A.S. Byatt Remembers When British Academia Said, ‘No Girls Allowed’

“My moment of pure feminist rage came when I was a very young academic wife in Durham in the early sixties. … Access [to the student union] was restricted to male students, who debated there as the ones in Cambridge had done. But it was the only place where the university had any social life … I protested to male students I met at college gatherings. They could not see what was worrying me.”