OPEN DOORS
Legacies of Enslavement: Unlocking a Door to Girton’s Past Opening doors to opportunities, or to glimpses of the future, may sometimes also involve confronting locked doors to the past. Professor Dame Marilyn Strathern, Life Fellow, former Mistress and Chair of Girton’s Legacies of Enslavement Working Group, offers a personal reflection on why and how the College recently began turning one particular key
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ehind the impetus for Cambridge University setting up its Legacies of Enslavement Inquiry in 2019 were its historic links to unconscionable practices that had helped fuel more than two centuries of British prosperity. The legacy the University had in mind stemmed from that era: how racism was built into social inequalities. Had those inequalities gone away one might have opened that door out of interest or curiosity, but they have not gone away and the door must be opened with a more urgent sense of unfinished business. Of all forms of oppression, enslavement is egregious in denying people legal and civil recognition. One aspect of that unfinished business is acknowledgement of personhood denied. It was the combination of treating people as chattel goods and a period of huge economic expansion, on both sides of the Atlantic, which came to entrench a racist ethos. One of Girton’s redoubtable historians, the late Betty Wood, always emphasised that there was nothing inevitable about this process. If we are opening doors, it is initially onto a very specific epoch,
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The Year
and in Girton’s case onto nineteenth-century outcomes of that expansion. July 1885 It is summer 1885. Girton has just learned it was the principal beneficiary of a will of one Jane Catherine Gamble. The bequest – completely unexpected – recalls a moment when the young college, in this regard a struggling one, could see only a future of mounting debt. Gamble’s legacy was to be transformative: Girton’s land was doubled, the tower built, 24 student rooms added. Gamble had nothing to do with Emily Davies’s energetic circle of supporters. Of course, it was the promoters of a college for women who gave concrete form to how she wished to dispose of her residuary estate. Perhaps behind Gamble’s interest in a female establishment was her own predicament as an heiress, indeed someone who had had to flee from fortune hunters, as she herself openly publicised.
