The Ida Bar Story

The Princess Ida Club was established back in 1888, just five years after Bella Guerin became the first woman to graduate from university in Australia. Despite this, women were still excluded from men’s societies and spaces on campus, prompting a group of bold students to call for a change. Thus, the Princess Ida Club was born, women on campus had a space they could call their own for the first time and one of the early victories for gender equality at Unimelb was won.

The Story

Taken from Farrago News item

When chronologically detailed, the ‘Melbourne University Union’ was created in 1884. Initially located in a billiards room, the Union was exclusively for male staff and students, despite Australian women being given admittance to attend tertiary education with the 1881 University Act. Women were able to enrol into any Diploma or Degree offered by Australian universities, yet the University Act states that:

“the council may if it thinks fit exclude females from attendance at any lectures, but not from any examination in the University.”

This exclusive attitude, justified within the very Act itself, lead the women of the University of Melbourne to make their own alternative in 1888: The Princess Ida Club. Named after a comic opera about a university exclusively for women, the club was an important space for women to participate in university life, exchange ideas and partake in the intellectual discourse that was barred from them by the Union of the time.

 

Initially located in the west wing of the Old Quadrangle, the Princess Ida club members were allegedly so loud and disruptive that a noise complaint made by Professor Harrison Moor was immortalised in a cartoon. Entitled ‘Princesses at Play: The Fantasy’, the cartoon by Alfred Vincent was published in Melbourne Punch in 1897. Illustrated is a scene of animated, energetic women, playing billiards, boxing and fencing, lifting weights, singing together at the piano, and reading in their university robes.

This cartoon richly details the problem that many male members of The University had with the Princess Ida Club: they were stepping out of the traditional role of ‘the feminine', and inhabiting activities and spaces that had always been traditionally masculine. The Princess Ida Club, however, fiercely defended their space, and an 1897 photograph from The University of Melbourne Archives shows the Princess Ida clubrooms captioned with the motto: ‘Let no man enter on pain of death.’

In 1907, the Students Representative Council was created, and in 1915, The Princess Ida Club was replaced with the Women’s Representative Committee, formed to reflect the interest of women in relation to the Union.

Related Articles

Wilson, C. (1994). Women and Music in the 1890s: The Princess Ida Club, University of Melbourne. Context: Journal of Music Research, (7), 23–27. https://search.informit.org/doi/10.3316/informit.575007214051083

O'Brien, K., The Age, (2024) Meet the first-ever cohort of women to graduate from uni - in Melbourne. Read article here