With March being Women’s History Month, our March 2023 exhibition served as a chance to look back on generations of women academics in whose footsteps our library users follow as students and teachers of modern languages.
The exhibition ‘Women Through the Decades at MMLL’ incorporated photographs, sketches, online articles and print material, bringing to life various women who have taught modern languages at Cambridge since the course’s inception - from back in the nineteenth century to in the 2010s.
It showcased these women’s scholarly output held in the library but also included memoirs, poetry and children’s books they published, alongside recollections from their students and colleagues. Blurbs accompanying the exhibition told visitors of the women’s often extraordinary lives: from narrowly escaping war and revolution to working for Bletchley Park and the French Resistance, not to mention struggling to secure teaching posts in what was often a climate of rampant misogyny.
Girton College was particularly kind in providing permission for us to include a striking sketch of Odette de Mourgues giving a supervision on 16th-century French literature in 1950, as well as a photograph of Alison Fairlie lecturing to women at Girton in 1944.
We hope that looking back at the exhibition, whether here or on Instagram, will foster a much deserved appreciation of these inspiring women and their work.
Featured works:
- In the mind's eye : the memoirs of Dame Elizabeth Hill / edited by Jean Stafford-Smith.
- Racine, or, The triumph of relevance / by Odette de Mourgues.
- Reading Goethe : a critical introduction to the literary work / Martin and Erika Swales.
- The Brothers Karamazov and the Poetics of Memory / Diane Oenning Thompson (online access for current University members).
- As sombras são / fotografias de Eduardo Villares ; textos de Lucia Villares.
