Blue stockings
From August 17 to 21, Blue Stocking Week, events will be held on campuses across Australia to focus attention on women's participation in higher education.
A century ago, women who wanted a formal education were referred to by the derogatory term "blue stockings". Their desire alarmed the ruling class, which feared it would challenge and undermine the strict social roles — marriage, motherhood and housekeeping — assigned to women.
In 1873, Dr Edward Clarke published Sex in Education, in which he concluded it was possible for women to read and learn, but not while retaining "uninjured health and a future secure from neuralgia, uterine disease, hysteria and other derangement of the nervous system".
The ruling class's fears were well placed. Women's increasing access to education did not lead to hysteria or neuroses, but it certainly led them to question the limitations of married life. As the first wave of feminists banged on the doors of the universities, they also demanded the right to vote, to be legally independent of men and to express themselves.
Through defiant struggle, women won the right to an education. The first women entered universities in England in the 1860s and by 1870, in the US, 21% of university students were women.
Initially, this right was won only for women of the ruling class. For both men and women, a university degree was the prerogative of the rich; the number of people attending universities was tiny: only 50,000 in the US in 1870 and only 30,000 in Australia as late as 1940.
The role of universities changed markedly following World War II. During that capitalist boom, the ruling class urgently needed a more skilled and educated work force. Universities became institutions for educating a much broader layer of the population, including more working-class people. During the 1960s, the university population doubled or trebled in all advanced capitalist countries.
The ratio of female to male students nevertheless remained low. The conservative social climate in the 1950s placed women firmly in "the home", amidst Tupperware parties, babies and domesticity. In Australia, it was only after the introduction of free education in 1974, combined with the rise of the second wave of the women's liberation movement, that women eventually made up half the university population.
While women's overall participation rate has remained at around 50% since then, much less progress has been made in equalising the nature of women's participation. Today, gender discrimination in higher education is most evident in the spread of women across different parts of the university.
Women are still much less likely than men to enrol in postgraduate study, for example, and many studies reveal that twice the proportion of men as women are assisted by their employers with tuition fees.
The gap between men and women is even wider in the proportion of students who complete higher degrees; around 85% of men complete their doctorates, compared to 15% of women.
Recent research by the National Tertiary Education Industry Union revealed that women make up only 10% of professors and associate professors, take six years longer to complete their PhDs and are paid around $439 a fortnight less than their male academic counterparts.
Women are also concentrated in particular fields of study. The result is that, throughout this decade, more than 50% of female employees have been concentrated in two occupations: clerks and sales assistants. Of the 18.5% of women employees in professional jobs in 1990, half were teachers or registered nurses.
The dismantling of awards, some of which included study leave provisions; the increasing cost of child-care services; the slashing of government funding for public education; the attacks on student assistance schemes; and the introduction of up-front fees for more and more undergraduate courses, combined with the widening gap between men's and women's average wages, are exacerbating this inequality.
One hundred years ago, women had to fight to get in the doors of universities. Today, the women's movement needs to fight, not just to open those doors wider so that women may sit in equal numbers alongside men in courses such as the sciences, in postgraduate classes and among academics, but to keep the doors open at all to significant numbers of women.
Poor women, indigenous women, non-English speaking background women, mothers of young children, working women — all are still a long way from equal access to tertiary education, and they are being pushed further away.
Education is a basic human right, not a privilege for wealthy white males. During Blue Stocking Week, and beyond, we must demand:
No fees!
No attacks on Austudy or Abstudy!
No privatisation of education!
Increase funding for public education!
By Zanny Begg