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•——— Recto Runninhead ———• 137 ———— Chapter Eleven ———— Oh! U Wretch! p During the winter of 1885, a Vassar insider who preferred to conceal her identity gave a “confidential” gossipy interview to a young journalist in New York City. Let’s call her “Miss V.” The reporter wrote up an “exposé” three columns long of college life at Vassar with the insulting headline of “Vassar Virgins’ Vagaries” and spiked it with as many wild details as possible, no doubt at the request of the same editor who chose the silly headline for the article, which Cora clipped and pasted into her second, larger scrapbook. Starting with its disrespectful headline , it is a good example of the thinly veiled contempt that many male journalists and curmudgeonly men of the 1880s liked to inflict on Vassar’s independent young women in order “to take them down a notch.” On Saturdays, whenever there is snow, the long hills to the east of Poughkeepsie are alive with Vassar girls coasting on their little red sleds. You would be astonished by the dash and vigor displayed by these elegant young ladies when there is no young man around to look at them. Taking headers down rocky hills and screeching with mirth when they meet with a mishap is considered having a grand time. When they get tired of such sport they “hitch on” behind any farmer’s sled [large farm wagon on runners, pulled by horses or oxen] which chances to pass by. One day an old Dutchess county farmer, who had a string of Vassar girls tagging behind, trotted his team five miles into the country without stopping to give them a chance to untie their sleds. They screamed and grew mad and hurled slang and damaged chewing gum at him during most of the distance, but he merely chuckled to himself and drove on. When he finally turned them adrift they had to trudge back through the snow to the college on foot, as no teams came along to give them a lift. [ 137 ] 138 •——— verso runninghead ———• A different, more friendly article in the New York Herald from the winter of 1885 complained about the damage done to the college by the nationally popular genre of “Vassar jokes,” favored by cigar-chomping newspaper editors and publishers across the country: “nothing kills like ridicule . . . The deadly paragraph of the alleged newspaper humorist, taking Vassar for its theme because it is the representative female college , has done it more injury than the writers would believe . . . Many a girl has been sent to Smith or Wellesley because these colleges have escaped the time-dishonored jokes about the ‘Vassar girl.’” This same article praised Vassar’s Alumnae Association and its powerful money-raising abilities. The headline ran: “Vassar’s Loyal Daughters —Raising Funds to Build a $20,000 Gymnasium. Mrs. Thompson’s Generous Gift. How the College has Struggled with its Enemies— Alumnae Secure Recognition.” The article provided an intelligent, respectful overview of how effective the alumnae were in the struggle to help Vassar out of its financial difficulties. Stereoscope image of fashionable East Thirty-fourth Street in New York City, ca. 1885. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. •——— chapter eleven ———• •——— Recto Runninhead ———• 139 On the basis of the many news items about Vassar that Cora clipped and saved, it appears that the writers and editors at several different New York papers were engaged in a vigorous public dialogue about the role of educated women in the United States. Cora would certainly have noticed this. The tone of these articles allows me to divide them into two distinct groups: the ones that show respect for the college and its accomplishments , and the others that ooze condescension and contempt for anything a young woman might try to do. For every putdown that was published, whether serious or comic, some ally would publish a sympathetic article in defense of the dignity of Vassar and its students. This public form of debate in print inspired Cora’s classmate Mary Sheldon to become a journalist after graduating, and her articles, which Cora also saved, were often written to refute specific insults and criticisms. b On Wednesday, March 4, 1885, Grover Cleveland was inaugurated as the twenty-second president of the United States. Now it was payback time for the mistaken Blaine victory celebrations, and the Poughkeepsie Eagle reported in detail on the “Hilarious Democratic Vassarians” who “got square with the Republican girls who hurrahed for Blaine last November.” The magnificent oyster victory dinner of...

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