Betty Abigail Behrens

Catherine Betty Abigail Behrens (24 April 1904 – 3 January 1989), known as Betty Behrens (or Jane to friends) and published as C. B. A. Behrens, was a British historian and academic. Her early interests included Henry VIII, Charles II, and the early modern period of English history. She later focused her research on the Ancien Régime (the Kingdom of France from the Middle Ages to the French Revolution). She was elected a Fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge in 1935. She became a Fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge after the publication of The Ancien Régime. with reviews describing it as "remarkable and absorbing" and "a lively, thought-provoking essay in historical revision".

Early life and education Behrens was born on 24 April 1904 in London, England. She was educated at home by a series of governesses and never attended school. She graduated in 1927 with a first class Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree. The two colleges for women, Newnham and Girton, decided a dress-code for female lecturers which included hats. As Virginia Woolf explained, it was an important statement about uniforms and professional status. Women were only admitted to become full members of Cambridge University in 1948, and was the last university in the UK to do so. The Lend-Lease Act was passed on March 11, 1941, which set up a system that would allow the United States to lend or lease war supplies to any nation deemed "vital to the defense of the United States." For the rest of the war, Behrens worked as an official historian for the Ministry of Shipping. She struggled to finish her book, Merchant Shipping and the Demands of War, because of her Cambridge commitments and demands. In the 1970s Behrens was alarmed at the decline in the numbers of women on the History Faculty and began to gather evidence on the numbers of women employed and appointed to lectureships. At least part of her concern was with the waste or underemployment of human resources - put crudely she believed that many of the women without official lectureships were better teachers than the men who held them. Behrens' archive consists of nineteen boxes, and is uncatalogued.

Honours The Betty Behrens Seminar on Classics of Historiography was established at Clare Hall, University of Cambridge, in Behrens' honour. The recurring seminar offers a unique opportunity for students and scholars to reflect on great historical works and engage in discussion with renowned experts. Speakers include Professor Amira K. Bennison on Muqaddimah (1377) by Ibn Khaldun and Professor Paul Cartledge on Histories by Herodotus of Halicarnassus.

Personal life In 1966, Behrens married E. H. Carr, a fellow historian and former diplomat. At the age of 74, Carr was twelve older than Behrens, who was 62 on marrying. This was his third marriage, and her first. In 1947, Carr had lost his Chair at Aberystwyth University following objections about his affair with one (or perhaps more) of professors’ wives. Behrens attended his memorial service, along with only two of his PhD students.

Behrens died on 3 January 1989.

Selected works