Undergraduate Bodies: Women and Academic Citizenship in English Canada, 1875–1914

In the nineteenth century, the cap and gown, like soldiers’ uniforms or the robes of lawyers, was perceived to be unfitting on a woman’s body. The right to wear the cap and gown was granted to young men when they matriculated as undergraduates, signifying that they were members of their university and holders of academic citizenship. The withholding of these rights cast women as inferior, and the denial of academic citizenship was premised on a discourse that normalized women’s inequality. Photographs offer opportunities not only to view actual bodies situated in a specific historical time and place, but also to explore the visual representation of cultural discourses and to search for moments of disruption and dissent. By producing and circulating images of their own bodies in academic dress, early university women in English Canada pushed back against the normative gendered discourses that excluded them from academic citizenship. Yet the discursive undergraduate body they constructed based their claims to university membership on their collective identity as white, Anglo-Canadian women. In this way, university women made adroit use of photography to portray white women in academic dress as images of youthful power and strength who were capable of assuming civic responsibility and poised to work toward the progress of the new dominion.