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Originally Posted by mark12_30
Poor dear naive Professor Tolkien, earnestly hoping to fan into flame a serious literary or philological interest in student after student-- most of whom only wanted an A for their class standing...
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Ah but he has fanned so much interest in these things among those who didn't have a chance to study with him. To be fair to the Prof, the generation of women students he was writing about - well women weren't really encouraged to have opinions generally at that time (cf "Women,Know your place", if anyone has seen those Harry Enfield "Mr Cholmondely-Walker" sketches). My mother was taught that it was rude to talk about
anything for more than 3 minutes and never to talk about religion, politics etc - and she was of a slightly later generation,
and attended one of those schools that had been founded with the intention of giving women a
serious education!
Even for those women who went to university it would be going against a lot of conditioning to express a bold opinion. Also the proportion of women students would have been relatively low so if you adjusted to that I woner how different the ratio of original thoughts to number of pupils would be between the sexes..