A Short History of Newnham College, Cambridge

								

adult and armed, from the brain of their founder--or possibly from
the conjoint thoughts and efforts of a few generous and like-minded
patrons. Their birthdays are easily determined. Their continuity can
be traced both in material persistence and progress and in moral
and intellectual development and adaptation to changing conditions.
Others--and prominent among them the subject of this sketch--came
into being so gradually that their length of days may be variously
calculated. To the past students of Newnham College, the beginning
seems to be most naturally and fittingly associated with the day when
a comparatively small dwelling house was first opened, in Cambridge, by
Professor Sidgwick and a small group of friends, and placed under the
wise and devoted care of Miss Clough, for the accommodation of a few
young women who wished to give their time to serious study under the
tuition of such University professors, lecturers, and private teachers
as might be willing to further their desire for higher education.
Incorporation as a College was not to come for nine years, nor any
measure of distinct recognition by the University for ten years. But
no Newnham woman would reckon our beginnings from 1880 or 1881. An
antiquarian spirit might fancy that the germs were in the room in Mr.
Clay's garden, where lectures were first delivered to women students
and others. But student life and university instruction had for us its
first embodiment in the little community of five, and their teachers
and helpers, whose relations with Cambridge began in 1871.
This settlement of Miss Clough and the five students was the small
beginning out of which grew an institution which many hundreds of women
now regard with passionate loyalty, and which no opponents or doubters
can venture to despise. To understand its origin we need to go back a
little and consider how and why the movement towards higher education
for women was then beginning to take form, and why it came to be
specially associated with Cambridge.
It would be partly true and partly false to regard the objects of
those who practically founded Newnham College as identical with those
of the leading champions of the political and legal rights of women.
Of course, as might naturally be expected, many of those who, through
breadth of sympathy and hatred of injustice, gave the greater part
of their lives and energies to the removal of female disabilities,
public and private, were very ready to respond to the demand for higher
education for girls and women. One need only think (looking at the
leaders of thought in the middle of last century) of John Stuart Mill
(a benefactor to the Cambridge Lectures Association and to similar
enterprises) with the philosophic school which he represented and led.
The advocates of political liberty and those of higher education for
women used to a large extent the same arguments, and the securing of