Blaze e-catalogue - Catalog - Page 19
Blaze: Working Women, Public Leaders
societal attitudes that largely denied them an education. For many girls outside the middle
classes, educational opportunities were severely limited as they were often sent to work
in their teens.
Tertiary education
The doors to tertiary education for women in NSW opened in 1882 when the University
of Sydney granted admission through its Faculty of Arts. Sarah Hynes was one of its earliest
women graduates (1891). Sydney Girls High School Headmistress, Lucy Garvin, employed
one of the university’s first two women graduates, Isola Thompson (1861–1915) as her
deputy in 1889. The Faculty of Medicine accepted women in 1885 and Dagmar Berne
(1866–1900) was the first woman student there. She was followed by Harriet Biffin
(c.1867–1939). By 1900, there were fourteen women undergraduate students including
Jessie Aspinall (1880–1953), Lucy Gullett (1876–1949), Margaret Harper (1879–1964),
Susannah O’Reilly (1881–1960) and Constance D’Arcy (1879–1950). With 1911 graduate
Emma Buckley (1879–1959), Biffin, Gullett, Harper, O’Reilly and D’Arcy founded The
Rachel Forster Hospital for Women in 1921. Unable to gain employment as medical
practitioners due to their sex, the women doctors founded their own hospital. The Rachel
Forster Hospital served women, children and later, men, until 2000 when its services were
transferred to Royal Prince Alfred Hospital.
Once given the opportunity, women thrived at university and embraced not only its
learning, but its social and political environments. Ella Gormley (1885–1948), a pioneer
of physical education, attended the University of Sydney from 1909–1912. She was elected
founding president of the Women Evening Students’ Association under the patronage of the
prominent feminist, Maybanke Anderson (1845–1927).
While a number of the past Blaze women attended university, this was not the case for
women more broadly. Maria Nugent has explained in her study of women’s professionalism
in Australia that such opportunities were generally available to middle class women only.
Indeed, it was not until well into the 1960s and 1970s that greater numbers of people
in general, and women in particular, had the opportunity to attend university. Ms O’Loughlin
recalls a conversation she had with her mother during that time:
I would’ve been about seven, and I said to my mother, ‘Mum, what’s a university?’
I’d heard someone talking about it, and I didn’t know what it was. She explained
to me what a university was, and she said to me, ‘And you will go there one day.’
She came from a family in which nobody had gone to university, and a time when not
very many people did go to university, let alone women. That she gave me that high
expectation and belief and commitment to that goal from the beginning, meant that
I always knew I was going to university, and so I did.
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