Free Thinking Essay: Educating Ida
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 15 March 2018
⏱️ 24 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Gilbert and Sullivan gave university-educated women the English comic operetta treatment in their eighth collaboration, Princess Ida (1884) but why did the most famous musical duo of their day choose to make fun of them? To find out, New Generation Thinker Dr Eleanor Lybeck, from the University of Oxford, looks at protests, popular culture and a group of pioneering Victorian women who saw education as the first step towards emancipation. Recorded with an audience at Sage Gateshead as part of Radio 3's Free Thinking Festival.
New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select ten academics each year who can turn their research into radio
Recorded at the 2018 Free Thinking Festival and includes questions and answers from the audience at Sage Gateshead
Producer: Zahid Warley
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right? |
| 0:23.3 | It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's |
| 0:27.5 | out of ice cream. |
| 0:28.8 | Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:32.2 | Hello, I'm Shahid Abari. |
| 0:34.1 | I'm one of the presenters of Freethinking Am your host today. |
| 0:36.7 | Thank you for coming to hear this essay. |
| 0:39.3 | These essays are being delivered by the new generation thinkers. And the new generation thinkers are part of a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 along with the Arts and Humanities Research Council. |
| 0:51.2 | And the object of that scheme is to encourage academics to disseminate their |
| 0:56.1 | research on radio. |
| 0:58.5 | This is the BBC. |
| 1:03.9 | They intend to send a wire to the moon, and they'll set the Thames on fire very soon, |
| 1:16.5 | then they'll learn to make suck purses with their rigs from the ears of Lady Circe's piggy-wigs. |
| 1:25.6 | Who, you may ask, are they? Well, they were the legions of educated women |
| 1:33.0 | striking fear into the male chauvinist heart in the 1890s. Some, like the librettist |
| 1:40.1 | W.S. Gilbert, saw fit to lampoon them, no doubt in the hope that they would |
| 1:45.7 | disappear if added to a little list of society offenders, more of him in a moment. |
| 1:53.2 | But first, I'd like to concentrate on the phenomenon of girl graduates, the subject of the |
| 2:00.0 | Gilbert song from which I've been quoting. |
| 2:03.6 | Since the 1860s, women had been permitted to attend lectures and take examinations at Cambridge, |
| 2:09.6 | although their achievements went unrecognised by the university. |
| 2:14.6 | But in 1897, a proposal to award women degrees was put to the Cambridge Senate. |
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