The history of higher education in England, especially where women are concerned, has been based mostly on accounts focusing on colleges at Oxford and Cambridge. Although Georgia Oman embraces and develops existing scholarship in this area, her key contribution is the illumination she brings to the multi-faceted development of the civic universities. This new wave of predominantly urban institutions, receiving their charters at the end of the nineteenth century and early years of the twentieth, developed in contrasting ways in response to local context. Most embraced co-education, in name at least, and were non-residential with the majority of students commuting from home. Some of these colleges sought to mimic the structures and strictures of Oxbridge for reputational reasons; others in contrast sought to use difference as representative of their modern, progressive status, including their admittance of women to degrees. Oman demonstrates powerfully how these new civic universities did not follow a single trajectory or provide a uniform student experience, even if gender informed the DNA of all of them at every level. In this way, she demonstrates convincingly that the development of co-education and higher education, both at these new institutions and more generally, is a local story rather than a national one.

Oman offers analyses of institutions in England and Wales including what became the universities of Bangor, Birmingham, Bristol, Liverpool, Manchester, and Sheffield. These are considered in the context of the growth of the middle classes and the development of the suburbs and their accompanying transport infrastructure. The use of a vast array of sources, including student accounts in letters and memoirs as well as newspapers, institutional records and correspondence, enables a multiplicity of voices to be heard. Oman weaves into her analysis the experiences of female students and staff and brings their quotidian lives to the foreground. This makes for an engaging read. For example, a discussion of the gendered negotiation of space in regard to sporting facilities reveals that this was most acute when it came to rowing and the shared use of rivers. A student at St Hilda's College, Oxford recalled in 1909 that “we had to go out in the early morning so as not to contaminate the river when the men were on it” (166).

Chapters detail the evolution of the civics from colleges into fully fledged universities focusing on themes including the development of the campus; residence and non-residence; class and commuting; libraries, laboratories, and learning spaces; sports and social activities; and student clubs, unions, and guilds. Gender propriety was embedded throughout these with segregation policed via structure and architecture, space and place, formal regulations and informal self-regulation by the female and male students themselves. Oman explains how the idea of the campus became an important concern, citing how the University of Birmingham was based on the popular American concept of a campus positioned away from the contamination of the city. Despite their progressive ideals, however, these new campuses were divided along gender lines, illustrating how the spatial reality of buildings undermined co-educational ideals. At Liverpool, for example, gender was encoded into the very architecture of the new space commissioned to house the student guild. The Reilly Building opened with separate wings for male and female students with facades featuring “male baroque and feminine regency, fronting two different streets with separate entrances” (193).

Spatial control was just one of the factors regulating the mixing of male and female students. At Liverpool again, it was policy that lectures for men began and ended on the hour and those for women on the half hour, thus limiting mingling of the sexes, while at the University College of North Wales, mixed-sex meetings held on the premises were banned after 5.30 p.m. Oman demonstrates the sometimes accidental nature of progress opening up higher education to women, illuminating how locality and its links to feminine propriety were influential. In 1871, the principal of King's College London remarked how problems of access prejudiced any opening of the college's teaching to women but that the completion of the Metropolitan Railway to the Temple, making a more private and gentile access from the Thames Embankment possible, solved these problems. It was these concerns that partly led to the introduction of residential halls at the civics, removing one of their key differences from the Oxbridge model. Universities felt a greater duty of care for women who, unlike men, could not use local lodgings without threatening respectability. This led to halls of residence being set up for female students before they were for men, such as at Bristol where female halls, modelled on the home to provide an appropriate, domestic environment, emerged twenty years before those for men. Of course, catering for women students by providing acceptable accommodation approved by their families was also good business for these new institutions which were often not flush with money.

The contrasting experiences of female and male students are not the only focus of Oman's analysis; she also considers female lecturers. Unlike Oxford and Cambridge, where single-sex colleges created a market for women teachers, the mixed classes characteristic of the civics made the situation more complicated. Few women taught at the civics in their earlier days, and those who did were generally hired as tutors with a remit covering female students’ pastoral needs rather than having a role with meaningful authority or interaction with men. A closer consideration of women teaching in mixed-sex departments would have enhanced the discussion; for example, the controversy and challenges faced by Marie Carmichael Stopes when she became the first woman appointed to the Science Faculty at the University of Manchester in 1904 deserves further discussion. However, this is a very minor quibble. Oman has contributed an insightful and highly valuable addition to the scholarship on gender and the development of higher education in England and Wales.