Vox Meditantis

Sunday, 21st October 1934

The afternoon wanes early now, and I have taken my customary walk amongst the apple trees before the light fails altogether. The orchard is nearly spent – only a few wizened fruits remain upon the uppermost boughs, and the grass beneath lies thick with rotting windfalls. There is a melancholy beauty to autumn’s conclusion, yet I find myself curiously uplifted this evening, despite the gathering mists and the chill that has crept into the air.

I stood for some time beneath the oldest tree, watching the first stars prick through the dimming sky. Venus, I think, and perhaps Jupiter – though I confess my astronomical knowledge remains that of an enthusiastic amateur. How steadfast they appear, those celestial lanterns, whilst we below rush headlong into an age of machinery and marvels. This morning’s wireless broadcast spoke of new aeroplanes being tested, capable of speeds that would have seemed the stuff of fantasy when I was a girl. I find myself torn between wonder and unease. Are we meant to fly so high, to move so swiftly? Or do we risk severing ourselves from the good earth, from the patient rhythms that have governed human life since time immemorial?

Yet I cannot deny the excitement that stirs within me when I consider what these modern inventions might mean for the girls in my charge. The motorcar has already granted us freedoms my mother’s generation could scarcely imagine. The wireless brings knowledge into even the remotest cottage. Surely there is moral purpose in progress, if we but guide it wisely?

This leads me to a question I have been turning over in my mind these past weeks, one that came to me quite unbidden as I read my correspondence this morning. What is the greatest risk I should like to take – but have not found the courage for?

I know the answer, though it costs me something to commit it to these private pages. I should like to establish a technical college for young women – not merely a finishing school or a place for domestic training, but a proper institute where girls of ability might learn engineering principles, wireless operation, perhaps even aviation mechanics. I have spoken of it to no one save Maud, who thinks me half-mad but kindly refrains from saying so directly. The difficulty is not merely financial, though that is considerable. It is the weight of expectation, the fear of seeming ridiculous, of overreaching my proper sphere. A headmistress who keeps to her Latin and her deportment lessons is respectable; one who dreams of training female engineers courts mockery – or worse, failure that would reflect poorly upon all women who aspire to leadership.

And yet, standing here beneath the stars, I cannot help but feel that we are called to be more than custodians of the past. The heavens themselves declare that there are heights we have not yet scaled, mysteries we have barely begun to fathom. If men may reach towards them, why not women also?

The mist has thickened now, and I must return indoors before I lose the path entirely. Tomorrow brings another week of lessons, of chapel, of the hundred small duties that constitute my life. But tonight, in the gathering darkness of the orchard, I have allowed myself to dream – and that, perhaps, is the beginning of courage.

The stars are watching. I must prove myself worthy of their steady light.

Interwar Britain, amid uneven recovery from the Great Depression and accelerating technological change, saw women’s higher education expand slowly but perceptibly, though engineering and technical fields remained largely male preserves in the mid-1930s. Universities admitted women on formal terms of equality at some institutions since earlier decades, yet female enrolments clustered in arts and teacher training, with technology recording only a handful of women students in 1934-35 at Manchester. Parallel adult-education movements broadened access, scheduling women-only classes and daytime provision to accommodate domestic responsibilities during the 1930s. In the following decade, wartime labour demands opened technical training to many more women, accelerating post-war debates on women’s professional roles and educational reform.

Bob Lynn | © 2025 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved.