Caroline Spurgeon--English Studies, The United States, and Internationalism.

ABSTRACT

Analysis of the difficult establishment of the first woman professor of English English Studies, Caroline Spurgeon, in the Anglo-Saxon and European contexts reveals crucial but much neglected traits of the history of the discipline. Among other things, it shows that when, in the decisive phase of expansion and reorientation after World War I, English English Studies finally seemed to be coming into its own, it was already heavily dependent on US power. The new constellations in world politics become particularly clear in Spurgeon's characterization of the Newbolt Report and her role in the founding of the International Federation of University Women.

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For good reasons, Caroline Frances Eleanor Spurgeon (1869-1942) is regarded as the first woman professor of English English Studies. Moreover, she exercised great influence and, therefore, is a fit subject for a conference in memory of the first woman professor of Polish English Studies. (1) In fact, the two scholars show a number of similarities. Both, for instance, first established themselves in medieval studies. Spurgeon, however, also played a role in the decisive reorientation of English English studies in the context of World War I, i.e. away from philology towards English literature as the leading paradigm. Among other things, she was a member of the Newbolt Committee.

Spurgeon exhibits specific, forward-looking features, which were, to a considerable degree, connected with her special role as a woman. Thus, her example allows us not only to recover a substantial portion of the female part of the history of our discipline, but, simultaneously, to illuminate important characteristics that her male colleagues either did not evince with the same clarity or that, in their case, at least have been badly neglected.

In studying the broader contexts, a non-British, continental perspective may prove helpful. I will first trace Spurgeon's development up to her attainment of the Hildred Carlile Chair at Bedford College and will then concentrate on her activities during the decisive phase of reorientation. (2)

1. Spurgeon's beginnings up to her professorship

Born in 1869, Caroline Spurgeon, in many respects, represents the European social type of the (upper) middle-class daughter. More precisely, she may be called an (upper) middle-class daughter of the Empire, because she was born in India as the only child of a captain. The early years of her youth were spent in Germany and France. As was still common for girls, no great value was attached to her school education. According to Spurgeon's own description, it was limited almost completely to languages and music -- not such a bad basis for specializing later in English. It was at quite an advanced age, twenty-four, that she began her studies at King's and University College London, out of the desire to "attain a thorough and healthy education" (Spurgeon 1999: 88, my translation). Encouraged by a committed Vice-Principal, Lilian Faithfull, she read for the Oxford Honours School in English Language and Literature and passed these examinations in 1899 (Dyhouse 1995: 157 f.).

Although Spurgeon no longer belonged to the first generation of women students, the fulfilment of her wish "to accomplish something definitive" and an academic career were still extremely difficult (Spurgeon 1999: 88, my translation). Being a woman she was not eligible for an Oxford degree, and one backdoor through which a number of others of her sex would soon be able to enter was not open to her. Since she had not taken the full course in Oxford, she was not able to legitimate her success in the examinations by securing a degree ad eundem from Trinity College Dublin. (3) At least, she had the opportunity to join the teaching faculty of Bedford College. She had never intended to become involved in teaching, but this was a chance to get a foot in the door of academia, particularly since during the reorganization of the University of London it had been Bedford among the women's colleges that was immediately integrated and thus recognized as fully academic (Sutherland 1999: 46).

The difficulties confronting Spurgeon with a view to a doctorate would deserve closer scrutiny. What is clear is that she worked ten years on her dissertation. One factor was that the University of London (which had been among the first British universities to admit women to their degrees) still had to fight hard for its full recognition. As late as 1908 Sidney Webb observed that it was still difficult to persuade people that there was a University of London, although it was the biggest in the country and the fourth or fifth largest in the world (Harte 1986: 180). Two years earlier an "intellectual entente cordiale" was established with the Sorbonne, one of the oldest universities outside Italy, with a view to increasing one's respectability. At the Sorbonne, English Studies was already well established, compared to other universities or countries on the Continent (Haas 2000: 359), and it was there that Spurgeon turned, for the formalities at any rate. Of the two professors of English, Alexandre Beljame and E mile Legouis, Legouis in particular maintained close contact with England and had suitable research interests. (4) In 1911, at last, at the age of forty-two, Spurgeon attained a doctorate of literature on the basis of Chaucer devant la critique en Angleterre et en France depuis son temp jusqu'a nos jours.

How important a formal qualification was on account of the manifold prejudices against women in academia can be seen from the example of Spurgeon's friend Edith Morley. Morley did not want to spend so much time, money, and energy on a few letters after her name and built up English at Reading almost single-handed, only to find that, when the college was being elevated to a full university, she was to be the only lecturer in charge of a subject who would not be promoted to the professorial ranks. Morley ultimately managed to obtain the title of Professor (in 1908, not for English Literature, but English Language). Nevertheless, she suffered intensely from discrimination throughout her further career, especially since the college authorities continued to regard it as unacceptable for men to be responsible to a woman (Dyhouse 1995: 160 f.).

In comparison with Morley, Spurgeon had two great advantages: publications in the most prestigious field, medieval studies, and certain protective mechanisms of a women's college. As the importance of official qualifications had been perfectly clear to a number of women networking for the promotion of female higher education, the British Federation of University Women, founded in 1907, had soon created an annual prize fellowship, and Spurgeon had been the first recipient. Thanks to her doctoral degree and further qualification, she was now able to succeed in open competition against other applicants for the new university chair in English Literature, tenable at Bedford College in 1913. (5) Thus Spurgeon attained her chair not merely by internal promotion and, accordingly, could consider herself the first proper and hilly accepted woman professor of English English Studies, and the first frilly accepted woman professor in England in general (Spurgeon 1999: 90). Within the University of London, she remained the only exception for quite a while, and Oxford and Cambridge were even further from accepting women on an equal footing.

Still, Spurgeon was now able to publish with Oxford University Press (OUP) and Cambridge University Press (CUP), as they committed themselves more broadly to medieval studies as well as mysticism (cf. Matthews 1999: 185 f.). In view of the dissolution of the Chaucer Society, OUP cooperated in the publication of the seven instalments of her Five hundred years of Chaucer criticism and allusion from 1914 onwards, and the definitive edition of 1925 rested with CUP. Her seminal medievalist work, in contrast, the 1901 edition of Richard Brathwait's comments, in 1665, upon Chaucer & Tales of the Miller and the Wife of Bath, had been printed by the earlier, non-Oxbridge publishers of the Chaucer Society. The latter, it is worth remembering, had been founded by Frederick James Furnivall out of a democratic idea of education. As in the various other literary societies he started, he encouraged women to take an active part and, in simple matters, even enlisted help from ordinary workers. It had been Furnivall, and not a n established professor, who opened for Spurgeon the perspective on her dissertation project.

That the first fully recognized female professor of English English Studies had to take a very important, perhaps even the decisive step of her academic career on the Continent, in a non-English-speaking country, comes as no surprise to someone familiar with the history of women's higher education. In order to counter the massive opposition, women depended heavily on international exchange of information and mobility. No country was progressive in all areas concerning the improvement of their position. Even in the United States, in spite of its early establishment and recognition of women's colleges, and in spite of its early admission of women to diverse coeducational institutions, there had also been great difficulties at the higher levels -- graduate study, doctorate, and academic career -- and often they still continued. In the late 1870s, for instance, Martha Carey Thomas, after obtaining a B.A. from Cornell, had not been admitted to the seminars at Johns Hopkins, but only to individual instruction. She had moved on to Leipzig. There she was allowed to participate in the seminars and even to write a thesis, but not to receive a degree and so had to content herself with the philological prestige study at Leipzig imparted. She then resorted to the liberal University of Zurich, a Mecca for academic women, where, in 1882, she obtained a Ph.D. summa cum laude for a dissertation on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

The example of Carey Thomas (1857-1935), however, also illustrates how much further the academic establishment of women had already progressed in the United States by the first decade of the twentieth century. As early as 1884 Thomas had become Professor of English and Dean at the Quaker women's college Bryn Mawr, and since 1894 had been serving as President there. Nevertheless, a decisive factor should not go unmentioned: Thomas's rich friend Mary Garrett, the daughter of a railway boss, gave Bryn Mawr $10,000 each year that Thomas served as President. In the new century, Thomas was an American celebrity and leading spokeswoman for women and higher education. Her criticism of Harvard President Charles W. Eliot's outdated notions of women's roles had been reported by newspapers throughout the States, and her monograph Education of women had been published by the US government for the Paris Exposition of 1900 (American national biography 1999, 21: 519-522). In Europe in contrast, even for a doctorate Spurgeon still had to turn to a country where women were helped by the fact that the universities did not enjoy such high esteem as at home or in certain other states. (6)

2. World War I and the Newbolt Report

Spurgeon gained the chair in 1913, the year before the outbreak of World War I. Like most women, the war offered her opportunities to extend her sphere of work, consolidate her position, and move into the public eye. Together with the majority of her male colleagues, she participated in the great "war of the professors", which was waged on both sides of the trenches. Although Spurgeon had won her reputation through medieval studies, this had not been in Old English or highly specialized philology, but in connection with a classic that was enjoyed outside the groves of academe as well, and she had precisely focused on the reception history, which also implied certain national emphases. Now she had increased, if questionable, opportunities to put her subject to the test regarding its relevance for life. Her inaugural address to King's College of Women of October 1914 stressed "the privilege of living in war-time". Soon she served on the executive committee of the "Fight for Right Movement". This had been founde d by Sir Francis Young husband, the explorer of Manchuria and Tibet, and its twenty-one Vice-Presidents were a corona of personalities of high society, famous academics, and writers like Robert Bridges, Edmund Gosse, Thomas Hardy, and Henry Newbolt. In her 1916 speech, The training of the combatant, Spurgeon employed full-blown propaganda rhetoric in the service of general moral armament and mobilization of all energies at home, in order to forestall an "inconclusive peace" before the final victory. Quite typically, she presented German intellectualism as subaltern and the fight against it as the fight for the future of civilization itself. In contrast, she showed already much more moderation in her lecture Poetry in the light of war, given to the English Association in January 1917.

The end of the war brought far-reaching changes to the political geography and also precipitated the establishment of new paradigms in academia. For English Studies, this was particularly obvious, as the political reordering entailed important changes in the role of the English language. By deciding the outcome of the war, the United States had unquestionably emerged as a world power, and by pushing English through as the language of the peace treaties alongside French, President Wilson laid the foundations for the role of English in the international organizations that the twentieth century was to develop on an ever-increasing scale, from the League of Nations via the UN to the present-day plethora of GOs and NGOs. Moreover, in a number of European states that were created or renewed on the basis of the right to national self-determination, the anti-German and anti-Austrian aversions gave a decisive impetus to the use of English and to English Studies. To what degree the rise of the United States meant a ser ious weakening of Britain would only later become fully evident. For the time being, the Anglo-Saxon ties were emphasized.

Even before the fighting was over, England passed an Education Act and sent a Universities Mission to the United States, to which Spurgeon belonged, together with Rose Sidgwick, Lecturer in History at the University of Birmingham. The fact that originally the Universities Mission had no women delegates and that only on American insistence were the two added shows how small women's part in academia still was (Batho 1968: 3). Thanks to her public commitments and connection with the English Association, Spurgeon was also a member of the so-called Newbolt Committee. This official enquiry into the teaching of English at all levels of the education system had been instigated by the English Association, which, founded in 1906 by two schoolmasters, had acquired great influence, notably in cooperation with powerful circles. However, Spurgeon obviously considered her US contacts more important. She was almost overwhelmed by the country's "eager and thrilling vitality" (Spurgeon 1922: 67), formed a close friendship with Virginia Gildersleeve, an English scholar and Dean of Barnard, availed herself of the greater academic possibilities she had there (e.g., as a visiting professor at the renowned Columbia University), and was active internationally. During a large part of the meetings of the Newbolt Committee and the final drafting of its Report, she preferred to lecture in the southern states and to campaign for the International Federation of University Women.

For England, the Newbolt Report signalled the change of leading paradigm and expansion of the subject most emphatically. In The Atlantic Monthly, January 1922, Spurgeon presented it to an American public, in the context of the Reports on the Classics, Modern Languages, Natural Sciences, and Adult Education. This article, entitled "The refashioning of English education: A lesson of the Great War", is an important, but completely neglected document of the history of English Studies. It differs significantly from the comments and publications of Spurgeon's male colleagues (cf. Baldick 1987: 92-108) - namely through her clear orientation towards America as a model and her pronounced internationalism - and deserves a closer look.

Through World War I, it had become extremely easy to denigrate comparative philology and language study as a "Germanic", alien yoke. But, in contrast to certain wartime publications, Spurgeon's tone in The Atlantic Monthly was no longer strident. She contented herself with quoting Sir Walter Raleigh's "apt description" of such philology as "hypothetical sound-shiftings in the primaeval German forests" (Spurgeon 1922: 63). At the same time, however, she hardly specified what might be taken over from France, despite her first-hand knowledge, and although in the introduction she saw a vital reason for the "superior quality of French staff-work" in "the trained power of the French officer to express himself readily, accurately and clearly in his own language". With much more emphasis than her male colleagues (cf. Baldick 1987), Spurgeon criticized the class character of the English education system and pleaded for its democratization. Since she herself had been impeded by the educational barriers and, on the othe r hand, appreciated the positive results of the American system for women, this will have been much easier for her. Right in the introduction, she set the United States up as the model by extensively quoting from the Newbolt Report a comparison that a chaplain had made in Flanders between the ordinary English soldier and the men from overseas. He lamented that the mental equipment of the former was "pitiful", compared with the "overseas man, with his freedom from tradition, his wide outlook on life, his intolerance of vested interests, and his contempt for distinction based on birth rather than worth" (1922: 55). How much Spurgeon agreed with this view (in contrast to certain others on the Newbolt Committee) becomes evident from the fact that she repeated the key concepts in slight variation in her own argument - "independence of thought", "sense of real values", "less trammeled life" - and underlined that now they were gradually being accepted for a national education in England, too. Looking at her own coun try with American eyes, she reminded her readers that "the idea of a similar elementary education for all, which in America is almost axiomatic, is for England revolutionary" (1922: 57). Her praise of the Workers' Educational Association as "the most significant, vital and hopeful educational movement in Great Britain" (1922: 58) points into the same direction, as does her fundamental approval of the enormous expansion of the tertiary sector in the United States, the "vast universities on a scale undreamed of here", including their "student self-government of a high order" (1922: 67). While hinting that some elements from the long tradition of the Old World might be helpful to the New, "desirous of raising its standards to a high degree of finish and perfection", she stressed much more emphatically that "in the special task, which lies before us in England, of the refashioning of our education in closest relation to life, in order to meet the needs of our great industrial population, I believe that America, o f all the countries in the world, is the one that can teach us most" (1922: 67). This already implied for Spurgeon accepting the newer type of university student, "the many who [did] not come from cultivated surroundings, and who [were] not preparing to be scholars or educational specialists" (1922: 67).

America also furnished Spurgeon with models for establishing a close relation between the national literature and life, both for the traditional and newer kind of student, and the "live" methods she recommended included play-writing and training in dramatic art. Again her choice of examples was revealing: beside a (male) Harvard professor, two female lecturers from Barnard. A further institution she already cited (following the Report) was the MIT; there Frank Aydelotte's experiment concerning the teaching of English in engineering schools attracted her attention. (7) All in all, Spurgeon took the view that the importance of English in school and university was much more broadly recognized in the United States than in Britain, and also less hampered by entrenched prejudices (cf. especially p. 63). Unfortunately, her suggestions, like those of the Report, very much amounted to an emotionalising, uncritical use of literature, which still lacked proper theoretical foundations.

The unifying effects of a common national education, emphasized by the Report, seemed to Spurgeon already a foreshadowing of a desirable "unifying international effect which can be got only through a common education, thought out on an international basis" (1922: 62). In the reform and innovation fervour of the early twenties, she put her hopes on an education that would not exclude anyone, in order to check "violence and misery and disorder" and to balance and control "the swiftly increasing knowledge of material and destructive forces" (1922: 56). Here she did not make it clear what exactly she meant, apart from preventing future wars. The Russian Revolution, the unacknowledged nightmare of many intellectuals, is nowhere named. Spurgeon did, however, state that the stirrings of a new spirit were "to be seen in all the nations under different forms", thus, at least, including the former enemy states. Accordingly she expressed the wish for a further report: one "on what we can learn from other countries to he lp us in our work". As a first adumbration she cited H.G. Wells's scheme of a "Bible of Civilization" or -- in another formulation of his -- "The Book of Necessary Knowledge". Wells considered a worldwide common-school education on a common basis an indispensable prerequisite for bringing about a new order in the world and a real "world civilization". Again the New World was to provide the model. Along with Wells, who was in Washington to cover the Disarmament Conference for the New York World, Spurgeon hailed the USA as "a hopeful laboratory of world-unifying thought" (1922: 66). Thus, Spurgeon's internationalism already bore distinct American features and accepted US supremacy. Written, in all likelihood, during the first significant gathering of world leaders in the capital of the United States, which, beyond any doubt, marked the country's ascendance to world power, Spurgeon's article mirrored the passing of cultural leadership from the Old World to the New. Wells, for his part, was to leave the conferenc e disillusioned and very dispirited (cf. Smith 1986: 274), but the Great Books Scheme, which was being developed at Columbia, soon started to spread throughout the American universities and via them enormously influenced twentieth-century concepts of education. Of its 151 authors, forty-nine were English or American, only three each Scottish, Irish, Spanish or Italian. (8)

3. The International Federation of University Women

I cannot discuss here Spurgeon's further contributions to the development of English Studies. Her literary analyses of the twenties and thirties are still widely cited anyway. I would just like to mention that her occupation with Shakespeare was, to a certain degree, due to American stimuli -- stimuli even of a very elementary kind. Soon after the completion of her great Chaucer work, an American woman, a friend of her friends, drew her attention to John Keats' Shakespeare edition slumbering in a private library at Princeton, which led to her first substantial Shakespeare publication (1928). Then, around 1929, a very generous American gift allowed her to retire from teaching at Bedford College and to concentrate all her energy on exploring the field with which her name is still intimately linked: Shakespeare's imagery.

What needs to be dealt with briefly in our context is the international commitment of Spurgeon's on the margins of her discipline, or just outside, with which she achieved the most far-reaching results. It was during her first visit to the United States, in the late autumn of 1918, when she had been discussing the recent war with Sidgwick and Gildersleeve, that she had a momentous idea: "We should have ... an international federation of university women, so that we at least shall have done all we can to prevent another such catastrophe". As her friends readily agreed, in Gildersleeve's eyes, the International Federation of University Women (IFUW) was born (Batho 1968: 3). The official establishment took place in London in 1919 with representatives from the British, American, and Canadian associations. Apart from Gildersleeve, the American delegates were Carey Thomas and Dean Helen Taft also of Bryn Mawr. The founders and some more idealists campaigned energetically, and, in various countries, the prospect of a great international federation gave a decisive impetus towards the creation of associations at national level. Thus, in 1920, at the first conference of the IFUW at Bedford College there were an additional five national federations (from Czechoslovakia, France, Italy, the Netherlands, and Spain) and delegates from further countries where national associations were formed shortly afterwards (Belgium, Denmark, India, Norway, South Africa, Sweden). Spurgeon was elected the first President, and the International Headquarters were fixed in London, where a room and the services of a secretary were provided by the Universities Bureau of the British Empire. In 1922, Spurgeon was re-elected for another period and then followed by Gildersleeve. According to her friend, Spurgeon possessed a "dynamic ability not only to inspire people with a vision but to make them work for its fulfilment" (Batho 1968: 3). By 1925, the IFUW already boasted of 28,114 members.

However, in order to put Spurgeon's achievements into perspective, it should be remembered that there had been earlier international federations of women's associations, i.e. of associations not limited to university women. On the academic level, American women in particular had made efforts to develop branches abroad, because American graduates were already going out into the entire world. Above all, earlier and direct peace work had been done by women like Anita Augspurg and Jane Addams, who had come together at The Hague in 1915 and had started a number of initiatives to halt the war. They had founded the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom -- and some, like Emily Greene Balch, had been sacked for it.

The Oslo conference in 1924, which marked the end of Spurgeon's two terms, was organized jointly by the four Nordic associations, despite the political tensions between their countries. It focussed on "The place of university women in the world's work". Spurgeon herself talked about "Careers for educated women in the higher branches of industry, commerce and finance" and, among other things, even at this early date pointed out the opportunities in advertising (1925: 8). Under a broad understanding of English Studies or with a view to the history of Women's Studies, her speech would certainly deserve a closer examination, as would diverse contributions of the IFUW.

The IFUW soon sought contact with the League of Nations, and it was thanks to the efforts of various women's associations that equal access to the offices of the League was laid down explicitly and that there were female delegates from the very beginning. After World War II, Gildersleeve was the only American woman delegate to the UN Charter Committee, and it was she who contributed the formulation of the fundamental purpose: "We, the Peoples of the United Nations, determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war" (American national biography 1999, 9: 25). In 1947, the IFUW was granted the right to send accredited observers to all organs of the UN. It was among the first women's organizations to be given official consultative status at ECOSOC and UNESCO.

In the reform fervour of the early years of the IFUW, a number of members pleaded for Esperanto as their working language and a Committee on an International Language was created. This was tacitly dropped after 1926. At first, the languages of the Conferences were English and French, later German and the language of the respective host country were also accepted. In practice, however, English (and French) dominated. In the thirties, an International glossary of academic terms was prepared, which afterwards was used by the UN when it came to lay foundations for its educational work (Batho 1968: 6-10).

The first Conference outside Europe took place in 1947, in Toronto. Of the twenty-five Presidents to date, only eight have come from non-Anglophone countries and only two Indians (1971-74 and 1992-95) have represented the "Third World". Today, the IFUW has 180,000 members. It belongs to the influential NGOs and considers itself the global voice for women graduates.

4. Conclusion

Spurgeon furnishes an early British instance of what great opportunities English opened up to women in the twentieth century and of how English Studies contributed to women's emancipation. At the highest university level, this applied first and foremost to Americans. (9) What my examples also show is that establishment in the national / official language discipline often formed the basis for a career in subjects which only developed later, such as Sociology and Women's Studies. Below the glass ceiling excluding the very top positions, English-speaking women had ever-widening opportunities inside and outside academia, at home and, above all, globally.

Spurgeon was far-sighted in her close US contacts and internationalism, but they both also suggested themselves to her more readily than to her male colleagues. The great irony for English English Studies lay in the fact that, when it finally seemed to have come into its own, it was already heavily dependent on US power.

What Spurgeon did not see so clearly, and as a contemporary to whom essential information was inaccessible could not see so clearly, was the dark side of the picture: the negative corollaries and foundations of the ideologies and policies of language and culture -- of the intensified WASPism and Anglo-Saxonism, to be specific. At the very moment when US democracy was presented to the world as the model for the future, it was being most seriously undermined. In order to sway American public opinion and to steer the country into the war, an unprecedented propaganda effort had been necessary, including the kindling of mass hysteria, censorship, surveillance, and oppression. And they did not simply evaporate with the armistice. Just to give a few key terms: Espionage Act and Sedition Act; American Protective League -- Secret Service (250,000 members); Committee on Public Information, whose achievements at home and in over thirty countries with seventy-five million pamphlets etc., its head George Creel summarized in the following book title: How we advertised America: The first telling of the amazing story of the Committee on Public Information that carried the gospel of Americanism to every corner of the world; close cooperation between American and British intelligence services; hundred-percent spirit and its blatant disregard for the right to self-determination which one simultaneously propagated in Europe; literacy, i.e. English, tests for prospective immigrants and quota in favour of WASPs; persecution of labour leaders and pacifists, mass trials... (10) In short, what Spurgeon could not yet see so clearly were the dark strands of US tradition, which, thirty years later, caused Schlauch to leave her native country. (What Schlauch found, in these respects, on the other side of the iron Curtain would be a topic for another paper).

(1.) An earlier version of this paper was given at the Poznan Symposium in Memory of Margaret Schlauch in May 2002.

(2.) Although several of her books are still available and a prize, a scholarship, and a fellowship still carry her name, there is hardly any recent literature to be found about her. Even the comprehensive British biographical archive offers only a single, meagre entry. Important information is contained in Spurgeon's own characterization of her career for Elga Kern's Fuhrende Frauen Europas. I also want to thank my former assistant, Elizabeth Shipley, Ph.D., for her resourceful and indefatigable bibliographical help.

(3.) Between 1904 and 1907 a considerable number used this not particularly dignified route (nearly 700, according to a recent estimate, which, however, seems rather high). They became locally known as "the steamboat ladies", as most of them arrived in Dublin by ferry only the night before graduation (Dyhouse 1995: 158, 184).

(4.) His theses about the chronology of the two "Prologues" of the Legend of Good Women of 1900 had sparked a lively discussion in Chaucer research on both sides of the Atlantic, in England and on the Continent.

(5.) Perhaps some female lobbying also helped (Dyhouse 1995: 140-142).

(6.) It was also only in 1908 that the prestigious Ecole Nationale Superieure admitted women to its entrance examinations.

(7.) Aydelotte had been among the first Americans to win a Rhodes scholarship. (Cecil Rhodes died in 1902 and out of his enormous wealth accumulated in southern Africa, three million pounds went to his old university for scholarships for Americans, Germans and colonials). Aydelotte's dissertation dealt with Elizabethan rogues and vagabonds (1913). After reforming composition and his book of readings English and engineering (1917, remaining in print for some 22 years), he became widely known as director of the "War Issues" course for the Students Army Training Corps. After the war, he popularized Oxonian educational ideals in the States and served as American secretary to the Rhodes Trustees until 1953 (American national biography 1999, 17: 88-89).

(8.) In the amended version (Davies 1996: 21).

(9.) Gildersleeve, e.g., served on the boards of the American College for Girls in Istanbul, the Near East College Association, and the Institute of International Education. After World War II, she belonged to the American Educational Mission to Japan and helped oversee the rebuilding of higher education there. (American national biography 1999, 9: 25).

(10.) See, e.g., Kennedy (1980: 45-92) and Vaughn (1980: 3-22).

REFERENCES

Select bibliography of writings by Caroline Spurgeon:

1901 Richard Brathwait's comments, in 1665, upon Chaucer's Tales of the Miller and the Wife of Bath. (Chaucer Society Publications, 2nd Ser. 33.) London: K. Paul, Trench & Trubner.

1911 Chaucer devant la critique en Angleterre et en France depuis son temps jusqu 'a nos jours. Paris: Hachette.

1913 Mysticism in English literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

1914 The privilege of living in war-time: An inaugural address to King's College for Women. London: University of London Press.

1916 The training of the combatant. An address delivered for the Fight for Right Movement. London: Dent.

1917 Poetry in the light of war. London: English Association.

[1968] Reprinted in: Perspectives of poetry: The English Association pamphlets. London: Dawsons.

1922 "The refashioning of English education: A lesson of the Great War", The Atlantic Monthly, January: 55-67.

1925 "Careers for educated women in the higher branches of industry, commerce & finance", in: International Federation of University Women (ed.), 6-10.

1925 Five hundred years of Chaucer criticism and allusion. 3 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

1928 Keats's Shakespeare: A descriptive study. London: Oxford University Press.

1935 Shakespeare's imagery, and what it tells us. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

1999 "Mein Arbeitsweg", in: Bettina Conrad -- Ulrike Leuschner (eds.), 88-92.

Spurgeon's papers, which upon her death were presented to the Bedford College Archives, are now housed at Royal Holloway, University of London. They comprise thirty-two boxes and cover the years 1896-1928. See http://jsp.genesis.ac.uk/integrated/archieve.jsp?pk=49.

Works cited

Baldick, Chris

1987 The social mission of English criticism: 1848-1932. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Batho, Edith C.

1968 A lamp of friendship: A short history of the International Federation of University Women. Sumfield and Day [printers]: International Federation of University Women.

Chance, Jane (ed.) forthcoming Women Medievalists in the Academy. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Conrad, Bettina -- Ulrike Leuschner (eds.)

1999 Fuhrende Frauen Europas: Elga Kerns Standardwerk von 1928/1930. Munich and Basel: Ernst Reinhardt. Costas, Ilse

1992 "Der Kampf um das Frauenstudium im internationalen Vergicich", in: Anne Schluter (ed.), 115-144.

Davies, Norman

1996 Europe: A history. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Dyhouse, Carol

1995 No distinction of sex? Women in British Universities. 1870-1939. London: University College London.

Eagleton, Terry

1983 Literary theory. Oxford: Blackwell.

Engler, Balz - Renate Haas (eds.)

2000 European English Studies: Towards the history of a discipline. Leicester: English Association.

Garraty, John Arthur (ed.)

1999 American national biography. 24 vols. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Haas, Renate

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