Zoe Blackburn

I’ve called this a love letter, but it’s really an open letter to anyone who has just been unexpectedly pooled to a women’s college in Cambridge. When I applied to Cambridge, I chose St. John’s for my application for the same reason most people probably do: I’d heard of it. Along with Trinity and King’s, it seemed to me to epitomise ‘Cambridge’, the place I desperately wanted to be. Google Images had shown me pictures of the brick that turned photogenically golden in the sunlight, and that was enough for me to put it down on UCAS, with precious little consideration about what it might be like to live there. So imagine my surprise when January came round and I read in elated shock that I’d been accepted to ‘Murray Edwards College’, a place I knew literally nothing about. 

To be fair to past me, I vaguely remembered Jeremy Paxman saying the name on University Challenge, but I had assumed it was like any other Cambridge college. When I saw it described as a women’s college, I didn’t know how to feel. I’d been to mixed schools my whole life, and my most vivid reference points for what an all girls education looked like were Wild Child and St. Trinian’s, neither of which (I’m told) are 100% accurate. Though this was based on admittedly no hard data whatsoever, I’d imagined girls’ schools as bitchy, stuffy, competitive, cliquey and sexphobic places. 

I still couldn’t tell you if any of that’s true of single sex secondary schools (it’s probably not). But I can tell you that a women’s college at Cambridge is none of those things, at least in my experience. 

Firstly, we are not single sex. College is hugely enriched by the fact that men are encouraged to work here and trans women, trans men and non-binary people are encouraged to study here. 

Secondly, by the age of eighteen or nineteen people have mercifully left the worst of their torturous teenage insecurity behind and learned to be kind to one another. 

And thirdly, there is nothing stuffy about living in bright white concrete. 

When I think of Murray Edwards now, I think of the neon lights in the café, the light-up fountain in the courtyard, or the Tracey Emin print right next to the entrance that says ‘Believe in Extraordinary’. I think of the hundreds of artworks by women that line the walls, and the gardens where you’re allowed to walk on the grass and pick the flowers. I remember being terrified of living on a hill so far away from town (it’s a fifteen minute walk). But now I think of it more as a kind of sanctuary. Some of the women studying here will go on to work in environments that are over 90% male.

There is something distinctly empowering about that ratio being inverted, even if just for now. Even those of us in majority female subjects sometimes have to listen to the less self-aware male students in Faculty seminars explaining our points for us or egregiously abusing the word ‘ontological’. Men still get more firsts than women in almost every subject. The fact that we get to have our college supervisions away from the real world could not be more of a blessing. 

My experience of supervisions in a women’s college has been that they are radically, refreshingly collaborative. Nobody speaks over each other – and if they do it is reliably accidental. Being in a building that celebrates – by design – women’s creativity and ambition is inspiring, not oppressive. The quietly anarchic 60s aesthetic of the architecture suits my politics and fashion sense a hell of a lot better than John’s ever could have. Of course, there are a few students at other colleges who find misogynistic and homophobic ways to contrast us with Newnham, and to reduce us to either sluts or nuns in a pathetic microcosm of the Madonna/whore complex. But they don’t know what they’re talking about (the earth-shattering revelation that sex doesn’t make you stupid is still a few years away for them). Over my nearly three years in college, I’ve had the privilege to live and learn alongside too many different kinds of women to ever flatten into a stereotype. 

The fact that women, especially queer and trans women, are able to unapologetically take up space here is part of what makes the college’s mission meaningful, absolutely, but in many ways it’s just like anywhere else. I have friends who love to party and friends who don’t, friends who drink and smoke and have sex, and friends who don’t. What being part of a women’s college does offer is a chance to develop an intellect, confidence, and sense of humour away from patriarchal expectations of what they should be. When I first arrived at Cambridge I was, admittedly, a veteran people-pleaser, but I’m certainly not leaving as one. 

I suppose what I’m trying to say is, if you get an email this January telling you you’ve been pooled to a women’s college, please don’t worry. It might turn out to be the best thing that’s ever happened to you.