Degrees on Arrival: The Steamboat Ladies

This episode features the story of how a group of more than 700 pioneering women in the UK smashed through barriers to higher education and claimed degrees from Trinity College Dublin. Denied their degrees at Oxford and Cambridge because of their gender despite successfully completing their exams, the “Steamboat ladies” made use of an early 1900s loophole to earn official recognition by making a trip across the Irish Sea. The episode also explores the broader suffrage movement at the turn of the century and profiles figures like Eleanor Rathbone and Margaret Hills, whose efforts paved the way for academic and professional equity for women attending universities in the UK and around the world.

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