In the year 1867 the idea of founding a woman's college and of associating the higher education of women with the university of Cambridge began to take shape.[448] No movement of the century, it may confidently be affirmed, has done so much to increase the happiness of women, and none has opened to them so many new horizons. If men look back on the years spent at the university as among the happiest in their lives, so that everything in later life which recalls their _alma mater_--not excluding the London terminus from which they always "went up"--borrows some of its glamour, the university life meant all this, and more, for women. To begin with it repaired a traditional injustice, the absence of any standard of individual life especially for the unmarried; the neglect of every personal interest, talent, or ambition, which a woman might have apart from looking after her own or other people's children. The Reformation, in itself, had done singularly little for women. Puritan views were of the kind patronised by a Sir Willoughby Patterne, and no step had been made towards recognising women's claims as individuals since the days when convents had in some measure certainly admitted these, a fact which probably sufficed to make the convent turn the scale on the side of happiness.
Girton and Newnham are the outcome of two contemporaneous but separate movements. In 1867, as we have seen, the moral foundations were laid of a college in connexion with Cambridge university where women should follow the same curriculum and present themselves for the same examinations as men. In 1869 the late Professor Henry Sidgwick, fellow of Trinity, and afterwards Knightbridge Professor of Moral Philosophy, suggested that lectures for women should be given at Cambridge in connexion with the new Higher Local Examination which the university had that year established for women all over England. To-day, more than thirty years after the building of the two colleges, Newnham and Girton are as alike in character as two institutions can be, but this likeness is the consequence of changes on both sides. The view taken by the promoters of Girton was that if women were to be trained at the university by university men they should undergo precisely the same tests, and take precisely the same examinations as men. Professor Sidgwick contented himself with a scheme for relating the higher education of women to university teaching, and not only accepted but encouraged a separate course of study and a separate examination test. Girton represents the principle that a woman's university education should closely resemble that which the centuries had evolved as the best for men. Newnham was started to further a scheme of education as unlike the men's as preparation for the higher work made possible. The one grew out of a claim to have the same examination as men; the other was the outcome of an examination established expressly for women. Events have not justified the second scheme. If women's education was to be connected with the university, the only permanently satisfactory way was, clearly, to follow the curriculum already traced out. If this was not actually the best which could be devised, the foundation of women's colleges was not the moment to attempt to alter it. A "best" created for women would always have been thought to be a second best. There were in fact not one but two objects set before all who interested themselves in these things--to get higher education for women, and to win recognition for their capacity to do the same work as men. Among the founders of women's colleges many had present to their minds something further than the advantages of education--they looked forward to a time when women should participate in the world's work, and have a fair share in the common human life; not a fair share of its labour, for this had never been lacking, but of the means, the opportunities, and the recognition enjoyed by men.