Emily Davies

Although her brothers received a better education than she, Molly Hughes did not resent them. Emily Davies (1830-1921), on the other hand, is said to have resented the restrictions placed on her and her sister in comparison to their three brothers. It was this sense of frustration at gender inequality, along with her friendship with Barbara Bodichon, that led to her suffragist activities and, in 1869, to set up a women's college in Hitchin, which moved four years later to become Girton College. Girton was the first Cambridge college to offer women university-level education; it has been mixed since 1977.