Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Davies, Sarah Emily
DAVIES, SARAH EMILY (1830-1921), promoter of women’s education, generally known as Emily Davies, was born at Southampton 22 April 1830, the fourth child of the Rev. John Davies, D.D., who was rector of Gateshead from 1840 to 1861, by his wife, Mary Hopkinson. She was educated at home. From girlhood she felt a strong interest in the efforts made to raise the position of women by Elizabeth Garrett (afterwards Mrs. Garrett Anderson, M.D., q.v.) and Barbara Leigh Smith (afterwards Mme Bodichon, q.v.). Visits to her brother, the Rev. John Llewelyn Davies [q.v.], in London, enabled Miss Davies to do occasional work for the Englishwoman’s Journal (founded in 1858 by Mme Bodichon and Miss Bessie Rayner Parkes, afterwards Mme Louis Belloc) and for the Society for Promoting the Employment of Women (founded in 1859).
On her father’s death in 1860, Miss Davies, with her mother, moved to London and engaged actively in helping Miss Garrett to enter the medical profession. This led to the formation in 1862 of a committee, with Miss Davies as secretary (1862-1869), for obtaining the admission of women to university examinations. The committee’s efforts secured in 1865 the admission of girls to the Cambridge senior and junior local examinations. In 1866 she founded the London Schoolmistresses’ Association, of which she was honorary secretary till its dissolution in 1888. A memorial promoted by Miss Davies in 1864 caused girls’ schools to be included in the scope of the Schools Inquiry Commission (1864-1868), before which she and Miss Frances Mary Buss, principal of the North London Collegiate School for Ladies, gave evidence of great value. The local examinations and the commission led to the modernization of girls’ schools.
As nothing equivalent to university education was then available for women, Miss Davies began in 1867 to organize a college for women, with the help of Mme Bodichon, Henry Richard Tomkinson, Henry John Roby [q.v.], James (afterwards Viscount) Bryce, Sedley Taylor, Lady Stanley of Alderley [q.v.], and others. The college, which was opened at Hitchin in 1869 and transferred to Cambridge (Girton College) in 1873, was henceforth Miss Davies’ main interest, and its finance and general policy were directed by her. She insisted that the students should submit to the same tests and, as far as possible, to the same conditions as university men, and she opposed all attempts to organize separate educational schemes for women.
In suffrage work also Miss Davies was a pioneer. With Mme Bodichon and Miss Parkes she organized the first petition, which was presented by John Stuart Mill to parliament on 7 June 1866; and in 1866-1867 she acted as secretary to the first women’s suffrage committee. In 1870 she was elected one of the first women members of the London School Board, but she withdrew in 1873 and devoted herself entirely to Girton College, where she resided as mistress from 1873 to 1875. In 1904 she resigned the honorary secretaryship of the college, which she had held since 1867, except for a brief interval during which she was treasurer. She then turned again to suffrage work, and became chairman of the London Society for Women’s Suffrage. She died at Hampstead 13 July 1921.
Miss Davies’s chief writings are The Higher Education of Women (1866) and Thoughts on Some Questions relating to Women, 1860-1908 (1910). She had a remarkable power of carrying her schemes into effect; rational and clear-sighted, she combined tenacity of purpose with such caution, forethought, and moderation in action as to earn for herself the description of ‘this very unrevolutionary woman’, although in reality she was one of the chief figures in the movement which revolutionized the position of women.
[Miss Davies’s writings; Minute Books of Girton College; Barbara Stephen, Emily Davies and Girton College, 1927; private information.]