I think you would be amused if you were here now to see my lectures
– in my elementary one I
have got a front row entirely consisting of young women (some of them
not so young neither, as
someone says in Jeames' Diary) and they take notes in the
most painstaking and praiseworthy
fashion, but the most extraordinary thing is that I have got one
at my advanced lecture. I am
afraid she does not understand a word and my theory is that she
is attending my lectures on the
supposition that they are Divinity and she has not yet found out her mistake.
Professor J. J. Thomson to Mrs H. F. Reid, 4 November 1886
When Joseph John Thomson used this light-hearted description to
brighten up a letter to
a family friend, women had been attending physics lectures at the
Cavendish Laboratory for four years. Though the picture was designed to
amuse the
recipient, a married woman,
joviality thinly disguised unease. Thomson's previously
homogeneous audience had been
physically split into two opposing sections with young, male
students at the back and older,
female students along the front row. Intellectual divisions were
also apparent; the women
took notes in a different, non-male way, and without the sharpness
of a masculine mind
they could not understand the content. The message was plain –
the women had made a
mistake. Their infiltration had been unsuccessful and they did not fit
in.