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

women rarely occupied the library or walked the campus paths alone. Although Edger and her contemporaries had been accepted as students, this is not to suggest that university staff or male students were accepting of their presence.

Irrespective of the espoused rhetoric of ‘no distinction of sex’,⁶⁴ there was a level of evident hostility from both male students and staff when, for example, timetables had to be adjusted to accommodate ‘ladies’⁶⁵ who were deemed in need of social and moral protection in public places. The following extract taken from a statement made by George O’Rorke, Speaker of the House of Representatives in New Zealand, highlights this view:

Certainly the presence of women students on campus was a necessary prerequisite to the appointment of women staff, although it did take just over three decades for this to occur.⁶⁷ In the opening decades of the twentieth century, then, the woman student was a rapidly emerging orthodoxy on the four university campuses. However, women students remained a numerical minority. University administrators were unable to ignore their obligations to appoint women staff to supervise, teach, and monitor women students.⁶⁸ Accordingly, academic women became a new presence on the campus, and they were in a more precarious position numerically than female students were. Although university administrators may have wished these women to act as surrogate mothers to female students, academic women had little or no intention of being glorified housekeepers. Armed with their own academic and professional