Sarah Woodhead

Sarah Woodhead (1851-1912) was the first woman to sit and pass a Tripos examination at Cambridge University. She studied at the first women's college to be founded at either Oxford or Cambridge, i.e. Girton College - but before it was built, so attended courses set up by its founder, Emily Davies, in Benslow House, Hitchin.

Woodhead's father was a Manchester grocer. The family had long belonged to the Society of Friends and Sarah was educated at Ackworth School, a Quaker school which had offered an education to the daughters of Friends as well as their sons for over eighty years before she became a scholar there. Her mother's father, Joseph Cranstone, with whose family she lived prior to moving to Hitchin, was a prominent member of the Hemel Hemstead Society of Friends. In 1873 she took the same Tripos examination as the male students, having already gained a first at Part I, and was classed as the equivalent to Senior Optime in Mathematics. In that year she was the first of only three women to complete the course as students at Girton College - and the only one to have done so in Mathematics. The three 'honorary' rather than actual graduates became known as "Woodhead, Cook and Lumsden the Girton Pioneers ". She passed on her knowledge to the students of Girton during the first term after its completion but then was offered the post of Head of Mathematics at the newly-opened Manchester High School for Girls. After her marriage to Christopher Corbett, an architect, she ran her own school in Bolton before becoming the second headmistress of Bolton School, known then as Bolton High School for Girls.After her husband moved the family back to Manchester so that he could take over the family firm, she found employment as an inspector of schools. Widowed in her fifties, she moved to Harrogate and died there in July, 1908, aged fifty-seven .