A woman who changed Cambridge: Ida Darwin
Guest Blog:
Literature Cambridge lecturer Ann Kennedy Smith writes about Ida Darwin
On a balmy summer's evening last July I cycled over to Darwin College, Cambridge. It was the final evening of the Fictions of Home 2019 summer course, and I was giving a talk on ‘The women who changed Cambridge’ based on my research into some of the women who made Cambridge their home in the 1870s and 1880s. It seemed appropriate that we were meeting in Darwin College, part of which was once Newnham Grange, the childhood home of Gwen Raverat. In her celebrated memoir Period Piece (1952) Raverat wrote: ‘I belong to the first hatching of Fellows’ children, and was born into a society which was still small and exclusive. The town, of course, did not count at all.’
The first university families to settle in Cambridge were certainly close-knit, and enjoyed tea parties and picnics, boat and bicycle trips: Gwen’s mother Maud had the first ‘lady’s tricycle’ in Cambridge, I thought, as I locked up my bicycle. But it simply wasn’t true that these women were oblivious to issues affecting the town and wider society. They wanted to do work that made a difference, and they formed Cambridge’s first women-led associations in order to do just that. Here’s an extract about Ida Darwin’s involvement in some of those pioneering groups.
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Ida Darwin
Ida was born in London in 1854, the first child of Thomas Farrer, later Lord Farrer, the Permanent Secretary of the Board of Trade, and Frances Erskine, a talented singer and cousin of the Wedgwood family. She grew up in a wealthy, well-educated Victorian world that mixed privilege with politics, science with the arts. Her father was a keen amateur botanist who corresponded with Charles Darwin about orchid experiments and the two men became close friends. Even so, when Ida, aged 25, wanted to marry 27-year-old Horace, Darwin’s youngest son, Farrer objected strongly, believing Horace to be a dreamer with poor health and career prospects. The marriage went ahead anyway, and Ida and Horace moved to Cambridge in January 1880. Spurred on by his father-in-law’s lack of faith in him, Horace acquired joint ownership of an engineering workshop and set about designing and manufacturing measuring instruments for the university’s new laboratories. His Cambridge Scientific Instrument Company became a successful business, a forerunner of the city’s many bio-tech industries today.
Moving to Cambridge was a passport to another country for Ida. As a married woman, she had access to a wide variety of lectures and private lessons from tutors, but she didn’t just want an education for herself. From her earliest days she was a keen supporter of the women’s college at Newnham, and became close friends with the Principal, Anne Jemima Clough and Helen Gladstone, a student and later Vice-Principal. Ida campaigned alongside them for the University’s Senate to give women students the right to sit for the university's final Tripos exams, and they celebrated together when the vote was passed in 1881.
Cambridge wives and female students were, as the historian Christopher Brooke has said, ‘pioneers and settlers of a new territory’, and it was natural that, in this predominantly male culture, they saw the importance of working together. During the 1880s Ida and her married friends set up several societies that successfully blurred ‘town and gown’ divisions. The largest of these was the Ladies’ Discussion Society, which focused on outward-looking political and social activism and provided information about professional careers for women. Invited speakers included Dr Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, who gave a talk on ‘The medical profession for women’ and Beatrice Webb on ‘The expediency of regulating the conditions of women’s work’. Such associations brought women together and gave female students the opportunity to see how their work could make a difference in the public sphere of the future.
Gwen Raverat described her aunt Ida’s ‘shining Victorian perfection’, but this conventionality was her armour, giving her courage to step into thorny areas, and her friends shared her strong sense of social awareness. She and a group of university wives set up a group called the Cambridge Association for the Care of Girls (CACG) to help the town’s disadvantaged girls find training and employment. Her work with this association led to Ida’s life-long interest in learning disabilities and the need for social and legislative reforms in Britain’s mental health services. With the assistance of the Charity Organisation Society (COS), she and Florence Ada Keynes founded the Cambridge Association for the Care of the Feeble-Minded in 1909, a precursor of the mental health charity Mind. One of its primary aims was to raise public awareness of the need for legislation, and Ida and her colleagues campaigned hard for the passing of the Mental Deficiency Act of 1913.
During the war years Ida read Freud and Jung and followed with interest Dr William Rivers’ accounts in the Lancet of a new ‘talking therapy’ to treat soldiers suffering from the condition then known as ‘shell shock’, now commonly referred to as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Ida was convinced that the ‘talking cure’ should be used more widely among the civilian population, and after the Armistice was signed she asked Dr Rivers and Dr Charles Myers to lend their support to her scheme to establish a special clinic where people could be treated for ‘early mental disorders’ without the stigma of staying in an asylum. In 1919 the first outpatients’ psychiatric clinic at Addenbrooke’s Hospital was opened, one of the first in the country.
I'll be discussing what happened next, and Ida Darwin’s continuing mental health work in the 1920s as part of Literature Cambridge’s summer programme on Literature of the 1920s in July 2021. I hope to see you there.
Dr Ann Kennedy Smith
22 November 2019
Ann is giving a talk on women’s societies in Cambridge in the late nineteenth century on Thursday 5 December 2019 17.30 at the University Library. Free, but please book.
