Canterbury College was coeducational from the very start, even when it was the Canterbury Collegiate Union, and this policy was well supported by the foundation professors, especially John MacMillan Brown. His student, and later wife, Helen Connon was the first woman in the British Empire to receive an Honours degree when her Master of Arts was conferred in 1881. However not all lecturers were wholeheartedly in agreement. In the 1920s, student Jean Struthers wanted to take Honours in Chemistry but wasn’t allowed to by her professor.
Just because the College admitted women to study, this did not mean that all forms of propriety were abandoned. For example, it was usually expected that women would sit in front at lectures with men sitting behind. This could still be used to an advantage. M.C. Keane recalled that in Professor Haslam’s class “Many of us spent far less time in listening to the Professor than in admiring the ladies back hair or the pretty bust of Clytic over the fireplace.” Outside of classes, they may have been in separate common rooms, but there were still chances to mingle. Some of the early teaching staff, such as Bickerton and Macmillan Brown, regularly invited students to dinner. One graduate reminisced about “...the merry tea at [Bickerton’s] house, the original ideas that gushed from his brain, the little dance [and sometimes a play] in his great salon, … with a soupcon of flirtation with some of the lady students…”
