“One day, all of this will vanish. This brick and mortar and dogma. Gentlemen, women are coming to Cambridge.”
I heard those words spoken a week ago watching Virginia Woolf’s Night & Day, the new film adaptation of Woolf’s 1919 novel. In the film, Katharine Hilbery (Kit) is determined to study astronomy at Cambridge. She manages to pull some strings and land an interview but was told by the panel of three men that despite her many accomplishments, the door was closed to her because she was a woman. I think it’s important to note that the men had no idea Kit was a woman until she showed up. In those days, gender was assumed to be male on any application. They were shocked to see Kit.
“There are no women here. We don’t even have toilets for them.” was one insidious excuse given Kit for banning women from the institution.
Kit walks away. She’s devastated.
But then, in a dramatic move, she turns around, and stomps back into the room.
Kit tells the men who have denied her entry that they may have the power to say no today. But they do not have the power to decide the future.
I haven’t been able to get that scene out of my head. I so admire Kit’s courage to own her talent and ambition and stand up for herself and for all women who wanted to pursue a profession when it wasn’t allowed.
That moment also made me think about how often women throughout history have been told some version of the same thing:
Not yet.
Not here.
That’s not for women.
We’ve never done it that way.
You don’t belong here.
Let’s face it. Women have been told “no” for centuries and yet we keep finding ways to push through barriers.
After doing some research, I discovered that this scene isn’t in Virginia Woolf’s novel. It was re-written with more of a contemporary point of view for the film. The filmmakers took Woolf’s Katharine (Kit), a woman wrestling with expectations about marriage, work, intellect and independence, and gave her a more dramatic fight for her future. Well done!
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), was an English novelist, essayist, biographer, and feminist, who wrote extensively on the issue of women’s access to higher ed and professions such as science, the church, the law, and medicine, a problem that was exacerbated by women’s exclusion from institutions like Oxford and Cambridge. Woolf herself never went to university, and apparently, resented that her brothers and male friends had opportunities that were denied to her. Woolf questioned what women would do if they had these opportunities.
The novel Night and Day focuses with sensitivity and concern about women’s suffrage and the tension between love, marriage, work, ambition and independence. The University of Oxford describes the novel as being “set against the prewar suffrage campaign”, while Cambridge scholarship notes that “Woolf was already confronting the inequities underpinning patriarchy in Night and Day.”
In the film version, Kit opened the closed-door barring women from education by directly confronting the male gatekeepers. As a result of her speaking out, she was admitted to Cambridge! And though her character in the novel didn’t pursue an education at Cambridge as the new film suggests, Woolf still addressed the themes of:
- Who gets an education?
- Who gets to earn money?
- Who gets intellectual freedom?
- Who gets to live an independent life?
- What does a woman need to have a life of her own?
Read the full article on Substack.com.
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