Words Importing the Masculine Includes Females: Women at University College Dublin in the First Decade

It is perhaps difficult to conceive of a time when women in Ireland were excluded from entry into university solely on the basis of gender. This, however, was the case until the closing decades of the nineteenth century (Harford, 2008). Women gained access to the Royal University of Ireland in 1879, to the Queen’s Colleges from the 1880s and to Trinity College Dublin in 1904. The opening of universities to women in Britain and the growing strength of the women’s lobby internationally meant that by 1908 University College Dublin (UCD), one of the three constituent colleges of the National University of Ireland (NUI), had no alternative but to open its doors to women on equal terms as men. While those women who passed through the doors of UCD in the first decade represented a minority of middle-class women whose social, cultural and economic position enabled them to benefit from higher educational reform, their participation in higher education had wider social implications. It shattered the Victorian ideal of womanhood which confined women to a life in the private sphere, allowing women for the first time access to the professions, previously a male preserve, thus extending the potential and capacity for women’s involvement in wider social and political arenas. Gains were slow and tentative, however, the scale of opposition to reform considerable, public discourse objecting to the admission of women to universities on religious, moral and physiological grounds.