Book Review: College Girls
Nov. 24th, 2018 08:32 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerI 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.”
(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.”
