Historical Portraits of Women Home Scientists: The University Of ...

qualifications, these women sought meaningful careers, as we highlight in chapters 4 and 5. Furthermore, the arrival and visible presence of women students and staff fractured the image of the university as the sole territory of men.

In both New Zealand and Australia, for example, a level of pragmatism preceded the entry of women students to the universities.⁶⁹ In the first place, there was a requirement to staff the newly established girls’ secondary schools. Secondly, the universities depended to an extent, particularly during the war years and Depression, on fee-paying women students for their economic survival. Thirdly, the universities realized it was imperative that they address the ‘problem’ of women students as well as wider concerns about the need for an appropriate higher education for young women. The administrative solution to this problem was the academic woman and the appropriate subjects that were directly connected with her gendered future vocation. Thus, academic women were a necessary component in the gendering of the academy, academic work, and academic knowledge. Kay Morris Matthews has pointed out that many of the university graduates who secured degrees and diplomas from the University of New Zealand forged successful careers for themselves both within gendered expectations (as teachers, for example) and beyond (as lawyers and doctors).⁷⁰ Similarly, Marjorie Theobald has commented that universities in colonial environments were less obstructive in terms of affording young women access and entry to the academy.⁷¹

The entry of women students and academic women to the University of New Zealand appeared to be relatively straightforward. However, there was public criticism and condemnation of suggestions that young women should be provided with an academic education. Critics such as Sir Frederic Truby King⁷² and Dr Ferdinand Campion Batchelor deployed contemporary scientific ideologies to show that a competitive academic education for girls would render them unfit for motherhood. Although advocates such as Colonel John Studholme⁷³ and Lady Anna Stout⁷⁴ supported the higher education of women, their arguments were tied to a range of feminized occupations, such as teaching, nursing, and philanthropic