Margaret Thatcher battled to preserve her old women-only Oxford college from European Community equality laws requiring it to take in men, Downing Street files reveal.
The then prime minister, who read chemistry at Somerville between 1943 and 1947, dismissed the proposals as “absurd”, saying they would “prevent women’s colleges from continuing as women’s colleges with women fellows”.
Her interest in the workings of the Sex Discrimination Act 1975 were disclosed in documents released to the National Archives in Kew on Friday.
Section 51 of the act exempted Oxford and Cambridge colleges from the general sweep of equality rules but an EC directive pushed for its repeal a decade later.
Thatcher was warned in June 1986 of the impending change in a letter from the then principal of Somerville, Daphne Park, a former MI6 officer.
“Dear Prime Minister ... the Oxford and Cambridge Act 1923, under which our statutes were enacted, continues to protect our status and enables us to lawfully to advertise [teaching fellows’] posts for women only,” Park wrote.
“I am not asking you, busy as you are with affairs of state, to do anything; but I thought you might wish to learn what is happening from us and to know what we are doing about it.”
The letter added: “I hold no brief for resisting change when the time is ripe but I hope the college will be able to choose its course when the right time comes rather than to have the decision made for us for reasons which are not germane to the issue.”
Senior Downing Street advisers, ministers and British negotiators in Brussels were mobilised to safeguard the status of Oxford and Cambridge’s women-only colleges. Thatcher personally raised the issue with Jacques Delors, the then president of the European commission, receiving assurances that “common sense would prevail”, according to a No 10 memo.
On one note Thatcher wrote: “I take it that no decision has been taken about section 51. I should resist its repeal most strenuously. Please keep me informed. I will chair any (or every meeting) on this subject.”
In a further memo on 28 August 1987, the prime minister said she would “vigorously” support attempts to use legal powers to preserve the status of all-women colleges.
The changes would have affected the status of the four remaining all-women colleges – Somerville and St Hilda’s at Oxford and Newnham and Lucy Cavendish at Cambridge.
Somerville accepted men for the first time in 1994 and St Hilda’s, the last remaining single-sex college in Oxford, became mixed in 2008.
