The First Girl Graduates: The legacy of Kate Edger

The achievements of Kate Milligan Edger, the first woman in the British Empire to earn a BA and the first woman in New Zealand to earn a degree, are well-known and memorialised. A facsimile of her degree is displayed permanently at the Kate Edger Information Commons and new graduates hire regalia from the Kate Edger Educational Charitable Trust. There are even grants available in her name to support women following the same path.¹

Edger graduated with a BA from the University of New Zealand on 11 July 1877 after completing her studies at Auckland College and Grammar School. While she is rightly renowned as a champion of women’s education in New Zealand, less is known about the women who quickly followed in her footsteps, or as Edger called them, “The First Girl Graduates.”²

Among the early “girl graduates” from this University, which opened in 1883 as Auckland University College, are sportswomen who competed in the first Easter Tournament in 1902, founders of student literary journals, headmistresses of the country’s top girls’ schools, the first woman to gain her MA from Auckland, and members of the Student’s Association executive.

Like Edger, many went on to marry, have children and sustain careers, often in education. One graduate, Annie Morrison, left university with a MA in 1893 and became the first headmistress of Epsom Girls’ Grammar School.³ Another, Mary Edith Clarke, married, had children, worked as a librarian in Te Awamutu and as Mary Scott wrote over 40 novels depicting rural life in New Zealand.⁴

To celebrate the 140th anniversary of Edger’s graduation, Special Collections explores the lives of five of the University’s early women graduates in a display outside the Reading Room, Level G of the General Library, until 18 August.

References

¹ More about the Kate Edger Educational Charitable Trust (2012). Retrieved from http://www.academicdresshire.co.nz/About+Us/More+about+Kate+Edger++the+Trust.html

² Evans, K. (1923, May 12). The First Girl Graduates. Lyttelton Times, p.16.

³ New Zealand Federation of University Women, Auckland Branch memorial book. MSS & Archives E-21. Special Collections, University of Auckland Libraries and Learning Services.

⁴ Scott, M. (1966). Days that have been: An autobiography. Auckland: Longman Paul.