The women's colleges at the older Universities are now so well established as to be taken for granted as a necessary part of the national system of education. Their character and aims are so far similar to those of the men's Colleges as to obscure at first sight the fact that they are totally different in origin and history. These differences of course leap to the eye so far as the buildings are concerned; and they must be explained if we are to understand their present character and position.

When Girton College was founded in 1869, the University of Cambridge was still in the midst of that remarkable process of change which was to transform its character in the course of the nineteenth century. With five hundred years of life behind it, it was entering upon a fresh chapter and renewing its vitality, after the stagnant period of the eighteenth century, with its sinecures and its narrow exclusiveness.

The origins of the University can be traced back to the thirteenth century; many of the Colleges date from the Middle Ages, and most of them had come into existence before the Reformation.