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The College
Somerville is a college for women and men. It was founded, as Somerville Hall, in 1879 to provide an opportunity for women, who at that date were excluded from membership of the University, to enter higher education in Oxford. The founders' insistence that students should not be subjected to religious tests or obligations distinguished Somerville from its Anglican counterpart, Lady Margaret Hall, and set the ethos of cultural diversity which has characterised the College to this day.
The choice of name for the new foundation was also significant. Mary Somerville (1780 1872), a twice-married Scot whose international reputation as a scientist was gained in the intervals of raising a family of five children, provided students with a formidable role model. Her family allowed the new Hall to adopt their arms and motto (the notoriously untranslatable 'Donec rursus impleat orbem'), and over the years presented it with many family mementoes, including a number of Mary Somerville's own paintings.
Accommodation for the first twelve students was found in Walton House, an early 19th-century stone building set in large grounds, which remains the administrative core of the college. For the next forty years the history of women in Oxford was one of steady infiltration, as they gradually secured admission first to lectures, then to examinations, and finally, in 1920, to university membership. During this period Somerville took the lead in a number of important respects. In 1894 it became the first of the five women's halls of residence to adopt the title of "college". It was the first of them to appoint its own teaching staff, the first to set an entrance examination, and the first to build a library. With the establishment in 1903 of the Mary Somerville Research Fellowship it was the first to offer women in Oxford opportunities for research. In the 1890s the Somerville Council was prominent in an unsuccessful campaign to admit women to degrees; the success of the 1920 campaign owed much to the diplomatic skills and academic reputation of the then Principal, Miss (later Dame) Emily Penrose.
Membership of the University did not bring instant acceptance. Women remained debarred from many university clubs and societies (including the Union) for many years to come; their colleges were not recognised as full colleges of the university until 1959; and it was only in the 1970s (when the men's colleges began to go mixed) that they were allowed to play a full part in university administration. In the many intervening battles for equality, Somerville played a leading role: in 1936 it was the first Oxford college to grant maternity leave, and in 1950 the first to seek self-government. Meanwhile, in the wider world, its alumnae were breaking new ground in opening up careers for women in such fields as politics, the civil service, broadcasting, journalism, commerce, and law.
This pioneering energy accounts in part for the strong sense of individuality which has characterised Somerville from very early on. In Oxford legend it soon became known as the "bluestocking college", its examination results spectacularly refuting the widespread belief that women were incapable of high academic achievement. The commitment to science implicit in the initial choice of name was confirmed in 1964 when Dorothy Hodgkin, an undergraduate of the college 1928-31 and science tutor from 1935, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for her work on the structure of penicillin, vitamin B12 and insulin. A tradition of involvement in political and social concerns has been handed down from the college's Liberal founders: Somerville alumnae have been prominent in politics both in Britain and abroad, two of them - Indira Gandhi and Margaret Thatcher - attaining the highest office in their respective countries, and a number of others suffering imprisonment as dissidents under a variety of repressive regimes.
The College's sense of identity has been fostered and perpetuated by a long and distinguished line of writers: uniquely among the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge it has been credited with a "School of Novelists". And, lightly disguised as "Shrewsbury College" in Dorothy L. Sayers' Gaudy Night, it has also been the subject of a novel. The controversial decision to admit men was taken in 1992. As a mixed college, Somerville continues to take pride in its pioneering history, its traditions of academic excellence and public service, its scientific reputation, and its literary heritage, seeking to maintain and reinterpret for the 21st century its founders' commitment to the principle of equality of opportunity in education.
