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?”
AlanGiles
Your sense of “victimhood” is so theatrical you are becoming a parody of yourself. You are turning this site into a joke with your posts under your real name closely followed up with a “guest” post, saying the same things but more offensively.
The “Lord Blagger” joke has been done so many times (both by the real you and under the mysterious “Guest” non-de-plume) it has lost any sense of meaning. I only assume LFF employs you as some sort of cyber village idiot. If they wish to encourage genuine debate it’s time you were disallowed the privledge of having two identities.
Whether you pose as Jewish, or Methodist, or C of E, Baptist, Seventh Day Adventist, RC, Sikh or whatever you are STILL a loathsome little trouble-maker. Religion has NOTHING to do with it. It’s your vile manner that is so contemptible
W.E
This is a prime bit of navel gazing. An LFF piece on a silly dinghy race. Really?!? Oxbridge and most other top universities are open to ANYONE who can make the grade. This trite piece shouting about elitism makes no seans at all.
W.E
Not to mention the bursaries and scholarships to help underprivileged students financial.
W.E
Thank you, glad someone said it.
SonOfTheIsles
I agree with you totally, leftwing slander resistance.
I am 100% working class and proud to say so. I am not one of these holier than thou middle-class lefties who polute this website.
I got into Wolfson College, Oxford, simply on the basis of my CV and my interview. I borrowed subfusc for matriculation and wasn’t going to waste money buying it unlike the faux socialists I met there.
My only problem with Oxford was the vast number of faux socialists crying crocodile tears for the rest of the world and then partying hard into the night with not a care for the money they were spending.
You get into Oxford on academic merit. What you do there is your business. It can be as cheap or as expensive as you want it to be.
Personally, I thought the computer science department wasn’t a patch on the one at Essex University, which I went to for my undergraduate degree.
Elitist, Oxford isn’t. Poncey, yes. The lefties on this site would fit in just fine.