Elena’s Reviews > Testament of Youth > Status Update

Judging from my experience as a graduate from one university and the wife of a professor attached to another, it does seem to me that academic life in any country tends to make both men and women narrow, censorious and self-important.

lol I must concur for far too many.

. . . women have still a long way to travel before their achievements are likely to be assessed without irrelevant sex considerations entering in to bias the judgment of the critic . . .

The passage of time--or so, at least, I fondly believe--has changed my furious Buxton resentments into mellower and more balanced opinions, but probably no ambitious girl who has lived in a family which regards the subservience of women as part of the natural order of creation ever completely recovers from the bitterness of her early emotions.

The constant & to me enraging evidences of this difference in attitude towards Edward & myself violently reinforced the feminist tendencies which I had first acquired at school, & which were being indirectly but surely developed by the clamorous drama of the suffragette movement far away in London.

"It feels sad to be a woman!" I wrote in March 1913 . . . 2/2

. . . I should have been far more patient & docile than I ever showed any symptom of becoming had I not resented [my brother's] privileged position as a boy . . . in our family . . . what mattered was not the quality of the work but the sex of the worker. 1/2

One [diary] entry, made on Dec 20th, 1913, after a local dance, runs as follows: "It leaves me with a very unsatisfied feeling to have met so many stupid and artificial men with whom all the girls are obviously so pleased. How I wish I could meet a good strong splendid man, full of force and enthusiasm, and in earnest about his life! There must BE such!" [1/2]