I went to a lecture today. Perhaps not a novel activity for a graduate student, but the lecture was markedly different to any I have been to before. Well of course, you might say, what would be the point of going to a lecture if not to hear something new? Certainly that is true. Yet the specific difference to which I refer on this occasion has to do with the audience.
As I walked in, a few minutes prior to the start time, hushed chatter abounded, as per normal. It was a particularly low-pitched murmur, its creators a rather balding crowd and the ratio of tweed to seats impressively high. I felt as though I had entered a private mens’ club, an Etonian old boys’ event or some such. A quick head count told me that around seventy individuals had gathered to hear the lecture. I strained to count ten women. The stereotype of the slightly dusty though magnificently erudite male historian rang out from that lecture hall.
Perhaps I ought not to have been surprised by this. The media loves to lambast Oxbridge, consistently reminding us that the universities steadfastly remain the privilege of public school boys who go to the same college as daddy, indeed whose ancestors probably paid for the elegant pile of bricks, or at least a library or SCR. Yet, now in my fifth year of Oxbridge ‘education’, I have never walked into a lecture hall, dining hall or common room and been confronted with quite so disproportionate a gender divide. Nor was the misrepresentation only along gender lines. According to my estimations, the audience was 95% white, with a similar percentage over the age of fifty.
It is a well known fact that women are under-represented in the sciences. Female engineers, physicists and mathematicians are still the exception. The lecture I attended, however, was on Early Modern history. Delivered by an eminent (male) historian, the talk crossed the disciplinary boundaries of history and religion. Why, then, did it only attract a room full of white middle-aged and senior men? I don’t know the answer to the question but my guess is that it may have to do with the ‘big’ names that have historically come out of those centuries that we loosely, and questionably, refer to as ‘Early Modern’. Both its most famous figures and many of the best known historians studying that time are men; Montaigne, Machiavelli, Hobbes to name but a few of the period’s ‘protagonists’. Jacob Burckhardt, Quentin Skinner and John Pocock would all appear on a list of distinguished academics who work or worked on the period.
The interest in the role, status and lives of women in these centuries has increased manifold in recent years, and much of the work produced in that area has been written by women. On very rudimentary gender lines, we might conjecture that this is because, as relatively unexplored territory until recently, it provides a space where women scholars need not tread in the footsteps of male predecessors. Equally, it may quite legitimately be that many women scholars are simply interested in how women of the past lived. Yet there would be something strangely skewed if the study of history were to become overly polarized in this way, women writing about women, men about men. Human interaction does not work like that, nor should it be how our interactions with the past work.
Whatever the reason, it is unsettling to think that many women, young people and ethnic minorities might still choose not to participate in certain aspects of the historical field that, beyond their own fascinations, remain greatly influential on how we live and think today. At least it is a choice, you may respond, the Women’s Movement might have approved! After all, it is still not so long ago that women were barred from Oxbridge, the last all-male college opening its doors to women in 1988. It is also an affirmative choice, we might say, to study something else. Yet if the absence from today’s talk reflects a feeling of what men thought, said and did in the Early Modern period being somebody else’s territory in some way, the question of choice, I believe, begins to fall apart.
I would like to reiterate my earlier statement, that this is the first occasion on which I have been hit by so blatant a gender (age and ethnicity aside) imbalance within the Oxbridge setting. Nor am I talking about gender discrimination. Compared to vastly more male-dominated sectors such as finance, Oxbridge could be considered a bastion of equal gender representation in terms of numbers. Moreover, women undergraduates frequently outnumber men in subjects such as Modern Languages and History of Art (though less so further up the academic ladder…).
Yet if we work on the simple premise that collectively and individually we can learn something – anything – useful from the past, then we should strive for as diverse a group of interpreters of that past as possible. Of course, I am under no illusion that all older men in tweed suits always think the same thoughts or even think in the same way, even if their backgrounds and sartorial choices are similar. Yet we cannot call them a diverse bunch. A multiplicity of different voices working on any one subject area allows us our greatest shot at making history a relevant part of our lives today. A teleological reasoning perhaps, but nonetheless one among many that illustrates the fragility of an audience as uniform as this afternoon’s dominating the study of any area of the past.