By Sarah Stephen
One hundred years ago, women who wanted to educate themselves were sneered at and called "blue stockings". This label accused them of masquerading as men — at the time, male intellectuals were depicted as wearing blue stockings.
Women daring to enter higher education were challenging the dominant ideology that women's only natural and proper roles were as wives, mothers and/or housekeepers.
The alarm that this challenge provoked within the establishment is reflected in a 1873 book by Edward Clarke, Sex in Education. Clarke concluded that if women used up their "limited energy" studying, they would endanger their "female apparatus" — their biological capacity to bear children.
Clark wrote that although a woman could study and learn, she could not do all this and expect "a future secure from neuralgia, uterine disease, hysteria and other derangements of the nervous system".
A woman was first admitted to the University of London in 1868, but only to take classes and exams. It was another decade before women were permitted to attain a degree. The University of Cambridge did not admit women on equal terms until 1947.
As more women entered higher education, they were accused of "taking over" the universities (much as women are still accused of "taking men's jobs"). They were also accused of causing male enrolments and academic performance to fall.
At the turn of the century, social commentator G. Stanley Hall lamented that women would "become functionally castrated, unwilling to accept the limitation of married life". He was right.
The first wave of feminism, which demanded formal equality in work, education, marriage and the right to vote, rocked society.
But for most of the 130 years that women have had access to higher education, only the wealthiest could take advantage of it.
In the 19th century, universities prepared members of the upper classes for professions such as law, medicine and the church. With rapid technological development in the early 1900s, however, capitalism required a better trained, more skilled work force.
To meet this need, universities were expanded, especially after World War II. In the advanced capitalist countries during the 1960s, the number of universities doubled and the number of students trebled. In 1870, the entire US university population was only 50,000 — all from the middle and ruling class. Today it is 5.5 million.
Between the late 1880s and 1950, the proportion of university students in the US who were women increased by almost 10% to 30%, by 1975 it had reached 45%, and by the mid-1980s it was 52%.
Mirroring a trend in most advanced capitalist countries, in 1974 the Australian Labor government was pushed by a strong "free education" movement to abolish all university tuition fees. Fees were the single biggest barrier to women's entry into tertiary education.
Many barriers remained, however, including: the absence of free, on-campus child-care services; decent financial assistance; sexual harassment and assault; sexist language and curricula.
Neither did the increasing participation of women wipe out the effects of sexism in the wider society, so even those women who went on to tertiary education remained concentrated in traditional areas of study for women — the social sciences, nursing and teaching.
And while the proportion of women going on to postgraduate study slowly improved, it still remains lower than for men. In 1970, women were 27% of postgraduate students. By 1989 this had risen to 48%, but was still only 34% of PhD students.
During the 1980s, the federal Labor government began to claw back some of the gains that its predecessors had been forced to grant women. In 1986 the education portfolio was subsumed in the new Department of Employment, Education and Training: education was to be linked more directly to the needs of business.
The government began to promote the idea that universities should become "competitive" and "efficient". Universities were amalgamated, the bigger institutions swallowing up smaller, specialised campuses.
Government funding was pared back; the first faculties to be cut were those in which women students predominate — the humanities and arts, including women's studies.
In 1987 the government attempted to introduce up-front fees for undergraduates. While the proposed fee was small, students realised that it would be easy for governments to keep decreasing funding and increasing fees. A strong campaign developed against the fee, and the government was forced to back off. Instead, it introduced a deferred fee in the form of the Higher Education Contribution Scheme.
HECS has undermined women's access to education. The majority of men pay HECS up front, while the majority of women defer until they are earning. Studies have shown that one in four women will still be paying off their HECS debt at the age of 65, compared with only one in 25 men.
This disparity will probably get worse. The difference in wage levels between men and women averages 20-35% and likely to increase. More women workers are being pushed into part-time and casual work, and they are concentrated in unskilled and semi-skilled work.
Last year, the Liberal federal government increased HECS by at least $800 for all courses, and decreased the repayment threshold to $20,701 (94% of adults in full-time employment earn more than this). More women will therefore live in poverty in order to pay off their debt earlier, and many will be discouraged from entering higher education.
The moves towards fully "user pays" higher education will have a dramatic effect on women's (as well as other oppressed groups') participation .
Already women are 54% of students who do not pay fees, and 41% of fee-paying students. Still higher fees could wipe out all of the progress of the last two decades and further limit access to higher education for women.
A century ago, women campaigned for their right to enter universities. Today, women must again campaign to be allowed to stay, for without full access to education, women's struggle for equality in all other areas of society will be much, much harder.