The women's colleges at the older Universities are now so well established as to be taken for granted as a necessary part of the national system of education. Their character and aims are so far similar to those of the men's Colleges as to obscure at first sight the fact that they are totally different in origin and history. These differences of course leap to the eye so far as the buildings are concerned; and they must be explained if we are to understand their present character and position.

When Girton College was founded in 1869, the University of Cambridge was still in the midst of that remarkable process of change which was to transform its character in the course of the nineteenth century. With five hundred years of life behind it, it was entering upon a fresh chapter and renewing its vitality, after the stagnant period of the eighteenth century, with its sinecures and its narrow exclusiveness.

The origins of the University can be traced back to the thirteenth century; many of the Colleges date from the Middle Ages, and most of them had come into existence before the Reformation.

The story of the College has been told in outline down to the end of the year 1932. It remains to notice various matters of lesser importance, which for Girtonians may be worthy of record, but cannot conveniently be included in the main story.

An American traveller who visited Girton in 1879 was much impressed by the fact that each student had “a room to herself; in the lower stories, each has two rooms”. The new buildings then in progress, as he remarked, would accommodate nineteen additional students. “This new building is to cost £8000 (40,000 dols.)—a sum for which an American college would have accommodated forty or fifty pupils. But it would have been by crowding them together; and Girton may well forgo elegancies and even comforts for the sake of the health and privacy of its students.” In the first “programme” drawn up by Miss Davies for the College in 1868 she had written:

Each student will have a small sitting room to herself, where she will be free to study undisturbed, and to enjoy at her discretion the companionship of friends of her own choice.

With the resignation of Miss Jex-Blake in 1922, the College entered upon a new period of its history. The retiring Mistress's position in regard to past students was of a character that could not be continued. She was personally acquainted with them all, and had actually been in residence with all except the small number who had left before she entered the College as a Scholar in 1879. Subsequent generations must lose this very special bond, whatever else they gain. Miss Jex-Blake was succeeded by her cousin, Miss Phillpotts (afterwards Dame Bertha Newall), who had entered the College in 1899 as a Pfeiffer Scholar. She held a Pfeiffer Studentship of £50 a year for the years 1903—4 and 1905—6, and served as Librarian from 1906 to 1909. She was therefore well known at Girton. “We feel that you alone could take the place of Miss Jex-Blake”, were the words used by the senior student in welcoming her on behalf of the students at the beginning of her Mistress-ship.

Miss Phillpotts's experiences after resigning the Librarianship at Girton had been of an unusual kind. She spent some years in independent study of the Scandinavian languages, during which she acted as private secretary to Baron Anatole von Hugel, Curator of the University Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology.