She noted at Encaenia, held in September this year due to COVID delay, that ‘This institution for me supported the life of the mind, regardless of who you were or where you came from. It was and remains a ‘provocative institution’, forcing students to consider their position on just about everything, or at least encouraging them to challenge prevailing wisdom. She is partly referring to ‘all these portraits of old blokes’ that have traditionally lined Senior Common Rooms across Oxford – but notes the recent effort to change this, with new portraits and much greater diversity. It’s a cliché but ‘what you can’t see you can’t be’ still applies.’

My generation really wanted that to change, in public affairs and in work generally. For young women there was always this sense of being outnumbered, that we had to try that bit harder. ‘The gender imbalance was remarkable but not much remarked on. It cheered me up!’īack then Oxford was a different beast, and if you were a woman you were in a minority. ‘I met many remarkable women at Oxford and that is a profound change. Jeanette Winterson says that the profound in-roads made by women at Oxford since 1978, when she went up to Catz to read English Literature, struck her when recently in Oxford to collect her honorary degree.

Oranges are not the only fruit feminism