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Six centuries of influence

From Lady Margaret Beaufort’s financial bequest, which enabled the College’s foundation in 1511, to the appointment of the first female Master of St John’s in 2020, women have played a crucial role in shaping the College community we know today.

Below are some of the key developments in the history of women’s involvement at St John’s. The Library's Biographical Archive contains comprehensive information on many of the individuals and milestones mentioned here. 

1600

Donations from Mary Talbot (1555-1632), Countess of Shrewsbury, fund the construction of Second Court.

Mary Talbot (née Cavendish) was the daughter of Bess of Hardwick. Bess had risen from a modest background to become a friend of Elizabeth I and one of the richest women of her time, and was renowned for her ambitious building projects, including Chatsworth House and Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire. Following in her mother’s footsteps, Mary – a countess of Shrewsbury herself, having married her stepfather’s heir – pledged to St John’s the huge sum of £3400 for the construction of the grand edifice known as Second Court.

As Richard Rex remarks in St John’s College Cambridge: A History (ed. Peter Linehan): ‘the College’s first century was thus book-ended by two powerful female benefactors. Lady Margaret had provided First Court. The countess of Shrewsbury provided Second Court, with a new back gate every bit as splendid as that at the front.’ Several decades after its completion, in 1671, a statue of the countess was mounted in the niche halfway up the splendid ‘Shrewsbury Tower’ on the court’s west range.

1680-90s

Sarah, Duchess of Somerset gifts to the College substantial estates at March (Cambridgeshire) and Wootton Rivers (Wiltshire), as well as funding several generous scholarships. The duchess’s property proved particularly important to College finances in the ensuing decades, and her portrait still hangs in the College Hall.

1966

Mrs M. Bulman becomes the first woman to preach a sermon in the College Chapel, on Sunday 1 May. Her sermon, entitled “Marriage?”, is printed in full in the following term’s issue of The Eagle (No. 267).

1967

St John’s Ģ����Ƶ���ذ�׿ conduct a ‘co-education survey’, with the aim of showing ‘that the climate of opinion in Cambridge, and in particular in St John’s College, [is] favourable to co-education’. More than 95% of respondents are revealed to be in favour of seeing more women undergraduates in Cambridge, while 63% are in favour of St John’s becoming co-educational. The results are published in The Eagle (No. 268), along with a detailed analysis by the survey’s authors.

The principal objections to co-education elicited by the questionnaire, were firstly the feeling that a single sex community is likely to be more conducive to study, and secondly a fear that co-education could reduce the number of male undergraduates by eliminating marginal males in favour of intelligent females. […]

It is interesting to observe that several of these same reasons were given by people in favour of co-education to support their case. These people stressed the probably harmful effects on Ģ����Ƶ���ذ�׿ of passing through the University and quite frequently leaving knowing no women there at all. Many felt that undergraduates should be acquainted with women socially, as opposed to purely sexually or romantically; the question not being one of sexual conquests. It was also pointed out that academic standards would probably rise with the exclusion of marginal males.

The article concludes optimistically: ‘we hope to have established that co-education is both a feasible and a desirable system on which to run an educational institution, and look forward to witnessing its introduction later this century.’

1971

Eileen Rubery is elected to a Meres Studentship. Although not admitted to membership of the College, she is the first woman to be elected in any capacity at St John’s.

1980

College Fellows secure a two-thirds majority to change the College Statutes to allow the admission of women.

1999

Professor Jane Heal becomes the College’s first female President.

2011

The Revd Elizabeth Adekunle becomes the first woman to be appointed College Chaplain (later also serving as the College’s first female Acting Dean of Chapel, in 2015-16).

2012

Jennifer Egan and Professor Jane Stapleton are the first women elected as Honorary Fellows of the College.

2017

Dr Annis May Timpson becomes the College’s first female Senior Tutor.

2018

Helen Murley becomes the College’s first female Domestic Bursar.

2020

Heather Hancock becomes the first woman to take up the Mastership of St John’s.

2022

The inclusion of girls and women in the College Choir.