A story about the first men’s colleges at Oxford to become mixed (April 17, ‘Forty years’ co-education’) comes close to suggesting that the presence of women at Oxford before the 1970s was insignificant.

While the arrival of women at colleges formerly open only to men was certainly an important moment in Oxford’s history, they built on a tradition that goes back much further; and some anniversaries this year are arguably even more significant.

It is a proud part of Oxford’s history that Somerville College and Lady Margaret Hall, which both opened their doors in 1879, were the first to admit women to the university and went on quickly to establish a reputation for the highest academic standards.

They were soon joined by St Hugh’s and St Hilda’s, and by the distinctive Society of Home Students which later became St Anne’s.

All five of the former women’s colleges now admit women and men in approximately equal proportions, but following on decades of struggle to establish women in this great bastion of male-dominated academic excellence. Generations of “Formidable Somervillians”, from Vera Brittain and her daughter Shirley Williams, to the great pioneer of sustainable development Barbara Ward, Iris Murdoch, Nobel-Prize-winning Dorothy Hodgkin and her pupil Margaret Thatcher, and countless others, have brought lustre to the university.

Exceptional women at LMH in the all-female era included Gertrude Bell, Eglantyne Jebb (founder of Save the Children), Benazir Bhutto, and Eliza Manningham-Buller, and the other former women’s colleges all claim illustrious alumnae, perhaps most famously Aung San Suu Kyi of St Hugh’s who spoke memorably about what an Oxford education has meant in her life, when she came to collect her honorary degree in 2012.

These women were the true pioneers, starting with those in the first 41 years who passed their exams with high honours but were not allowed to take their degrees (only granted in 1920), and the college principals who battled against Oxford’s cap on female numbers right up to 1956, finding the main offices of the university barred to them for even longer. This year, 2014, sees two anniversaries that are of special significance in marking the contribution made to a better world by women at Oxford.

The first is the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War, which saw women taking on war work in great numbers, suffering in even greater numbers the grief of bereavement and the tribulations that came with sustaining the traumatised returning soldiers, and supporting families deprived of their bread-winners and beloved sons. Vera Brittain, who arrived at Somerville in October 1914, chronicled that suffering and those sacrifices in the famously poignant Testament of Youth. Fifty years later, in 1964, the crystallographer Professor Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin (a student at Somerville in the 1920s and a Fellow of the college for most of the rest of her life) was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry: the first and so far the only British woman to receive a Nobel Prize in science.

Her path-breaking work in discovering the structures of penicillin, vitamin B12 and insulin, has laid foundations for human well-being that are of incalculable importance. Dorothy Hodgkin’s heirs and successors in Somerville, the Royal Society and the Royal Society of Chemistry, are planning to celebrate this great anniversary in suitable style.

It is good that there are women and men throughout all the colleges now, and the belated conversion of the men’s colleges to co-education in the 1970s is worth celebrating.

But let’s not forget those real heroines who blazed the trail.