Anna Mardling

The Cambridge History Tripos has a problem – a women problem. The women aren’t there.

I’m a third-year History student, and over the last two-and-a-bit years of my degree, I have grown increasingly frustrated with the lack of female representation in the Cambridge History curriculum. This course spans the entire history of the globe across millennia, and yet I often get to the end of a week of lectures and reading and think to myself, were women even involved at all? Where were they? I recently attended a seminar in which, after asking about the presence of women in the period we were talking about, I was told by my seminar lead (I am slightly paraphrasing here) that ‘women were present, but they weren’t there.’  

Really? Is this possible? Are women managing to defy the laws of normal human existence? Were women really ‘present but not there’ throughout all of history? Or is women’s history overlooked, including by Cambridge?

I’d like to start by pointing out a few obvious caveats and disclaimers – yes, this is mostly based on my personal experience, and yes, I recognise that this is a broader issue across History as a discipline. No, I have not studied all papers and do not claim to speak for all History students and their experiences, and no, this is not a personal attack on the History department or the History Tripos (or on men for that matter). I am trying to raise an issue that I have encountered throughout my degree, one that is not talked about enough. 

One of the most obvious ways in which women’s history is under-represented in the History Tripos is in the lack of women’s history papers available. In the first year, there is just one paper on offer that explicitly mentions ‘women’ in its title – a four-seminar Sources paper entitled ‘Other Voices: Listening to Women and People on the Margin in the Early Modern Period’.¹ In the second year, there are two Research Project options, ‘Gender in Early Modern Britain’ and ‘Women in Cambridge c.1900-1950’.²

In the third year, however, there are none – with the only topic that explicitly mentions gender in its title being the Special Subject ‘Masculinities and Political Culture in Britain, 1832-1901’.³

Now, this is not to say that other papers on offer do not mention women’s history at all, as many of them do. Some papers dedicate a single topic to women, such as the ‘Holy Households’ topic of T8 ‘Reformations: Faith, Fire and Fury’, or have topics that focus more on women due to their content, such as the ‘Faith, morality and the self’ topic of O7 ‘Modern Britain and Ireland’, which largely focuses on women and religion. 

However, I’ve tended to feel that in papers where women are not explicitly highlighted or addressed in their title, their experiences are often sidelined or relegated to a few throw-away comments. We have a Tripos that is, still, male-centric. 

The lack of female representation is all the more disappointing as it comes after the reformation of the Historical Tripos in 2022, aimed at giving students “more opportunities to study the world beyond Europe”,⁴ and allowing “students to engage in the history of humanity across three millennia and every corner of the globe”.⁵

These changes were needed, and have been welcomed by undergraduate cohorts. However, it is disappointing that the ability to study the experience of women – or their role in history – under the new Tripos is still so limited. This does not reflect the reality of each period, even more disappointing in the face of the changing gender balance of the History cohort, which in recent years has become female-dominated. Since 2014, the proportion of female students admitted to study History has steadily increased, from 52% in 2014, to 58% in 2019, to 68% in the most recent 2023 application cycle.⁶

For female students, like myself, it feels incredibly disengaging to constantly read about the history of men, as if there were little female involvement. We cannot act as if women were not present throughout history, and that women’s contributions were not important – yet this is often how I have felt through my studies.

Cambridge cannot be expected to solve this issue alone but the University, with a History Faculty of such size and prestige, could be central in addressing this balance and influencing the academic sphere worldwide. 

Women constitute half the population, as we always have. Why can’t this be reflected in the courses we study?

1. University of Cambridge, Faculty of History, History BA (Tripos). Available at: https://www.hist.cam.ac.uk/course/history-ba-tripos (Accessed: 9 December 2024). ↩︎
2.  Ibid. ↩︎
3.  Ibid. ↩︎
4. Guyatt, N, (2024), An even better curriculum: new Historical Tripos two years on, Available at: https://www.hist.cam.ac.uk/even-better-curriculum-new-historical-tripos-two-years (Accessed: 9 December 2024).  ↩︎
5.  Laven, M, (2023), Letter from the Chair, Available at: https://www.hist.cam.ac.uk/newsletter-2023-07/letter-chair (Accessed: 9 December 2024). ↩︎
6. %Admissions by Gender and Course, (2024), Available at: https://tableau.blue.cam.ac.uk/t/InformationHubPublic/views/CambridgeUndergraduateAdmissionsStatistics/GenderbyCoursegraph_1?%3Aembed=y&%3AisGuestRedirectFromVizportal=y (Accessed: 9 December 2024). 
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Image credits: Iris Venning, 2024