Of Other Spaces: women's colleges at the turn of the nineteenth century in the UK

This article explores the first British university-associated women's colleges at the turn of the nineteenth century. Drawing on Foucault, the article looks into the dualistic opposition between private and public, as well as women's attempts to transcend this dichotomy. In theorising women's colleges as Foucauldian heterotopias, spaces in the interstices of power relations and dominant social structures, the author focuses on the interplay of contradicting discourses and strong power relations within these women's colleges. In this light, the author considers the ways women resisted, negotiated, but also compromised in their attempt to shape their lives and invent new ways of being in the world.