St Hilda's College, Oxford: It's different for girls

Today, the fellows of St Hilda's College, Oxford - the university's last women-only bastion - vote on whether to admit men. Hannah Borno recalls her time at this very special institution, while Kathryn Hughes describes the arrival of the opposite sex at Lady Margaret Hall

It's Saturday night, autumn 1990, and three 19-year-old women – Lucie, a law student, Josie, a maths student, and me – are standing behind a deserted college bar. We are making toasted chocolate sandwiches and, in a particularly visionary moment, discover that this delightful confection is much improved by a quick splash of Babycham. We devise a range of cream-based cocktails to accompany our tasty new snack, before applying lip gloss and thick kohl. At 10 o'clock, our shift at the bar over, we stride out into the night, beyond the college walls. We are like bats swooping from a cave, our radars alert for the sound of fun.

For generations, that has been the Hilda's way. You want boys, you want fun, you have to go looking. But that ritual exodus may at last be at an end. Because today, fellows at the last all-female Oxford college will vote on whether to admit men, after 110 years of single-sex education, ostensibly for financial reasons. If this step is taken, it will lead to the entirety of the college – undergraduates, postgraduates and fellows – becoming mixed. Two weeks ago, the college's undergraduates voted on whether they were for or against integration. It was a tight vote: 57 per cent were against integration, 42 per cent were for. One thing is certain; if the college decides, rightly or wrongly, to admit male students, the bar will never be deserted again.

I studied English at St Hilda's from 1990 to 1993. I applied to the college under strict instructions from my school (it is thought to be easier to gain a place if you apply to a women's college), but in truth, I had very little appreciation of the college system. I had no idea that colleges were where you ate, slept, socialised, learnt and lived. Your college was your life. And choosing to attend a single-sex college was a big deal. There are girls in the dining-room, girls in the library, and girls in the bar. Everywhere you look, there are girls. Girls carrying books, girls carrying oars, and girls carrying Whistles carrier bags.

St Hilda's has a reputation for excellence in English, and the college atmosphere, cosy and domestic, was highly conducive to study. I remember wall-to-wall pale green carpets, ticking clocks, a wonderful library, stunning views of the river, and good, wholesome food. Looking back, St Hilda's was like a genteel, slightly faded, country-house hotel – perfect for a weekend break when you fancy getting down to some serious reading.

That the place was void of boozy young men, shouting in the bar and vomiting in the flower-beds, I now think was a marked advantage, but at 19, I could see no virtue in that fact, because back then, my primary objective was flirtation. My aim, and that of most of my fellow-students, became to leave the place as often as we could. Some girls defected wholesale to other colleges: they'd come to Hilda's for their weekly tutorial, but they'd study, eat and drink elsewhere. The somewhat isolated position of the college (it is situated beyond Magdalen Bridge, and is the furthest east of all the colleges) meant that, for us, any night out first necessitated a lot of walking. We would stride out through town, wine bottle in hand, in our uniform of high boots and higher skirts, looking for fun.

Those of us who were extrovert fared well. If we went to a party, we'd shove our own music on, dance provocatively, and take over, cackling gleefully, oblivious to the other girls glowering at us. But more introverted girls suffered, spending three years curled up in ivory towers reading medieval texts before they realised that the handsome princes of whom they dreamt would never actually come to them.

That's not to say that efforts to bring in the boys always failed. When Josie and I were entertainment reps, we would instigate events with lurid names like "Sexual Jungle" that never failed to lure hundreds of over-groomed, slightly desperate boys to our bar. Unfortunately, most of the Hilda's girls were dancing elsewhere at the time, and the shy ones still stayed in their rooms. All the more for me, Lucie and Josie.

Perhaps, in a mixed college, our exuberant, sometimes predatory, femaleness would have been less fully expressed. At the more ultra-male of the colleges – places such as St Peter's and St Edmund Hall – girls would dress sportily, favouring a drab rugby shirt-and-tracksuit uniform. We, on the other hand, exulted in our boots and miniskirts. As a fellow-English student, Dr Keely Fisher, 33, now a lecturer in medieval English at Oxford, recalls: "When a girl from another college dressed up, it was clean jeans, clean shirt, clean hair and a nice pashmina. But when a Hilda's girl dressed up, it was time to break out the seamed stockings. We were more aware of our femininity than girls from other colleges, because we had the space to develop it fully."

Paradoxically, although the focus of my life at college was pursuing boys, I acquired no male friends. For me, this must be the biggest failing of all-female education. Having spent my adolescence at an all-girls school, and my university years at St Hilda's, it wasn't until my late twenties that I learnt the value of male friendship. What I'd been denied until then was that camaraderie that comes with drinking tea on rainy afternoons with a boy you don't fancy. I never developed a sense of boys as people, not prizes, and left university unable to engage with men on a sensible level. I either fancied them or ignored them. I still only have one heterosexual male friend.

I've made firm female friends from my time at St Hilda's, but when I compare my friendships will those of women from mixed colleges, they are no more numerous, nor are our bonds stronger. Tellingly, I never made a single female friend outside college. At the time, the St Hilda's "sisterhood" was all I needed, and it seemed rock-solid – like armour. But 12 years on, I am no longer friends with many of those women. In spite of, or perhaps because of, the intense nature of the bonds between us, our "sisterhood" imploded rather violently five years ago. But when I look back on my years at Oxford, those negative traits I ascribed to the all-female environment – the hothouse atmosphere, my and my fellow-students neurosis, the infectious hysteria that preceded Finals (which saw me jogging, full of beta blockers and bourbon, round the garden at 4am on the day of my first exam) – were just as much in evidence at mixed colleges. And, although there was always a particular PMS edge to our lunacy, boys went mad, too. We just didn't see them doing it.

When I ask my peers how they feel, 12 years on, about St Hilda's going mixed, most are ambivalent. Lucie Donahue, 30, who studied law and is now working in London as a television director, recalls: "Because I had just come from a mixed state school, it suddenly felt as if I was plunged into a social experiment. I don't think it did me any harm – it made me much tougher than I would have been and taught me to go out and get the things I wanted. Especially men. But looking back, we were friends in adversity – we constantly had to stick together and defend each other because we all felt slightly isolated and beleaguered." On the issue of integration, Lucie argues: "I can't say that I had a bad time because the college was single-sex, but I can't say that I had a better time because of it, either. So, if I had to choose, I'd vote in favour of admitting men. There's no reason not to."

Keely Fisher disagrees: "I had a fantastic time at Hilda's, and I chose to attend a single-sex college. There is absolutely no reason to admit men; why on earth would I want to be surrounded by callow, untried 18-year-old youths? When I applied to the college, I was pursuing some kind of St Trinian's idyll. I thought that St Hilda's would be full of beautiful, intelligent, naughty girls who knew how to have fun, and I wasn't disappointed – one good friend even smuggled a Chippendale stripper into her halls of residence as a plaything for the weekend." She goes misty-eyed at the memory. "At Hilda's, I worked hard and played hard; I wore fishnets and hotpants to my Finals, and I got a double First."

One of Dr Fisher's former students, Ruth Hunt, did her English degree at St Hilda's two years ago, and was both president of St Hilda's Junior Common Room (JCR) and of the university's student union. She agrees with her mentor: "St Hilda's provides an alternative that is sorely needed. We are different and should enjoy that difference – rather than becoming just another slightly lazy, slightly average, mixed college." One Fellow, who wishes to remain anonymous, argues: "As a college, we are successful, solvent and progressive. We don't need men."

There is a very specific argument for maintaining all-female educational institutions. I know that my father, a Muslim, was ecstatic when I ended up at St Hilda's. No doubt his vision of the college was of a studious idyll where grave young women drank tea together and read books – he overlooked the fact that the place does have doors to the outside world. But it is true that as more and more girls from other religious backgrounds are granted access to a university education that may otherwise have been denied them, then single-sex institutions will have an increasingly important role to play within our society.

For some women, such as Keely, the choice of a single-sex college is an empowered one. Others have no choice at all: it's a girls-only college or nothing. And I believe that St Hilda's should stay single-sex to keep this option open. Perhaps I'm being wistful, but at 31, I sometimes long for the hushed gentility of St Hilda's. A world where women quietly murmur to each other over tea and toast. And at Hilda's, I did at least have the chance to be active in college – I was both bar manager and entertainment officer, and I'm not sure I would have had the chance had our JCR committee been full of men. So, I shall feel a certain nostalgic sadness if today, the fellows finally vote for integration.

Still, I wouldn't advise any daughter of mine to follow in my footsteps. Unless, of course, she enjoyed wearing fishnets, loved dancing, could hold her drink, and relished a long, long walk of a Saturday night.

Hannah Borno is senior features writer at 'Cosmopolitan' magazine

The day the men arrived at college: a survivor writes

In October 1978, when I went up to Lady Margaret Hall, I was part of the last all-female intake. The college was already getting ready for men. There was a bar being built – apparently no alpha male of the kind LMH would need to attract to reap the benefits of going co-ed would attend a college where you couldn't get a quick half after a hard day in the library. And they were also building New Lavatories – a phrase that popped up, in capital letters, on everybody's lips whenever we heard the banging and gurgling sounds that were going on in odd corners of the late-Victorian building. This bothered me, but I was too shy to ask. I had, after all, grown up living with a father and a brother, and they had never seemed to need a separate lavatory. Perhaps LMH men were going to be different.

I was – and remain – passionately opposed to the Oxbridge women's colleges going mixed. As I half-knew at 18, and, having done a PhD in Victorian education, realise in full-colour now, the women's colleges (Girton and Newnham at Cambridge, LMH and St Hilda's at Oxford, for example) were built on the sweat, vision and £5 donations of women who were determined to have something better for themselves than an education that ended at 18 with a bit of piano practice and French conversation. The pioneers who built the colleges, and the first women who attended them, had to put up with being told by concerned relatives that they would probably never marry, and would almost certainly grow moustaches as a result of this crazy desire to get themselves an education.

During my second autumn there, I could hardly bear to catch the eye of the young men, with their different sounds and smells, who moved loudly and confidently into the college. (In fact, this wasn't such a sacrifice as it sounds since, in those early days, it was infra dig to go out with an LMH man and I had a nice boyfriend tucked away at a proper men's college.) I also refused to dine with the new male principal on high table, turning down his invitation every time my name came up. By all accounts he was a good, clever man, but I just didn't (and still don't) believe an equally good, clever woman could not have been found to run an institution that had been built to redress the lack of educational and employment opportunities available to half the population. Now, after 25 years with a man at its head, LMH once again has a female principal, Dr Frances Lannon, who taught me history all those years ago with grace, style and passion.

I've worked in enough universities to realise that the Oxbridge women's colleges haven't gone mixed on a whim. Painfully under-endowed, they need to work every angle if they are to stay viable in the increasingly competitive world of higher education. Offering modern young women the chance to start their adult lives in an institution that, on bleak days, could resemble a hostel for depressed nurses, was probably not going to work for much longer. But, since I don't work for St Hilda's and don't have to go to planning meetings and worry about balance sheets, I have the luxury of being able to say that I think women's colleges are, and, in the case of St Hilda's, should remain, for women only.