Bluestockings: The Remarkable Story of the First Women to Fight for an Education

When I joined the Women Unbound Challenge and decided to go for the suffragette level, I thought that reading the three nonfiction books required would be the real challenge inside the challenge for me. If we talk about reading purely for fun, I read mostly fiction and sometimes nonfiction about history. I do borrow quite a lot of nonfiction from the library, but most often I only browse or skim the books, read a snippet from here, another from there. Well, I do admit that my nonfiction choices for the challenge have been well within my comfort zone: first one was about my favorite writer and the second one is about history, but still this far my "challenge within a challenge" has gone a lot more smoothly than I expected. My first nonfiction book for the challenge Vita & Virginia was really interesting and so was also my second! My second nonfiction book read for the challenge was Bluestockings: The Remarkable Story of the First Women to Fight for an Education by Jane Robinson.

Jane Robinson is a British writer and lecturer, who specialises in writing about social history from the women's point of view. In addition to Bluestockings, she has written half a dozen other nonfiction books that would all very well qualify for the Women Unbound Challenge. Read more about Jane Robinson here.

Bluestockings: The Remarkable Story of the First Women to Fight for an Education tells the story of higher education for women in Britain from about the mid 19th century to the 1930s through the experiences of the women, both teachers and students, themselves. It is a well written, informative book that is very readable. It reads almost like a (good:)) novel. The stories of the pioneering women educators and their students are captivating. While reading you are transported into a world of cocoa parties and chaperones, eccentric entrance interviews, scholarly triumphs and tragedies, supporting and not-so-supporting parents, wonderful teachers, who secretly paid their poor female students university education, and bigoted professors, who when seeing that in the lecture hall only women were present, said "As there is nobody here, I shall not lecture today." [p. 69]

I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in women's history, women's rights or the history of education.