This Sunday, for the first time in its history, the Royal Academy will celebrate International Women’s Day with a variety of events that explore inter-generational perspectives of women in the arts. In the lead-up to this we’re publishing a series of blogs exploring the historic role of women at the RA.

While the founders of the Academy had accepted two women into their fold, the issue of women’s exclusion from arts education was not addressed at the Royal Academy until 1860, when Laura Herford was admitted by accident to the RA Schools after submitting drawings with only her initials, L.H.

Whether or not this was a strategic move as part of a larger feminist campaign against the Academy is unclear. However, before this, her involvement in art classes outside of the Academy organised by artist Eliza Fox (which also formed as meeting places for feminists from the late 1840s onwards) suggests she was linked with the public petition appearing in Athenaeum magazine in 1859, requesting the Academy to open its doors to women.

Laura Herford’s admission was later referred to as “The invasion” in G. D. Leslie’s The Inner Life of the Royal Academy (1914), but in the following ten years after her admittance in 1860, an additional 34 female students were admitted into the RA Schools. Once in place, female students had to fight for the right to have the same training and facilities as their male counterparts, who by this time were benefitting from the pioneering integration of life drawing into arts education, as modelled by the European academies during the 17th century.

The very idea that women could even be artists was being hotly debated by John Ruskin and other critics in a number of journals at that time. Women’s place in society was still perceived as passive and their behaviour governed by emotion. They had been excluded from the practice of drawing from the nude figure since the time of the founding Academicians, as we can see in Johann Zoffany’s The Royal Academy of Arts, 1771–2, where Moser and Kauffman are depicted as paintings on the wall rather than physically attending the life class.