A moving, comical and eye-opening story of four young women fighting for education and self-determination against the larger backdrop of women’s suffrage.

It is 1896 at Girton College, Cambridge, and Elizabeth Welsh is preparing for battle.  Girton is the first college in Britain to admit women. The girls there have risked everything to go to University. They study ferociously. They match their male peers grade for grade. And they leave empty handed. While the men graduate and are awarded their degrees, the girls gain only the stigma of being a ‘blue stocking’, an unnatural educated woman. They are unqualified and, worse, unfit for marriage.

In Jessica Swale's debut play, Blue Stockings, Tess Moffat and her fellow first years are determined to win the right to graduate. But little do they anticipate the hurdles in their way: the distractions of love, the cruelty of the class divide or the strength of the opposition, who will do anything to stop them. The play follows them over one tumultuous year as they do battle against the great intellectual inequality of their day.

Jessica Swale is a director, playwright, workshop leader and educator.  She is artistic director of Red Handed Theatre Company.  Blue Stockings is being performed for the first time after its debut at Shakespeare's Globe as part of the ADC Theatre's spring 2014 season.