Blue Stockings (NHB Modern Plays)

By Jessica Swale

A moving, comical and eye-opening story of four young women fighting for education and self-determination against the larger backdrop of women's suffrage.
1896. Girton College, Cambridge, the first college in Britain to admit women. The Girton girls study ferociously and match their male peers grade for grade. Yet, when the men graduate, the women leave with nothing but the stigma of being a 'blue stocking' - an unnatural, educated woman. They are denied degrees and go home unqualified and unmarriageable.
In ?Blue Stockings?, Tess Moffat and her fellow first years are determined to win the right to graduate. But little do they anticipate the hurdles in their way: the distractions of love, the cruelty of the class divide or the strength of the opposition, who will do anything to stop them. The play follows them over one tumultuous academic year, in their fight to change the future of education.
'Cracking... leaves you astonished at the prejudices these educational pioneers had to overcome' Guardian
'Lively and eye-opening' Independent
'Touching and entertaining... Swale tells the story with both wit and a hint of righteous indignation' Telegraph

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nick Hern Books
• Release date: Sep 12, 2013
• ISBN: 9781780012612

Jessica Swale

Jessica Swale is an Olivier Award-winning writer, director and film maker. She trained at Central School of Speech and Drama and the University of Exeter. Jessica began her career spending a happy decade as a theatre director, during which she founded and Red Handed Theatre Company, with whom she won Best Ensemble in the Peter Brook Empty Space Awards and multiple Evening Standard Award nominations. She then began writing. Her first play, Blue Stockings, premiered at Shakespeare’s Globe in 2013. It is now one of the most performed plays in the country, and is featured on the GCSE Drama syllabus. She is currently writing the TV series. Jessica’s next play, Nell Gwynn, won her an Olivier Award for Best New Comedy and transferred from the Globe to the West End, starring Gemma Arterton. She is currently writing the screenplay for Working Title. Other plays include Thomas Tallis (Sam Wanamaker Playhouse), The Mission and adaptations of The Jungle Book, Sense and Sensibility, Far from the Madding Crowd, Stig of the Dump and The Secret Garden. Now working primarily in film and television, she both directs and writes for the screens – original works and adaptations. Screenplays include Persuasion for Fox Searchlight, Nell Gwynn for Working Title, Longbourn for Studio Canal and an original rom-com for Blue Print Pictures. Her first film, Horrible Histories the Movie, premiered in 2019 and was nominated for a BAFTA for Best Feature for Children. Her directorial debut feature, Summerland (also writer), starring Gemma Arterton, premiered in 2020. She also wrote and directed the internet hit Leading Lady Parts, a short film promoting equality in film, starring Arterton, Felicity Jones, Emilia Clarke and friends, for the BBC and Rebel Park Productions. You can watch it on YouTube. Jessica is an associate artist with Youth Bridge Global, an international NGO which uses theatre as a tool for promoting social change in war-torn and developing nations. As such, she has lived in the Marshall Islands and in Bosnia and Herzegovina, directing Shakespeare productions including The Comedy of Errors, Much Ado About Nothing, Twelfth Night and The Tempest. She has written three titles in Nick Hern Books’ popular Drama Games series: for Classrooms and Workshops, for Devising, and for Rehearsals. She is also an active campaigner for greater equality and diversity across all dramatic media, and an active member of Times Up and the Me Too movement.

Book preview

Jessica Swale

BLUE STOCKINGS

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Title Page

Original Production

Note to the Players

Acknowledgements

Dedication

Characters and Note on Text

Act One

Act Two

About the Author

Copyright and Performing Rights Information

Blue Stockings received its professional premiere at Shakespeare’s Globe, London, on 24 August 2013, with the following cast:

Blue Stockings was performed in an earlier version at the Jerwood Vanbrugh Theatre at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, London, on 18 October 2012, with the following cast:

Note to the Players

In the mid-1800s, girls in England were lucky if they got an education at all. Some wealthy young women had governesses, some girls went to secondary school, but the curriculum was often limited to ‘feminine subjects’: needlework, art, maybe French if you were lucky, whilst the girls’ brothers were learning algebra and translating Virgil by the age of eleven.

That began to change when Emily Davies, the pioneering educationalist, led a successful campaign to incorporate serious subjects and examinations into ladies education. Then, when she’d conquered the curriculum, she turned her attention to higher education. In 1869 she set up Britain’s first residential college for women at Hitchin, Cambridgeshire. There, in a farmhouse twenty miles from Cambridge (considered to be a safe distance), the first women’s university college was born. There were five students, taught by any lecturers that were willing to risk their reputations and cycle the forty-mile round trip to do so. But it was a beginning.

By 1896, the College had moved to Girton, a mere two miles up the hill from Cambridge (a schlep which was quickly christened ‘the Girton grind’.) Yet, though the girls studied identical degrees to the men, when they’d finished their courses they were sent home empty-handed. When the men donned their caps and gowns for graduation, the women were denied their certificates. It was then that Girton’s new Mistress, Elizabeth Welsh, alongside her staff and students, decided to begin the campaign to win the girls the right to graduate. And that is where the play begins.

As for the girls themselves, we tend to associate the Victorian era with stuffiness, modesty and proper manners. The girls at Girton were rebelling against that. Whilst they followed social rules and etiquette, in their passions and ambition they were stretching out of their Victorian corsets, pulling away from their demure mothers and moving rapidly into the twentieth century. They are feisty, they are driven and they are the movers and shakers of their age.

As for the men, it would be easy to assume that those who condemn women’s education with as much vitriol as Maudsley or Lloyd are heartless misogynists. That’s simply not the case. These men speak the prevailing opinions of the time. They’re not the devils of the piece; they genuinely believed that women’s health and the future of Britain was at stake. I’d heartily recommend reading Maudsley’s short book Sex in Mind and in Education, on which some of his text, and many of the sentiments of the play, are based, as a place to start.

Jessica Swale

Acknowledgements

Thank you to the National Theatre Studio for putting a pen in my hand; Bash at the Nash; Blanche McIntyre; Oxford School of Drama and my workshop actors; Ed Kemp and all at RADA; Lois Jeary, Laura Forrest-Hay and Phil Engleheart; Matt Applewhite and all at Nick Hern Books; Helen Mumby and all at MacNaughton Lord; Jane Robinson and the staff at the Girton archives; Dominic Dromgoole for taking a punt and having faith; to all at the Globe, especially our cast and crew; to the Swales, for listening to me read all the parts badly. To Lloyd Trott, a true mentor and inspiration, and to John Dove, whose generosity and wisdom has made this all possible. And finally, to Nell, Ella, Gugu and Michael, who have been the suspenders to this Blue Stocking. Thank you.

J. S.

For Malala Yousafzai

and all those who dedicate their lives to our education,

from the Girton pioneers to teachers, like my mother,

who inspire us all

Characters

THE GIRTON GIRLS

TESS MOFFAT, a curious girl

CELIA WILLBOND, a fragile hard-worker

CAROLYN ADDISON, an early bohemian

MAEVE SULLIVAN, a mystery

THE BOYS

RALPH MAYHEW, a student at Trinity

LLOYD, a student at Trinity

HOLMES, a student at Trinity

EDWARDS, a student at Trinity

WILL BENNETT, a student at King’s; Tess’s friend

THE STAFF

ELIZABETH WELSH, Mistress of Girton College

DR MAUDSLEY, renowned psychiatrist

MR BANKS, a lecturer at Girton and Trinity

MISS BLAKE, a lecturer at Girton

PROFESSOR COLLINS, a lecturer at Trinity

PROFESSOR ANDERSON, a lecturer at Trinity

PROFESSOR RADLEIGH, a board member at Trinity

MINNIE, the housemaid

MR PECK, the gardener and maintenance man

MISS BOTT, a chaperone

THE OTHERS

BILLY SULLIVAN, Maeve’s brother

MRS LINDLEY, shopkeeper in the haberdashery

Also a LIBRARIAN, additional MALE STUDENTS, a LADY and her HUSBAND in the café

With the exception of Elizabeth Welsh and Tess, all parts can be doubled. The play can be staged with approximately twelve actors.

Note on the Text

A forward slash (/) represents an interruption from the next speaker, to indicate where that actor should cut into the line.

Setting

It is 1896 at Girton College, Cambridge, home to Britain’s first female university students.

This ebook was created before the end of rehearsals and so may differ slightly from the play as performed.

ACT ONE

Prologue

September 1896. The first day of term at Cambridge University.

Smoke. Steam. Music. Train sounds. Dozens of men’s legs in gowns hurry past on their way from the train to their Cambridge halls. Bustle, shouting. Then, through the smoke, four pairs of women’s feet, daintily glad in lace-up boots, emerge and move towards us. As they come into the light these four

Reviews for Blue Stockings (NHB Modern Plays)

[spiralsheep · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Jessica Swale demonstrates a strong grasp of individual characterisation, balanced by her understanding of social change through history.One of the most socially powerful of the main female characters believes we should fight first for improvements perceived as most likely to be achievable in the shorter term. Women's education is her chosen cause, which she insists on separating from women's political rights. History consistently proves this position inadequate. Women won the right to vote in 1918 and 1928, but weren't allowed Oxbridge degrees until 1921 and 1947. The token working class female student is also very realistically sacrificed for the benefit of middle class ideologies (that undermine feminist solidarity).The play is also a witty theatrical entertainment, with relatable characters.