Florence Smith

Leave to Supplicate Granted: February 2024

DPhil Research Topic

 'An Oral History of the First women to Attend Coeducational Colleges at the University of Oxford’.

             My DPhil project uses oral history methodology to uncover and acknowledge the individual voices and experiences of the hundred women who entered five formerly male-only Oxford colleges in 1974. Using a life-story interview format, I seek to understand women’s experiences in the reference to their own wider and longer-term social context, as well as the political and social contexts of 1970s Britain. The project explores and examines the nuances of the process of women entering elite, patriarchal educational spaces.

             More broadly I am interested in British and Irish 20th Century Women's history. I have written on topics such as, women's role in producing nationalist propaganda in revolutionary Ireland, and women's domestic resistance during the Nazi occupation of the Channel Islands. 

              In 2018 I was awarded an AHRC Doctoral Training Studentship, which funded my Masters degree at the University of Oxford. In 2019 I was awarded a Clarendon Scholarship to fund my DPhil research.