Let’s be clear: the boat race is still profoundly elitist
Today’s Oxford and Cambridge boat race will, for the first time, see women of the two universities permitted to race on the same course as the men and on the same day in front of a live television audience.
This is a step forward for gender equality and another blow to patriarchal assumptions that women are too ‘delicate’ for such sporting endeavours. As recently as 1962 the captain of Selwyn College at Cambridge wrote to the university’s women’s boat club to chastise them for perpetrating something that was “a ghastly sight, an anatomical impossibility and physiologically dangerous”.
But let’s be clear: the boat race is still profoundly elitist. We should all welcome the levelling of the playing field between men and women, but the next step is for Oxford and Cambridge – and by extension the boat race – to open themselves up more fully to those from non-privileged backgrounds.
Just one in 10 children who attend either Oxford or Cambridge are entitled to free school meals – compared with a fifth of children in Britain as a whole. A quick glance at some of the surnames which still dominate at Oxford makes the same point in a slightly different way. According to a 2013 study by the London School of Economics, a disproportionately large number of places at Oxford were taken up by people with Norman Conquest surnames such as Baskerville, Darcy, Mandeville and Montgomery.
This isn’t because a Norman surname is a sign of super intelligence; it’s because we live in a society where class privilege cascades down the generations like a tennis ball bouncing down a flight of stairs. More young people from the London borough of Richmond attend Oxford and Cambridge than from the entire city of Birmingham.
And so as much as today’s boat race may be a victory for gender equality, we should not ignore the class inequalities that persist at our top universities – and in society more generally – in a fit of liberal hubris. As I’ve written a number of times, equality isn’t a state of affairs that is half upper middle class women and half upper middle class men.
James Bloodworth is the editor of Left Foot Forward. Follow him on Twitter
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75 Responses to “Hurrah for boat race gender equality. Now what about class?”
damon
”there’s also not that many shops”
It’s a big town you eejit, with all the usual town shops.
Guest
“FACTS R STUPID”
Right. As you make nonsense claims about private schools. No, the advantage is simply that they have smaller class sizes – and some excellent state schools do better than private schools anyway! And of course your focus is on making sure no thoughts happen among kids, etc.
And of course you want to reduce our educational system to one as poor as Sri Lanka’s old fashioned one, stripping out the tools to make people able to deal with modern jobs and once again making sure the focus is punishment, not learning.
Guest
Yea, you scream, what does the Jew know, he only lived there.
Keep attacking blindly, simply because a “eejit” (i.e. Untermensch Jew, to you) posts it.
Big town…big town…let’s see…150k people, not really very big at all – and about 45k of those are students, and hence short-term residents.
No surprise you are absolutely fine with class inequality, which you’re here to attack me to try and derail debate on.
David Lindsay
Oxford is basically a working-class city, especially the east. There are no Tories at all on the City Council, and an ultra-Left action advocating “working-class rule for working-class areas” had a few some years ago.
Leon Wolfeson
And how does that relate to what I said? Rents are sky-high, not least because the place is a third student. It’s a student town, very much so.