The college, which was opened at Hitchin in 1869 and transferred to Cambridge (Girton College) in 1873, was henceforth Miss Davies’ main interest, and its finance and general policy were directed by her. She insisted that the students should submit to the same tests and, as far as possible, to the same conditions as university men, and she opposed all attempts to organize separate educational schemes for women.
In suffrage work also Miss Davies was a pioneer. With Mme Bodichon and Miss Parkes she organized the first petition, which was presented by John Stuart Mill to parliament on 7 June 1866; and in 1866-1867 she acted as secretary to the first women’s suffrage committee. In 1870 she was elected one of the first women members of the London School Board, but she withdrew in 1873 and devoted herself entirely to Girton College, where she resided as mistress from 1873 to 1875. In 1904 she resigned the honorary secretaryship of the college, which she had held since 1867, except for a brief interval during which she was treasurer. She then turned again to suffrage work, and became chairman of the London Society for Women’s Suffrage. She died at Hampstead 13 July 1921.
Miss Davies’s chief writings are The Higher Education of Women (1866) and Thoughts on Some Questions relating to Women, 1860-1908 (1910). She had a remarkable power of carrying her schemes into effect; rational and clear-sighted, she combined tenacity of purpose with such caution, forethought, and moderation in action as to earn for herself the description of ‘this very unrevolutionary woman’, although in reality she was one of the chief figures in the movement which revolutionized the position of women.
[Miss Davies’s writings; Minute Books of Girton College; Barbara Stephen, Emily Davies and Girton College, 1927; private information.]
DEAKIN, ALFRED (1856-1919), Australian politician, was born at Melbourne 3 August 1856. He was the only son of William Deakin, an accountant, by his wife, Sarah Bill, daughter of a Shropshire farmer. Educated from 1864 to 1871 at the Church of England grammar school, Melbourne, he decided to adopt the law as a profession, and, after study at the university of Melbourne, he was admitted in September 1877 to the Victorian bar. But he was more attracted by literature, and was persuaded by David Syme [q.v.], who then controlled the Melbourne Age, to take up journalism. Under Syme’s influence he finally abandoned the belief in free trade which he had learned from the works of John Stuart Mill, and was induced in 1879 to stand for the constituency of West Bourke as a supporter of (Sir) Graham Berry [q.v.] in his violent conflict with the conservatives, who had the support of the legislative council, that body being elected on a high property franchise.
Successful at the polls, Deakin insisted as soon as parliament met on resigning his seat, as the validity of his election was challenged on a technicality. In the ensuing by-election he was defeated, and also at the general election of February 1880; in July 1880, however, he won the seat at the new general election necessitated by the fall of the new ministry. He immediately sought to promote a coalition between Berry and a section of the conservatives, and, when this failed, declined the attorney-generalship offered by Berry, though he supported his ministry and in 1882 won attention by a forcible denunciation of the errors of Victorian land legislation. In 1883 coalition came about between Berry and James Service [q.v.], and Deakin entered the ministry in March as minister of water supply and commissioner of public works, accepting in November the solicitor-generalship also. At the end of 1884, as president of a commission on water supply, he undertook a mission to America, the results of which were recorded in his Irrigation in Western America (1885). On the close of the coalition ministry, he formed, as leader of the liberal party, a new coalition with Duncan Gillies [q.v.], taking office in 1886 as chief secretary and minister of water supply; and in this capacity secured the passage of the Irrigation Act of 1886 and the adoption of an irrigation policy, which, at first seriously defective, finally proved a marked success. Next year he visited England as representative of Victoria at the colonial conference summoned to mark the jubilee of the Queen’s reign. His strictures on the failure of British policy as regards New Guinea and the New Hebrides were combined with an insistence on the unity of the Empire, which attracted favourable attention; while his democratic spirit was exhibited in his refusal of the then much coveted order, the K.C.M.G. An outcome of his visit to Europe was his Irrigation in Egypt and Italy (1887). Disaster, however, awaited the reckless finance of the ministry, which fell in November 1890, and, though Deakin was offered office in every subsequent Victorian government up to 1900,
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