History/History of Sexuality at the University of Glasgow. Rutherford received his PhD in History from Columbia University in 2020, and was a Junior Research Fellow and tutor in History at Merton and Corpus Christi Colleges, Oxford from 2020 until 2024.
He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Teaching Gender: The British University and the Rise of Heterosexuality, 1860–1939, with the following results:
Page 99 of Teaching Gender tells the story of a long-running conflict between the University of Manchester's men's and women's student unions in the 1920s and 1930s. Academic life at Manchester had been fully gender-integrated since the university admitted women to degrees in 1897, and in the 1890s and 1900s women and men welcomed the opportunity to study alongside each other. But after the First World War, when ex-servicemen students returned to higher education in large numbers, they expressed a virulent misogynistic backlash against the women students who had remained in higher education during the war. In response, women student government leaders declined to participate in gender-integrated student life, despite pressure from university administrators to cooperate. At Manchester, after over a decade of tension between the two unions, the Women's Union responded to men students' vandalism of the Women's Union, and the Men's Union's refusal to include women students in decision-making about university-wide student events, by declining to contribute financially to university clubs and societies and to allow any men students to access their facilities. They rejected a proposal from university administrators to merge the two unions' facilities as part of a large-scale building renovation.Visit Samuel Rutherford's website.
This example is indicative of the kinds of colourful stories about everyday university life that I tell in Teaching Gender, which is largely written out of the institutional archives of ten universities from across England and Scotland. It also helpfully draws out some of the book's key themes. The book shows that at a national and institutional policy level, the gender integration of UK higher education around the turn of the twentieth century was rapid and uncontroversial, driven by logics of efficiency rather than principled support for gender equality. But on the ground, the lived reality of gender-integrated social life was more complex, especially as it became inflected through the widespread cultural anxiety about relations between women and men and about the stability of the gender order that was characteristic of the post-First World War moment.
By page 99, the reader has had this problem explained to them, through examples like the one from Manchester. The book then goes on to describe the solution: students attempting to get on with one another in these gender-integrated environments landed upon heterosexuality as a useful set of scripts for navigating interactions across gender lines. They therefore established cross-gender sexual relationships that asserted the stability of the gender binary as normal, natural, and central to the purpose of university life. In the process, they marginalised alternatives—whether 'Platonic friendship' between women and men, or queer and trans subjectivities and intimacies. Ultimately, Teaching Gender is a book about how the UK's universities became a part of the UK state, and about how that process was a gendered one—thereby contributing to our understanding of the history of the male/female and the hetero/homo binaries at an especially crucial time for their emergence.
--Marshal Zeringue
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