Alexandra College was founded in 1866 to give a new sense of purpose to the education of young middle-class ladies in Ireland. The prevailing system did not provide young ladies with any opportunities for real academic involvement; nor did it prepare them for any engagement in public, social or academic affairs.
Educating women for a domestic role was regarded at the time as the essential objective of a “good” educational system. The system was largely in the hand of governesses who themselves lacked a grounding in mathematics, history, classics and philosophy.
Anne Jellicoe decided to address that inadequacy and put right the prevailing inequality against women. Her first idea was to open a College to educate governesses. This gave way to wider plan to provide a liberal education for young ladies that would sharpen their academic consciousness, and encourage them to take up ideas and issues that exercised the minds of the thinking men of the time!
As Alexandra settled into its role, Anne Jellicoe was convinced that a major obstacle to the liberal education of women was their exclusion from the university campus. She passionately believed that until women were admitted to The Royal University (founded in 1592), the voice of women would not commonly be heard in politics, literature or in academic debate.
Some progress was made towards the end of the 1800s when lecturers from Trinity came regularly to Alexandra College to give university-type lectures to interested students.
When it was possible for women to prepare and sit for a degree by following these lectures, there was still no question of female students joining the student body on the Trinity campus. The doors of Trinity were finally opened to women in 1903 and Alexandra College students were the first to enrol. Alexandra College students were among the first to achieve successes at the Royal University from 1891 and at Trinity College from 1903.