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
75 Responses to “Hurrah for boat race gender equality. Now what about class?”
JAMES MCGIBBON
Paper clips and pencil sharpeners are in big demand.
JAMES MCGIBBON
Yes Damon we could build car plants in every major town with a steel works to supply the materiel. We could have recruited some East End Cockney Spivs to have worked in Bletchley Park. That would have shortened the war.
JAMES MCGIBBON
We need very clever and thinking people to keep ahead of countries with clever thinking people. A person should know what their capabiities are after spending 12 yrs in education. As for women rowing boats that is fine but keep them out of front line soldiering. I mean do you want to be in a trench with a woman who is in her week before scoffing chocolate.
damon
As this is only bored sport now (until someone from this blog shows they give a damn about the comments section) – all I can do is roll my eyes at Leon the troll and laugh.
Of Oxford he says he ”worked there for three years” – worked on his degree he means of course. He’s one of them posh boys who probably was in the rowing club too, and now trys to hide it by coming across as all proletarian. A trustafarian.
I support higher wages for workers, and lower house prices and rents, and it would help a bit by kicking out all the foreign rich. Particularly ones who have gotten rich by robbing their own people.
Leon has a go at me for being a white man. So he’s a racist too.
damon
I’m only talking crap like this as the comments section here is ruined by Leon the troll. Often only signed in as Guest. Until he’s gotten rid of there’s not much point in trying to be serious.
But sometimes I do wonder if we couldn’t simplify our society a bit.
Do we really need so much crap in or lives? A house, food and clothing, a car maybe, good public transport, holidays, education – modern computers of course. But do we need it all to be so complex? Do we really need to build sandwich factories in Northampton and then have to import all the workers in from Eastern Europe to work there because they are boring low paid jobs? Just because people have spare money to pay for someone else to make their own poxy sandwiches.
To house the workers who make the sandwiches, parts of our towns will become run down poor worker bedsitlands, and British workers will be passed over because they can’t compete. So hang out like people in Benefits Street. Living on takeaways and cheep booze from the corner shops run by immigrants.