College Girls: Bluestockings, Sex Kittens, and Coeds, Then and Now (review)

The history of women in higher education gets a novel twist in this witty introduction to the trials and tribulations of a distinctly American creation—the college girl. Drawing on historical documents, trade books, magazines, newspapers, and archival ephemera, the author, Lynn Peril, gives a vivid portrayal of the development of cultural norms that have influenced the education of young women from the mid-19th century to the present day.

One can only look back with admiration at the perseverance of pioneering educators like Emma Willard who founded the Troy Female Seminary in 1821 with a curriculum that "boldly included mathematics and science" (p. 22), Mary Lyon who founded the Mount Holyoke Seminary in 1837, offering a three-year course of study that paralleled the "regimen of a men's college" (p. 26), and the abolitionists who founded Oberlin in 1833 as the first coeducational, interracial college.

As Peril points out, the separate-spheres ideology that differentiated between the appropriate social roles of women and men became a basic premise for the plethora of rules, regulations, and requirements governing female behavior. These in loco parentis rules proved resilient, placing numerous restrictions on women's social, academic, and recreational activities for more than a century, an amazing track record illustrating the longevity of university traditions.

Ultimately, as Peril shows, they became irrelevant in the 1960s and 1970s, victims of the sexual revolution and the enactment of anti-discrimination policies that legislated equal opportunities for women and minorities in academic, athletic, and co-curricular programs. As single-sex colleges and universities embraced coeducation, sex segregation diminished and the college girl gradually morphed into the well-educated, suitably credentialed and coifed career woman, independent, ambitious, and embracing alternative lifestyles.

Peril divides the book into eight chapters followed by a brief epilogue. Her introductory chapter, "The Birth of the College Girl," informs the reader that early women's colleges were rigorous by today's standards, encompassing the trivium and the quadrivium, and as electives, music, art, and physical exercise. She intersperses her discussion of academic requirements with references to popular texts and magazines that warned of the sexual risks of male-female proximity in coeducational colleges, the negative impact of rigorous study on women's reproductive health, and the danger of young women becoming "muddle-headed" if forced into higher education.

"New Girl on Campus" (chap. 2) and "Sex Ed and Husband-Hunting" (chap. 7) focus on the socialization of college girls, the growth of sororities, the preoccupation with dating and popularity, and interactions with peers from other social, economic, cultural, religious, and racial backgrounds. In reading about "The Collegiate Look" in Chapter 3, I recalled the importance of dress codes, magazines like Mademoiselle and Glamour as arbiters of taste, and annual visits to department store college shops where college wardrobes were carefully assembled. For boys it was the "preppy look" but as Peril relates, for college girls, dressing appropriately was a serious business. Her discussion of the influential Mademoiselle College Board jogged my memory about my entry in the magazine's annual guest editor contest, in which I was a runner-up to a classmate, Sylvia Plath, the poet who later wrote about her own experience at Mademoiselle and her attempted suicide in her novel, The Bell Jar (1963).

"In Loco Parentis and Other Campus Rules" (chap. 4) provides an account of dormitory life and parental trepidation about their daughters' well-being. As a consequence, colleges enforced gender-specific policies that ranged from family-style living quarters supervised by housemothers to quiet hours, curfews, no smoking or drinking, designated public spaces for entertaining male visitors, and compulsory chapel. Rule-breakers could anticipate suffering the consequences, particularly in colleges with peer-operated honor boards; but according to Peril, "students always found a way to work around parietal rules" (p. 171). She cites revisions in social codes beginning in the mid-1960s and, in some recalcitrant colleges...