We're at Girton College, which was the 
first institution to offer women the
same university education
that men could get.
same university education
that men could get.
I'm here with Dr. Dorothy Thompson.
I'm here with Dr. Dorothy Thompson.
I became a research fellow in '65,
a full Fellow in '68, the year when 
Murial Bradbrook became mistress.
Bradbrook is particularly 
interesting partly because
she was the first woman to be a 
Professor in the English faculty
in Cambridge,
but partly, simply because she
produced this extraordinary board game.
It's the career of a female academic.
She works on Varsity,
she does write some essays, 
she gets kissed under the archway,
she gets a small part playing 
in the amatuer dramatic society.
She also has a wild social life since she 
goes to
four May Balls.
I'm struck by how late writing a book
comes along given how productive 
she was in her own career.
She became a really world-renowned 
Shakespearean scholar.
She was one of the first to take 
seriously that you
should study Shakespeare as something 
to be performed,
not something simply to be read 
on the page.
That's right.
Her students were terrified of her, but she
was actually very quiet,
Her students were terrified of her, but she
was actually very quiet,
she was very motherly. Once she became 
a fellow, she put little Christmas presents
she was very motherly. Once she became 
a fellow, she put little Christmas presents
in our pigeonhole. If anybody had a book
published she would always give a party.
She lived in college all her life, when
she retired she described to me I
remember, how she had to learn to open a 
tin, like so many academics of that period.
She'd never cooked for herself or looked
after herself.
I suspect a modern
updated version of this family life
would be a lot larger in thinking
about the challenges that women
academics face.
When I got married, I was told I should plan 
my children for the long vacation 
because 
there was no maternity leave,
Things have changed in society at large.
This academic, she does marry her
supervisor doesn't she at some stage, 
that's before the quads I'm glad to say.
One thing we haven't talked about is 
whether women of Bradbrook's generation,
how aware they were of overt forms of
discrimination? I mean, we still have a
problem in the university, only a fifth of 
professors are women,
I think a little over a third of
university lecturers are women.
Was there a sense, among this generation,
of needing to fight against a lot of
prejudice and encountering overt
discrimination?
It's how things were, I
mean we give it the term overt
discrimination now, but that was the
world really, that was the world we were 
brought up in.
Retiring with a peerage is really being 
ambitious.
I think she was ambitious. I think she was
very ambitious
To do what? To achieve what?
To achieve within her subject,
to be an international figure that she
certainly was and make it in Cambridge
which was not an easy place to make it in.
