Women Enter the Scottish Universities

A popular shorthand credits the "Edinburgh Seven" of 1869 with simply "winning" women the right to study medicine in Scotland. The truth is harder and more interesting: the Seven matriculated, studied, and sat examinations, but after a sustained campaign of institutional and legal resistance they were ultimately prevented from graduating or being licensed to practise in Britain on the back of that Edinburgh training. The real legal breakthrough for Scottish women's university access came two decades later, with the Universities (Scotland) Act 1889 and the ordinances that followed it in the early 1890s.

This article applies a three-tier evidence framework. Documented claims — the founding of the Edinburgh Ladies' Educational Association, the matriculation of the Edinburgh Seven in 1869, the Surgeons' Hall riot, the eventual legal setback the women suffered, and the 1889 Act's role in finally opening graduation to women — rest on university archives, legislation, and extensive contemporary press coverage, and are stated as established fact. traditional claims describe how this history has been remembered and symbolically weighted — for example, the near-universal framing of the Edinburgh Seven as "founders" of women's medical education in Britain is a traditional interpretation with strong supporting evidence, even though, strictly, their own attempt to graduate failed at the time. Legend/myth claims to avoid include any suggestion that the Edinburgh Seven themselves secured the right to graduate in 1869 or shortly after — they did not; this article corrects that popular compression of events. Readers interested in Sophia Jex-Blake's full biography, including her subsequent career founding the London School of Medicine for Women and later establishing the Edinburgh School of Medicine for Women, should consult her dedicated biography card elsewhere in this collection; this card focuses on the institutional and legal access story rather than individual biography.

Origins: Early Campaigns for Women's Access, 1862–1868

The campaign for Scottish women's university education did not begin with the Edinburgh Seven's dramatic matriculation in 1869; it had roots in more modest efforts from the early 1860s, when individual reformers and sympathetic professors began organising informal and then increasingly systematic lecture courses for women who had no other route to university-level instruction. These efforts crystallised in 1868 with the formal establishment of the Edinburgh Ladies' Educational Association, which arranged dedicated lecture series taught by university staff, giving women access to a university-standard curriculum even though they could not yet matriculate as ordinary students or sit for degrees. This institutional groundwork — patient, incremental, and largely led by women themselves alongside sympathetic academic allies — created both the demand and some of the practical teaching infrastructure that the more famous medical campaign would later draw upon.

The Edinburgh Seven and the Fight for Medical Education

In 1869, seven women led by Sophia Jex-Blake achieved what no group of women had achieved at a British university before: formal matriculation to study for a degree, in their case medicine, at the University of Edinburgh. The "Edinburgh Seven" — Jex-Blake, Isabel Thorne, Edith Pechey, Matilda Chaplin, Helen Evans, Mary Anderson, and Emily Bovell — attended lectures, sat examinations, and in several cases achieved strong academic results, directly refuting contemporary claims that women were intellectually unsuited to medical study. Their presence provoked intense, sometimes violent hostility from parts of the university community and wider Edinburgh society. The most notorious episode, the 1870 Surgeons' Hall riot, saw a jeering crowd — including some fellow students — obstruct the women's path to an anatomy examination, an incident widely reported in the press and often cited as a turning point in public sympathy, even as institutional resistance continued. Despite this sympathy and the women's evident academic competence, the university and, eventually, the courts refused to allow them to graduate or be licensed to practise medicine on the strength of their Edinburgh study; a Court of Session ruling in 1873 went against their case, and the university ultimately refunded their fees rather than conferring degrees. The women's response was not to give up on medical education but to build alternative institutions: Jex-Blake co-founded the London School of Medicine for Women in 1874, and later returned to Edinburgh to found the Edinburgh School of Medicine for Women in 1886, creating a dedicated training pathway outside the university structures that had rejected them.

The Legal Breakthrough: The Universities (Scotland) Act 1889

The structural, legal change that actually opened Scottish university degrees to women came not from the Edinburgh Seven's own campaign directly, but from the Universities (Scotland) Act 1889, passed by the Westminster Parliament nearly two decades after their matriculation. The Act was a broad reform of Scottish university governance, reconstituting University Courts and establishing a body of Commissioners empowered to issue ordinances reorganising curricula, degrees, and admissions across Scotland's four ancient universities — Edinburgh, Glasgow, St Andrews, and Aberdeen. Crucially, the Act gave the Commissioners authority to make provision for the admission of women to graduation and instruction in classes, which they exercised through specific ordinances in the early 1890s. The practical effect followed quickly: women were admitted to graduate in Arts and, in time, other faculties, with the University of Edinburgh holding its first graduation ceremony for women in 1893. The 1889 Act thus represents the genuine legal hinge of this story — the point at which women's university access in Scotland moved from informal lecture courses and contested, individually resisted matriculation attempts to a formally sanctioned, legally secure right to study and graduate.

Legacy: From Exclusion to Equal Access, and Formal Redress

The expansion of women's access after 1889 and 1892–93 proceeded unevenly across faculties — Arts opened relatively quickly, while medicine, law, and divinity in many cases lagged, with full parity achieved only gradually across the following decades. Nonetheless, the institutional principle established in this period — that Scottish universities could, and from the 1890s onward routinely did, admit and graduate women — proved irreversible, and by the twentieth century women's presence at Scottish universities, while still facing social and professional barriers after graduation, was a normalised feature of Scottish higher education. The historical injustice done to the Edinburgh Seven received a notable symbolic, if very belated, correction in 2019, when the University of Edinburgh posthumously awarded them medical degrees 150 years after their original matriculation — an act widely reported as closing a long-open wound in the university's own institutional history, even as it could not undo the professional and personal costs the women had borne in their own lifetimes.

Late to admit, quick to fill

shared Not a pioneer. Robert Anderson, in his chapter of Scottish Education (5th edn, 2018), is plain that Scotland was not a pioneer in university education for women: legal obstacles delayed their admission until 1892. Once admitted, though, women came in large numbers. By 1914 they were 23 per cent of Scottish university students, a high share by the standards of the time, rising to 34 per cent in the 1920s before falling back to 26–27 per cent in the 1930s.

established The schools behind the numbers. Anderson explains the speed of the change by what had happened in secondary schooling. Outside the big cities, burgh schools and academies had long been open to both sexes, an unusual feature at the time, and mixed secondary education became firmly established in the late 19th century; only in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen did the high schools and endowed schools stay single-sex. Middle-class parents, he writes, now had as good a choice of education for their daughters as for their sons. By 1912 the 249 public secondary schools in Scotland had 19,611 boys and 18,701 girls. The universities had also begun requiring an entrance examination equivalent to the Leaving Certificate, introduced in 1888, which girls in these schools could sit on the same terms as boys.

Glasgow's separate route

established Opening the universities did not mean opening the classrooms. Glasgow taught its first women medical students separately, at Queen Margaret College, for longer than the other universities. Figures cited by the historian Helen Dingwall show that 4 of Glasgow's 84 medical graduates in 1894 were women, rising to more than 11 per cent by 1900, and that women made up about 10 to 11 per cent of matriculated medical students between 1892 and 1914. Many went on to long careers, and married women among them were able to keep practising.

established A student's letters show the change as it happened. In late 1891 Elsie Inglis, then studying in Glasgow, wrote to her father that Queen Margaret College was "to be taken into the University, not affiliated, but made an integral part", so that Glasgow degrees in "Arts, Medicine, Science, and Theology" would be open to women from October. In February 1892 she noted that St Andrews had already granted "degrees and mixed classes from next October". The letters are printed in Lady Frances Balfour's memoir Dr. Elsie Inglis (1918).

One student's route: Elsie Inglis, 1886–1899

established Inglis's training shows how a woman qualified before the universities taught her. Lady Frances Balfour, in her memoir Dr. Elsie Inglis (1918), records that she began at Jex-Blake's Edinburgh School of Medicine for Women. After the 1889 quarrel over two students Jex-Blake expelled, which ended in a successful lawsuit against Jex-Blake, Inglis backed the rival Medical College for Women. In February 1891 she moved to Glasgow, lodging at the YWCA hostel, because she "could not then take surgery in Edinburgh" and clinical teaching there was better. She worked in William MacEwen's surgical wards at the Royal Infirmary. In 1892 she passed the Triple Qualification, a licence granted outside the universities by the Edinburgh colleges of physicians and surgeons and the Glasgow Faculty of Physicians and Surgeons. Only in 1899, once Edinburgh admitted women to its medical examinations, did she graduate MB, CM.

established Opening degrees did not open the wards. In November 1891 the Glasgow Royal Infirmary managers ruled that women could not attend mixed classes, after the women had paid their fees. Inglis's reply to the superintendent, as she told her father, was "Then I shall come for my fees to-morrow." With MacEwen and other teachers behind them, the students won, and the women were told they could attend any class. Balfour adds that the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh admitted women to clinical teaching only after they raised £700 to furnish two wards, and confined them to those wards. She dates Edinburgh University's full opening of its medical teaching to women to 1916.

shared The women did not agree on the goal. MacEwen told Inglis that separate women's colleges would only delay the day when the universities admitted women, and she agreed in principle: "when they won't admit you, what are you to do?" From London in 1892–93 she urged that Edinburgh should aim at "a mixed school", while other campaigners preferred separate teaching. This matches Helen Dingwall's point that would-be medical women were divided on the question.

shared Balfour's account of how the 1889 Commission came to open degrees is her own recollection, passed on from Sir Arthur Mitchell, one of the Commissioners. She says he and colleagues simply asked on what principle it was "just or beneficent" to exclude women, and no answer came. It is a vivid memory rather than a record of the Commission's proceedings.

• The Edinburgh Ladies' Educational Association's 1868 lecture courses predate the more famous Edinburgh Seven medical campaign by a year, and provided some of the first systematic university-level teaching available to Scottish women.
• Several of the Edinburgh Seven achieved examination results that outperformed many of their male peers, directly undercutting contemporaries' claims about women's supposed intellectual unsuitability for medical study.
• The 1870 Surgeons' Hall riot is sometimes misremembered as the end of the Edinburgh Seven's campaign; in fact, the women continued trying to secure graduation rights for several more years afterward.
• The legal case against the women's right to graduate was settled in the Court of Session, Scotland's supreme civil court, in 1873; it did not go to the House of Lords.
• To use the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh for clinical teaching, women students first had to raise £700 to furnish two wards, and were then confined to them, according to Lady Frances Balfour writing in 1918.
• Sophia Jex-Blake's later foundation of the Edinburgh School of Medicine for Women in 1886 effectively rebuilt, from outside the university, the very training pathway the university itself had denied her in the 1870s.
• The Universities (Scotland) Act 1889 that finally opened graduation to women was a general governance reform Act, not a piece of legislation framed primarily around women's rights — the admission of women was one provision among several institutional reforms.
• The University of Edinburgh's first graduation of female students took place in 1893, meaning a full generation separated the Edinburgh Seven's 1869 matriculation from the first actual graduation of women at that university.
• In 2019, the University of Edinburgh posthumously conferred medical degrees on the Edinburgh Seven, an act of formal historical redress exactly 150 years after their original matriculation.

• Do not say the House of Lords ruled against the Edinburgh Seven. The decisive judgment, in June and July 1873, was the Court of Session's ruling that the University had never had the power to admit women.

• Do not state that the Edinburgh Seven graduated from Edinburgh in medicine in the 1870s — they did not; they were blocked by institutional and legal resistance, and were only posthumously awarded degrees in 2019. Correct phrasing: "The Edinburgh Seven matriculated and studied at Edinburgh from 1869 but were prevented from graduating; the University posthumously awarded them degrees in 2019."

• Do not state that the 1889 Act was framed primarily, or solely, as a women's rights measure — it was a broader university governance reform Act whose provisions included, among others, the admission of women. Correct phrasing: "The 1889 Act was a general reform of Scottish university governance that, among its provisions, empowered Commissioners to admit women to degrees."

• Do not conflate the 1868 Edinburgh Ladies' Educational Association's lecture courses with full university matriculation or degree study — they were a separate, earlier, more limited form of access. Correct phrasing: "The 1868 Association provided university-level lecture courses for women without matriculation or degree status, distinct from the Edinburgh Seven's later attempt at full medical matriculation."

• Do not treat this card as a substitute for a full Sophia Jex-Blake biography — her broader life and career are addressed, if included, on a separate biography card; this card is deliberately limited to institutional and legal access history.