‘A Summer School of their Own’: The Newnham College Summer Schools for Working Women

Between 1922 and 1950 Newnham College, Cambridge, and the Workers’ Educational Association ran a pioneering series of summer schools specifically for working women. These schools were inclusive, inter-generational, and non-hierarchical.  Drawing on the voices, reports, letters and personal testimonies of factory workers, domestic servants and seamstresses, many of whom came from the ‘distressed areas’ between the wars, as well as the recollections of their teachers, Mary Joannou’s richly illustrated presentation pieces together a fascinating story of women’s creativity, aspirations and achievements using little-known materials from the college archives by kind permission of the Principal and Fellows.

Mary Joannou is an Emerita Professor at Anglia Ruskin University attached to the Labour History Research Unit and author of a new biography, The Life and Turbulent Times of Clara Dorothea Rackham, Suffragist, Socialist and Social Reformer published by Routledge in 2022.