Photograph of Helene Reinherz in 1905 (archive reference: GCPH10/24/4)
The Girton College Suffrage Club organised a wide variety of events in and beyond College. These included frequent speaker-meetings addressed by visitors from Cambridge and elsewhere, political discussions, concerts, plays, and ‘Polyglot recitals’, at which students hidden behind a screen delivered speeches in a foreign language while the paying audience tried to guess their identity. During regular ‘Special Effort Weeks’, volunteers offered tasks such as ‘skirt brushing’ and ‘hockey stick oiling’ in return for donations of a few pence. Other things on sale included the services of a ‘Shampoo Salon’ and ‘fortune-telling’ conducted in the Tower. Some years saw suffrage ‘Bazaars’, complete with stalls selling ‘fancy concoctions’, or advertising the services of a ‘veiled palmist’. The Club also subscribed to suffrage journals, placed on a special shelf in the Girton Reading Room alongside the ‘standard works on the suffrage movement’. Competitions to compose the best suffrage song, weekly ‘suffrage reading’ meetings, and a ‘detective competition’ in search of hidden items all attest to a very active, popular society that drew on the enthusiasm of many Girtonians. (Quotes taken from successive editions of The Girton Review, 1910—1915).
However, not everyone in Girton supported women’s suffrage. The College authorities thought it best to keep ‘politics’ of this kind at a distance. Some students explicitly opposed the cause of votes for women. In November 1908, Miss Carey, Branch Organising Secretary of the Women’s National Anti-Suffrage League, spoke in College, and it was decided to form a Girton branch of that national organisation. The Girton College Anti-Suffrage League was in existence until Lent Term 1913, although it was less active in its later years. The first President was Rosemary Lubbock (Girton 1906), a third year reading Natural Sciences; the first Secretary, Eleanor Duckett (Girton 1908), a first-year Classicist. Unlike the Suffrage Club, no member of the College Staff was ever listed as a Committee member. By the end of 1909, the Girton League had 31 members. A subscription was taken out to ‘The Anti-Suffrage Review’ and copies were placed in the Reading Room. But the society’s main activity was to organise speaker meetings. One, held in February 1909, was addressed by the well-known novelist and anti-suffragist Mrs Humphrey Ward (Mary Augusta Ward) (1851—1920). Members of the Suffrage Club often attended these rival meetings, sometimes ‘blazing with red and white’ suffrage ‘badges’, and would raise their hands and voices with ‘numerous cries of “Question”’. (The Girton Review, Lent Term 1909).