Women Students’ Club

Although the University of Adelaide was at the forefront in enabling women to access tertiary education in the 1870s and 1880s, it wasn’t until sometime later that an organisation specifically for women students was constituted.  During the University’s first few decades, women students congregated semi-formally in quarters often described as unsatisfactorily heated, ventilated and furnished.[1]   By way of example, a 1902 letter to the University Council addressed from the ‘Women’s Common Room’ began, ‘[t]here are as you are doubtless aware 40 or 50 women students, and we have been granted a room in the basement of the Conservatorium building’.[2]  Multiple signatories, among them undergraduates Helen Mayo and Ruby Davy, laid out the some of the inadequacies of the allocated accommodation such as its distance from the University Building in bad weather, noise from the Elder Conservatorium and lack of basic facilities.[3]

Encouraged by Jessie Naylor, the wife of recently appointed professor of classics Henry Naylor, in July 1909 honours student Mary Moncrieff wrote on behalf of women students and graduates asking the University Council for permission to ‘form a club to promote the common interests of and, form a bond of union between past and present women students.’[4][5]  The Council agreed, and a constitution was drawn up over several months by women students and graduates.  From the outset, the ‘Women Students’ Club’ (WSC) was designed to be inclusive, with memberships available not only to current matriculated and non-matriculated students, but also to graduates, ‘affiliates’ in students from other institutions and honourary members such as the wives of University staff.[6]

Early records of the WSC reveal a thriving and purposeful organisation.  In 1915 the club consisted of a president (Helen Mayo), vice-president (Ellen Benham), a treasurer, a secretary and representatives of the faculties of arts, medicine, law and music.[7]  Several sub-societies had by now emerged including the Women Graduates’ Club and the Women’s Debating Club.  During and immediately after the First World War, a Red Cross sub-committee was active in fundraising and otherwise providing aid to soldiers and civilians.[8]  In these and other activities prominent students and graduates of the era included Constance Davey, Anna Menz, Dorothy Summerville, Mary Kitson, Sarah Elizabeth Jackson and Eleanor Allen.

In keeping with its founding goals, the main annual social events of the WSC were a ‘freshers tea’ to welcome and orientate new students, and a post-commemoration dinner to congratulate new graduates. The fresher’s tea for 1916 included presentations by representatives of sub-societies in the Women’s Christian Union, Women’s Progressive Club and Women’s Hockey Club.[9]  The following year, MA graduate Sarah Elizabeth Jackson ‘explained some of the differences between school work & university work & what the ideal of a student might be.’[10]  Post-commemoration dinners were more formal occasions with a set menu and toasts.  The 1914 annual dinner was held at Jackman’s Grand Café in December and included toasts to the King, the University, the WSC, the ‘Graduates of 1914’ and ‘Absent Graduates’.[11]

The area referred to as the ‘Women’s Common Room’ or the ‘Women’s Student Room’ remained substandard as indicated by a 1916 letter from the WSC to the Registrar requesting repairs and refurbishment to a ‘room used by all women students attending the University’ with ‘much traffic’.[12]   The request was granted, but the following year it was announced the WSC had been allocated a portion of the Mounted Police Barracks transferred to the University to ameliorate ongoing space shortages.[13][14]  The building, known affectionately as ‘the Cottage’, became the centre women’s social activities at the University – the ‘intellectual and social unity’ for which the WSC was created – over the next decade.[15]  As described in the September 1918 edition of the Adelaide University Magazine, ‘a background of cold space littered by coats and hats and bags and umbrellas’ was contrasted with amenities in the Cottage including a bathroom, kitchen and a room ‘where there is a fire, a carpet, easy chairs, pictures and flowers’.[16]  Renamed the ‘Adelaide University Women’s Union’ (AUWU) just before the move to the Cottage, students and graduates met formally and informally throughout the 1920s to discuss ‘science, arts, education, politics, welfare issues and international events’.[17]  The Women’s Debating Club, a particularly active sub-group during the postwar period, deliberated on subjects including women’s suffrage, equal pay for women, the nature of marriage and the role of the League of Nations.[18]

Another change of location came with the completion of the Lady Symon Building in 1929.  Funded by a £10,000 gift to the University by Sir Josiah Symon, the building was among the first to be completed in what would become the Adelaide University Union (AUU) complex on the northern edge of the campus. In offering the donation, Symon expressed a desire to foster ‘comfort and co-operation in women’s University work [by] broadening and increasing the facilities for it in harmony with the larger part which women now play and the greater influence they are destined to exercise and civil and education life.’[19]  The constitution of the AUU as a whole was being reformed in the late 1920s and as part of the terms of affiliation with the Union the Adelaide University Women’s Union was formalised as the title of what was originally WSC. At the same time, the Women Graduates’ Club became a separate entity named the Adelaide University Women Graduates’ Association (later the South Australian branch of the Australian Federation of University Women).[20][21]  1929 also saw the emergence of University Wives’ Club (later the University Women’s Club) as an organisation for the spouses of the mainly male academic and professional staff.[22]

The amended regulations of the AUWU, passed in April 1929, stipulated that its general committee consist of nine elected members including two students from arts and social sciences, two from science and engineering, two from medicine, dentistry, pharmacy and physiotherapy, one from law, commerce and physical education and two general representatives.[23]   During the 1930s graduates and other older women continued to play an active role in guiding younger women, and social fixtures like the freshers’ tea and the new graduates dinner continued. An ethos of service beyond the University also remained, with women students contributing to organisations like the Young People’s Employment Council during the Great Depression, the Women's Non-Party Political Association and, on the outbreak of the Second World War, renewal of support for the Red Cross.[24]

Although by the 1950s the main functions of the AUWU appear to have been subsumed by women delegates in the newly formed Student Representative Council and the postwar AUU, the influence of the AUWU was enduring. By one assessment, ‘the solidarity generated through the women students’ friendships spread beyond the University to other clubs. Through these clubs, women not only formed friendships that lasted their lifetime, but learned valuable skills including debating, organising meetings, minute taking and managing money, as well as gaining reprise from undertaking the mundane necessities of household life’.[25]  Equally, the collective initiatives of the University women students of the first half of the century provided a precedent for the second wave feminist students of the late 1960s and 1970s, the elected Women’s Officer role in the Students Association of the University of Adelaide from the 1980s and the ‘Women on Campus’ movement from the 1990s.

1. Finnis, M M 1975, The Lower Level: A Discursive History of the Adelaide University Union, The Adelaide University Union pp. 9-10. The University of Adelaide, Rare Books University Collection, 378.942 F514l.

2. Registrar’s Department, correspondence regarding ‘Women’s Common Room at the Conservatorium’. The University of Adelaide Archives, Series 200 docket 1902/469.

3. Registrar’s Department, correspondence regarding ‘Women’s Common Room at the Conservatorium’. The University of Adelaide Archives, Series 200 docket 1902/469.

4. Chessell, D and Jolly E and Latz H and Barrett-Woodbridge M, 2023, Graduate Women South Australia: A Women’s Association History 1914-2021, Graduate Women SA Inc, p. 6.

5. Registrar’s Department, correspondence regarding ‘Permission to form a club of Past and Present women students’. The University of Adelaide Archives, Series 200 docket 1909/517.

6. Adelaide University Women's Union, Meeting minutes 21 July 1909. The University of Adelaide Archives, Series 687, volume 1.

7. Adelaide University Women's Union, Meeting minutes 18 November 1914. The University of Adelaide Archives, Series 687, volume 1.

8. Adelaide University Women's Union, Meeting minutes 19 November 1915. The University of Adelaide Archives, Series 687, volume 1.

9. Adelaide University Women's Union, Meeting minutes 16 March 1916. The University of Adelaide Archives, Series 687, volume 1.

10. Adelaide University Women's Union, Meeting minutes 15 June 1917. The University of Adelaide Archives, Series 687, volume 1.

11. Women’s Student Club, Annual Dinner Programme, 1914. The University of Adelaide Archives, Series 1388, item 13.

12.  Registrar’s Department, correspondence regarding ‘Renovations to Women Students room’. The University of Adelaide Archives, Series 200 docket 1916/231.

13.  Adelaide University Women's Union, Meeting minutes 15 June 1916. The University of Adelaide Archives, Series 687, volume 1.  

14. Chessell, D and Jolly E and Latz H and Barrett-Woodbridge M, 2023, Graduate Women South Australia: A Women’s Association History 1914-2021, Graduate Women SA Inc, p. 14.

15. Adelaide University Magazine 1918, ‘University Women’s Union’, Adelaide University Magazine, September, vol 1, no 1, p 15. The University of Adelaide, Rare Books University Collection, 378.05 A22.

16. Adelaide University Magazine 1918, ‘University Women’s Union’, Adelaide University Magazine, September, vol 1, no 1, pp. 15-16. The University of Adelaide, Rare Books University Collection, 378.05 A22.

17. Chessell, D and Jolly E and Latz H and Barrett-Woodbridge M, 2023, Graduate Women South Australia: A Women’s Association History 1914-2021, Graduate Women SA Inc, p. 15.

18. Women Students Debating Club, Meeting minutes. The University of Adelaide Archives, Series 688.

19. Registrar’s Department, correspondence regarding ‘Sir Josiah Symon, Gift of £10,000 for Women's Union’. The University of Adelaide Archives, Series 200 docket 1926/116.

20. Adelaide University Women's Union, Meeting minutes 4 December 1928. The University of Adelaide Archives, Series 687, volume 2.

21.  Finnis, M M 1975, The Lower Level: A Discursive History of the Adelaide University Union, The Adelaide University Union pp. 130-131. The University of Adelaide, Rare Books University Collection, 378.942 F514l.

22. Capturing Their Spirit: An Updated History of the University of Adelaide Women’s Club 2018, University of Adelaide Women’s Club, Adelaide, pp 5-6.

23. Adelaide University Women's Union, Meeting minutes 10 May 1929. The University of Adelaide Archives, Series 687, volume 3.  

24. Adelaide University Women's Union, Meeting minutes 5 June 1940. The University of Adelaide Archives, Series 687, volume 4. 

25. Capturing Their Spirit: An Updated History of the University of Adelaide Women’s Club 2018, University of Adelaide Women’s Club, Adelaide, pp 3-4.