The action involves four very talented female undergraduates and the campaign to be allowed like their male colleagues to receive a formal degree qualification at the end of their studies.
The play touches on some of the issues surrounding the feminist ideals of the late nineteenth-century New Woman including female bicycle-riding, equal education rights, sexual autonomy, and political enfranchisement.
[4][5] The printed play includes a dedication to female education activist and Nobel laureate, Malala Yousafzai.
[6] The Girton Girls The Boys The Staff Others In performance, with the exception of Elizabeth Welsh and Tess, all parts can be doubled.
He argues that women's lives should be determined by their biological and reproductive functions, and therefore, they should not enter into an intellectual race with men at university.
Maeve is from a working-class family but because of her extraordinary talent, and sponsorship from Lady Beaumont, she is able to attend the college.
Ralph is especially taken with the sight of a woman sitting astride, whilst Holmes and Lloyd are horrified at the impropriety.
Miss Blake encourages them to work hard, to be exceptional, to think for themselves, all in aid of advancing the cause of women's rights to graduate.
Dr Maudsley arrives to lecture about female hysteria, his own opinion being that women have inferior moral strength caused by a weaker mind and will.
Later, in Mrs Welsh's office, Tess is persuaded to be more diplomatic for the sake of the progress of the female right to graduate.
In his seduction routine, Ralph recites in Italian an excerpt from the sonnet, Provedi, saggio, ad esta visïone by Dante da Maiano which he does not understand.
Having been turned away from yet another lecture, and having insisted that science is superior to the arts, Miss Blake threatens not to teach the women anymore.
The injustice of Maeve's situation inspires Tess to write a new essay on a scientific explanation for the Star of Bethlehem.
Mrs Welsh address the Cambridge Senate to appeal for a vote on the issue of granting degrees to women.
Professors Radleigh, Anderson and Collins offer Mr Banks tenure at Trinity College on the understanding that he desists teaching the women at Girton.
Carolyn and Tess buy fabric at Mrs Lindley's haberdashery to make banners to promote degrees for women.
Mrs Lindley refuses Lloyd's custom but when he points out that his father is the shop landlord she capitulates and sells him a pair of blue stockings.
Miss Blake has left her job and is engaged with gaining support from the suffragist movement on the vote for degrees for women.
An angry mob, perhaps led by Lloyd, has made an effigy of a blue stocking woman and burned it.
Michael Billington of The Guardian wrote, "the lack of nuance, however, matters less than Swale's ability to capture both the intellectual excitement of being part of a new student generation and the dilemmas it produced.
[9] In 2015, Blue Stockings entered the GCSE drama syllabus for which Lois Jeary and the playwright produced a students' guide to studying and staging the play.