periods of exercise a week of not less than one hour each from October 1 to June 1. Neither were considered a hardship for Smith’s students, particularly the latter, when a mania for basketball and (field) hockey swept through women’s colleges in both America and England in the 1890s.

Tuition in 1905 was $100, and room and board, $300 a year, which was moderately expensive, especially since it was not yet fashionable for the daughters of extremely wealthy men to attend college. To help with the expenses, Smith not only had a many, many scholarships for students, but a Student’s Aid Society, which assisted those who lacked the means to finish their education by offering loans without interest to needy and worthy students of the three upper classes, allowing them three to five years for the payment.

Though women’s colleges in America later followed Smith’s lead in abolishing preparatory departments and increasing the rigor of their curriculum, Smith nonetheless remains dedicated to producing women of intelligence and achievement, and of broad outlook.

A major development of the nineteenth century was the emergence of world’s fairs, all of which served to entertain visitors and impress them with the technological and cultural advances of Western nations and their colonies which increased exponentially–and dazzlingly–after the 1851 Great Exhibition hosted by England under the auspices of the Prince Consort. By the 1900 world’s fair, which was held in Paris, there had been eleven other expositions, held in such places as Vienna, Philadelphia, Sydney, New Orleans, Barcelona, and Chicago, which introduced a variety of inventions and cultures to awed visitors.

Though there were three more expositions of significance by the dawn of WWI (St Louis in 1904, Seattle in 1909, and San Francisco in 1915), the one held in 1900 was unique in that it was the first and last fair to bridge the gap between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This was also the pinnacle of imperialism, and the “nadir of race relations in America.” After witnessing the successful campaign for the inclusion of African-Americans in the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, African-Americans viewed the Paris Exhibition as another avenue to promote the progress of their people in the thirty-five years since the end of slavery. The year before the fair, W.E.B. Du Bois, a noted sociologist and activist for African-Americans, began to collect material for the display, and focused on “creating charts, maps, and graphs recording the growth of population, economic power, and literacy among African Americans in Georgia.” In conjunction with Daniel A.P. Murray, assistant to the Librarian of Congress, Du Bois was able to assemble a large collection of written works, which included a bibliography of 1400 titles, 200 books, and many of the 150 periodicals published by black Americans.

Du Bois stated that the objective of the exhibit was quadruple, and by displaying it he hoped to illustrate “the History of the American Negro, the Present condition of the Negro, the Education of the Negro, and Literature of the Negro.” he project was backed with a $15,000 budget appropriated from the American government and amounted to numerous artifacts, including “musical compositions, books by African American authors, and the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar, their award-winning display of photographs, books, models, maps, patents, and plans from several black universities, including Atlanta, Fisk, Howard, Hampton, and Tuskegee, showed the world African Americans “studying, examining, and thinking of their own progress, and prospect.”

One highlight of the exhibit utilized nine model displays to depict the progress of Negroes from slavery to the present day. The models began with the homeless freedman and end[ed] with the modern brick schoolhouse and its teachers. Finally, to illustrate the increase in population of the race and to demonstrate other contributions, there were charts showing population growth, the decline in illiteracy and a record of the more than 350 patents granted to black men since 1834. Du Bois stated, concerning the exhibit “we have thus, it may be seen, an honest, straightforward exhibit of a small nation of people, picturing their life and development without apology or gloss, and above all made by themselves.” As a result of its great success, the Negro Exhibit was awarded with seventeen medals during its time on display at the Paris Exposition. Specifically, it received “two grand prizes, four gold medals, seven silver medals, two bronze medals and two honorable mentions” in the various categories of appraisal.

Further Reading:
About Du Bois and the Paris Exposition
The 1900 Paris Exposition
The Exhibit of American Negroes
W.E.B. Du Bois and the 1900 Paris Exhibition
Africans, Darkies and Negroes: Black Faces at the Pan American Exposition of 1901, Buffalo, New York
A small nation of people: W.E.B. Du Bois and African American portraits of progress from the Library of Congress with essays by David Levering Lewis and Deborah Willis.
The Exhibit Online