Book Review: College Girls

[osprey_archer]

I reread Shirley Marchalonis’s College Girls: A Century in Fiction last week. I read it ages ago for my college thesis project, but the number of out of copyright works available online have burgeoned in the years since and it occurred to me that I could, perhaps, find many of the books Marchalonis mentions on Google books and read them during slow times at the library.

(This has indeed proved true, although there are odd gaps. Why does Google books have Betty Wales, Freshman and Betty Wales, Senior but not either of the books in between? Especially when I’m almost sure they were available when I was in college… but maybe I got them through interlibrary loan.)

Book recommendations aside, I quite like this book - it’s very readable, which academic books sometimes aren’t - but I do find it a bit frustrating this time around that she doesn’t do more to situate the changes in books about women’s colleges in the wider context of a growing cultural attack on women’s spaces and women’s organization and even just the basic idea that women’s relationships with each other could be based on anything but competition over men - which was part of a backlash against the fact that women had made great strides: women’s colleges were established, women high school graduates actually outnumbered men, women were inching into ever more professions…

Here’s a fun fact: according to Three Girls in a Flat, the Chicago World’s Fair Commission agreed to let the Board of Lady Managers appoint all-female juries to judge women’s industrial work - and then hastily backtracked when they discovered that women were employed in almost every industry.

Three Girls in a Flat also enthuses “the World's Fair will present the most remarkable display of women's work that has ever been made public, and the heretofore unrepresented factory woman will receive her due share of credit for the work she has done.” I don’t know if this happened at the fair itself, but if it did it was promptly forgotten again thereafter.

I’ve come around to the viewpoint that women have been doing almost everything since practically forever and yet every generation has to rediscover this fact. In 1893 women were factory workers and writers and painters and sculptors* and architects and businesswomen and college professors and college presidents and doctors and nurses and social reformers and preachers - yes! preachers! in only a few of the more liberal churches, but still.

Yet each generation forgets, and thinks the women before them never did anything but sew and have babies, because the received narrative, mostly created by men, mostly overwrites these women out of existence - and when it can’t, presents them as exceptions. We aren’t taught that smart and brave and enterprising and creative are things that women just are.

Anyway. I think the big shift in the portrayal of women’s colleges in novels comes down to backlash against all this terrifying public achievement. Marchalonis mentions aspects of this but doesn’t really dig into it or tie the elements of the backlash together, so within her book it remains somewhat mysterious why earlier women’s college books are so rosy and later ones so negative - and also why co-ed colleges, which had existed in large numbers since the 1870s (my own alma mater was co-ed since its founding in 1847, represent!) but rarely the subject of books for girls, suddenly surged in literary popularity in the 1920s.

Well of course they did. If you’re going to posit heterosexuality as the highest and only possible fulfillment of a girl’s life, she’s got to have boys to be heterosexual with, now doesn’t she?


*Enid Yandell, one of the authors of Three Girls in a Flat was part of a team of women sculptors who worked on the World’s Fair. They were called the White Rabbits because when the head of sculpture at the fair asked for permission to hire women, fair director Daniel Burnham told him he could “hire anyone, even white rabbits, if they can get the work done.”

Comments

[sartorias]

I've read a few girls in college novels from around the turn of the century 1900. I have one or two, still. I got the impression that all-girl-only college stories were more acceptable because even the idea of boys being educated nearby was considered too risqué for their daughters to read.

The classes are bent toward training wives, with "scientific" methods.

The girls have dances, and dress to the nines . . . to dance with each other. Only the seniors get a dance with actual boys, but their characters have to be vetted first, they are heavily chaperoned, etc, so that basically the girls have a single night in which to "fall in love" with that handsome young captain of industry, to predict their rosy future by the last chapter.

The ones in which girls have 'lashes' on one another are far more interesting, and covertly subversive, as many of the girls in these stories intend to have careers.

[osprey_archer]

Which ones do you have? I'm always looking for more, and searching for books that are over a hundred years old is always such a serendipitous thing: it can be hard to know what to look for, let alone what you'll find.

The classes in Daddy-Long-Legs aren't designed to teach the girls to be wives, scientifically or not - although it occurs to me that in the end, this is basically what to college trains Judy for (well, she also writes a novel), even though that's not the explicit focus of her studies.

[duskpeterson]

I haven't read enough girls' school stories to comment intelligently on your fascinating post, but it did make me wonder when female romantic friendship stories fell out of fashion, and whether this corresponded in some way to the rise of co-ed stories. Because the great appeal of school stories is invariably the bonds created between the students.

[osprey_archer]

Marchalonis's timeline suggests a correspondence - emphasis moved away from women's colleges (and thus the friendships, romantic or otherwise, of the students) toward co-ed universities - and the stories that were still set at women's colleges moved their focus from the delightful college experience to how *unnatural* and *unhealthy* it was to have all those girls cooped up without any boys.

I recently read an English novel from 1917 that's set up around this very theme - it seems to me that overall the 1910s were the years when the sexologists' writings about homosexuality began to seep through to the general public and make them view with suspicion romantic friendships that had earlier seemed sweet and innocent and even constructive.

But Blyton was still writing school girls getting harmless crushes on each other in the forties, so clearly it didn't die all at once.

[duskpeterson]

This has sparked some thoughts in me, but the thoughts involve a PDF file. Would you be willing to email me?

[osprey_archer]

How about you just try to explain it to me and we'll see if the PDF file is really necessary?

[duskpeterson]

Um . . . can't in public. I'll PM you.

[duskpeterson]

Was Marchalonis writing only about American colleges? Because I know that the timeline for the acceptability of male romantic friendships was different in the USA and Britain.

I've gone through my American high school yearbooks (1978-1981), and what is remarkable in the photos is how much touching the girls permitted themselves toward each other, versus the guys toward the guys. The guys could basically only touch each other in sports or when joking around. So even if female friendships at school fell out of fashion, I think they were still going strong when I grew up.

[kore]

I’ve come around to the viewpoint that women have been doing almost everything since practically forever and yet every generation has to rediscover this fact. In 1893 women were factory workers and writers and painters and sculptors* and architects and businesswomen and college professors and college presidents and doctors and nurses and social reformers and preachers - yes! preachers! in only a few of the more liberal churches, but still.

Yet each generation forgets, and thinks the women before them never did anything but sew and have babies, because the received narrative, mostly created by men, mostly overwrites these women out of existence - and when it can’t, presents them as exceptions. We aren’t taught that smart and brave and enterprising and creative as things that women just do.

FUCKING SERIOUSLY

[osprey_archer]

The world is so frustrating. SO FRUSTRATING.

[asakiyume]

Yup yup yup--I was really struck by this part too. osprey_archer--it'll be in the letter I'm still writing!

[osprey_archer]

I'll look forward to the letter!