Dangerous by Degrees

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In 1921, forty-one years after the opening of Somerville and Lady Margaret Hall, the first women's colleges at Oxford, the University finally granted degrees to women. The heated debate leading up to this historic step brought to light male Oxford's fears about the women in their midst. In response to these anxieties, the women's colleges were forced to engage in a delicate balancing act - fulfilling their mission to provide women with the same education available to men and, at the same time, presenting to their public a face and a rhetoric that did not appear to challenge traditional gender ideology. Dangerous by Degrees vividly describes and analyzes women's experience at Oxford shortly before and after the First World War. The Somerville experience, in its simultaneous rejection and embrace of women's traditional place, stands as a prototype of the ambivalent, confusing, and conflicted stories which the women who lived that experience subsequently tell in their fictions. Dorothy L. Sayers, Muriel Jaeger, Doreen Wallace, Margaret Kennedy, Winifred Holtby, and Vera Brittain - all students at Somerville between 1912 and 1922 - attempted to insert this new species, the woman with a

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