A Profile For International Women’s Day

For Christine Andrews (née Harbottle), coming to Homerton in 1947 changed the course of her life. We talked to her on International Women’s Day about feminism, raising aspirations, and how the world has changed for women.

One of five children – “three girls, bookended by boys” – Christine had received what she describes now as “a wartime education – I’d been to four schools in five years and I didn’t really know anything.” Having left school without much sense of what she might do next, she accepted the nudging of her “pushy mother”, who got her a job as a nursery assistant at Newcastle Church High School.

“The very fierce head-teacher called me in and said ‘What are you going to do for a career?’ which hadn’t really occurred to me. But I loved working with children, so she suggested I train as a teacher.”

Although Cambridge at the time was in the midst of the debate over women’s degrees, which were only awarded from 1948, Christine doesn’t remember this imbalance generating anger among the Homerton students, whose own qualifications were unaffected.

“We weren’t feminists – it hadn’t occurred to us. We accepted our place in society. It was only in the 1950s and 60s that we realised we were being put upon!”

Instead, she remembers a Homerton which was seen very much as part of the wider university, thoroughly integrated into a social network of dances, mixed hockey games, and cycling back from town to meet the 10pm curfew.

In the context of a male undergraduate population which was older than usual, having been through the war, Homerton was “not differentiated from the rest of the university in people’s minds. It was a source of women!”

But between the socialising and the boys, and the excitement at being away from home, Homerton also gave Christine, now 92, a hunger for learning which she has never lost.

“It excited my brain,” she says now. “It gave me a real interest in learning, and set me on a pathway which was quite different from the aspirations of my parents and most of my contemporaries.”

While her parents were already unusual for the time in their willingness to fund higher education for their daughters, Christine used Homerton as a launchpad to far greater autonomy than they had envisaged. Until just three years before she trained, teachers had been expected to give up their jobs on marriage. Far from following suit, Christine carried on working throughout the childhood of her own four children.

“My husband, Michael, was very accommodating – several friends said

Christine Andrews at home in 2020

they wouldn’t dream of letting their wives go out to work! But I always wanted to hold onto my independence.”

While teaching and bringing up her children, Christine also continued her own education, completing a diploma in Sociology at London University, and eventually converting her Certificate in Education to a BEd through parttime study.

In retirement she took on a second career, which she pursued well into her 80s, devising and implementing training for play-workers running after school clubs and holiday programmes. She also volunteered to set up play schemes for children visiting their mothers in prison.

“If a man goes to prison, things carry on at home. If a women goes, the family falls apart. And over this past year, many children whose parents are in prison haven’t been able to visit them at all. It’s appalling.”

Having “always hated being called Mrs Andrews,” she adopted Ms as her preferred title “as soon as it was invented.”

“I deeply regret changing my name, but it really wasn’t an option not to when we got married in 1952. My mother would have died a thousand deaths if I’d suggested it.”

Her own daughter, Jo, studied PPE at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, in the 1970s, and became a broadcast journalist. After many years as senior political correspondent at ITN, she moved into the charitable sector, before co-founding Equileap, which provides data on gender equality in the workplace in order to accelerate progress.

Jo credits the confidence Christine developed at Homerton for the fact that her own feminism, and belief in her right to pursue her own ambitions, were always a given.

“As the only girl in a family of three boys, I always knew I was completely equal to them, and that my parents had completely equal expectations of us. I didn’t take that for granted – I had a friend who wanted to be a doctor, but her parents told her not to be silly, to become a nurse and to marry a doctor. And even when I was going to Oxford, there were friends of my parents who said ‘oh, so you’re going to be a bluestocking?’ My parents’ fierce belief in equality was hugely important to me.”

Seventy-four years after Christine’s student days, expectations of and opportunities for women have changed beyond recognition. But she is far from complacent about how far we have come.

“Now the world is wide open to you – women can even go into space! But girls are still not sufficiently encouraged to be aspirational. We still have a long way to go.”

Christine has instilled that aspiration in generations of schoolchildren, all of whom have benefited from the training she received in Cambridge. But for her daughter, the impact of that training is closer to home.

“My own feminism really comes straight from my mother’s backing and support, and I see that as coming straight from Homerton. Our lives, and my life, would not have been nearly so interesting and fulfilling as they have been, had my mother not been to Homerton.”

Christine in the 1940s