Caitlin Flanagan, one of my favorite iconoclasts, has penned a review of a new book entitled College Girls: Bluestockings, Sex, Kittens, and Co-Eds, Then and Now. Flanagan notes:
“To an extent, the history of higher education for American women can be traced through the gradual erosion of parietals. As more and more young ladies began to leave their families not for marriage but for a college education, and then to slowly be granted the freedom of the campus, something profound began to change. The nature of the education women received in college — from the things they studied in the classroom to the graces and talents they were expected to cultivate beyond the lecture hall — evolved in direct proportion to their gathering personal and sexual freedoms. To be free to sleep wherever you choose and with whomever you choose is to be free to turn up your nose at the ‘Ladies’ Course’ and to pursue instead a “classical” curriculum.
“All of these developments are cataloged in Lynn Peril’s invaluable new book, College Girls. Hers is not an achievement of analysis; almost every one of her revelations is marshaled to support the contention that colleges imposed more limits on women than on men. (Or, ‘Color me jeering,’ as she puts it at one point.) But the book can be forgiven much, because in it Peril has assembled an Aladdin’s cave of treasures. She has read, and quotes at length from, a rich and various array of sources: student handbooks and yearbooks, popular novels, and advice manuals from the past two centuries. She has created a record of the daily habits of these women — from what they ate, to what they wore, to the subjects they studied — that will fascinate anyone interested in the history of private life.”
I do want to interject a note on those ladies’ courses. I think that young women were far more likely to end up with a sound classical education in the past than now. Those ladies’ courses were probably superior to a lot of the pap they get in college today. I base this partly on the old books, including a now sadly lost book of readings for young ladies’ book, circa 1860s. Back when I could remember the whole title, I almost replaced a copy, belonging to a relative, on ebay. I’m sorry I didn’t because I’d like to be able to cite the readings, which I remember as being quite impressive. I’m simply not sure young women today are as likely to gain the basics of a good education as their antecedents.
And then there’s sex:
“Peril reports, accurately, that much of the historical anxiety about sending girls to college had to do with the question of sex. In the 19th century, many believed that too much education could rob a girl of ‘the womanly virtues’ and set her on a course for spinsterhood. Coeducation was problematic on two fronts: Not only was a girl in danger of losing her virginity; she was also capable of falling in love with the wrong kind of fellow, perhaps even returning home engaged to someone her family had never met. Nowadays, with the threats to a woman’s virginity ever more numerous, and engagement regarded by most coeds as a quaint arrangement slated for the distant future, parents’ worries have only multiplied.
“Proof that the sex lives of college women remain an object of intense cultural fascination can be found in a book like Laura Sessions Stepp’s Unhooked which documents the semi-anonymous ‘hooking up’ that is now the norm. Stepp’s intention was to study this phenomenon open-mindedly, ‘hoping to understand rather than intending to censure.’ But journalistic objectivity was soon replaced by alarm and even horror. She found girls who were ‘exhausted physically, emotionally and spiritually’ by the practice. The girls’ behavior is starkly contemporary, but the adult’s characterization of it — and of the specific ways that sexuality can deplete a woman — could have been lifted from a 19th-century tract. In placing the blame for these developments on three forces (?the ethic of female empowerment; parental expectations for academic and professional achievement; and reluctance on the part of authorities on campus to intervene in students? social lives?), Stepp occupies the squishy middle ground where many progressive women unhappily find themselves: Yes, yes, yes to female freedom and empowerment, but Jesus Christ, why are these girls giving blow jobs to guys they hardly know?
“She pulls herself together long enough to conclude the book with a ‘Dear Daughters’ letter. It’s the kind of ‘sex is a beautiful thing, when it’s between two loving people’ lecture that has been making young girls want to jump out of the nearest window from sheer embarrassment since the early 1970s. (My lecture arrived, in my mother’s Palmer Method handwriting, on my bedside table midway through 12th grade, and the extent to which it mortified me — my mother was a nurse and knew how to draw a fairly precise medical illustration — cannot be overstated).”
But here’s my favorite evocation of the way things were:
“The most arresting part of Peril’s book is the brief, vivid, and appealing portrait she presents of herself as an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin 25 years ago. She arrived with a butch haircut, a suitcase full of punk clothes mail-ordered from New York, and a “tough-chick persona.” I suspected that she was romanticizing her past, but then she shows us her freshman ID card, and she really was a fright. Underneath, though, she was as timid as any 18-year-old girl plucked from home and set down on the campus of a huge university. Too shy to raise her hand in class, or even to order a pizza over the telephone, she was so rattled by a boy who flirted with her on the first day of French II that she promptly dropped the class. ‘In my heart of hearts,’ she writes — the phrase itself a kind of linguistic Fair Isle sweater — ‘I knew I wasn’t ready for college yet.’ She wandered through her four years, her melancholy settling into a depression, and despite all of her bravado — and a short, fun fling with feminist theory — she ended up in the greatest of all girl majors: art history.”
Linguistic Fair Isle sweater–how perfect.
“To an extent, the history of higher education for American women can be traced through the gradual erosion of parietals. As more and more young ladies began to leave their families not for marriage but for a college education, and then to slowly be granted the freedom of the campus, something profound began to change. The nature of the education women received in college — from the things they studied in the classroom to the graces and talents they were expected to cultivate beyond the lecture hall — evolved in direct proportion to their gathering personal and sexual freedoms. To be free to sleep wherever you choose and with whomever you choose is to be free to turn up your nose at the ‘Ladies’ Course’ and to pursue instead a “classical” curriculum.
“All of these developments are cataloged in Lynn Peril’s invaluable new book, College Girls. Hers is not an achievement of analysis; almost every one of her revelations is marshaled to support the contention that colleges imposed more limits on women than on men. (Or, ‘Color me jeering,’ as she puts it at one point.) But the book can be forgiven much, because in it Peril has assembled an Aladdin’s cave of treasures. She has read, and quotes at length from, a rich and various array of sources: student handbooks and yearbooks, popular novels, and advice manuals from the past two centuries. She has created a record of the daily habits of these women — from what they ate, to what they wore, to the subjects they studied — that will fascinate anyone interested in the history of private life.”
I do want to interject a note on those ladies’ courses. I think that young women were far more likely to end up with a sound classical education in the past than now. Those ladies’ courses were probably superior to a lot of the pap they get in college today. I base this partly on the old books, including a now sadly lost book of readings for young ladies’ book, circa 1860s. Back when I could remember the whole title, I almost replaced a copy, belonging to a relative, on ebay. I’m sorry I didn’t because I’d like to be able to cite the readings, which I remember as being quite impressive. I’m simply not sure young women today are as likely to gain the basics of a good education as their antecedents.
And then there’s sex:
“Peril reports, accurately, that much of the historical anxiety about sending girls to college had to do with the question of sex. In the 19th century, many believed that too much education could rob a girl of ‘the womanly virtues’ and set her on a course for spinsterhood. Coeducation was problematic on two fronts: Not only was a girl in danger of losing her virginity; she was also capable of falling in love with the wrong kind of fellow, perhaps even returning home engaged to someone her family had never met. Nowadays, with the threats to a woman’s virginity ever more numerous, and engagement regarded by most coeds as a quaint arrangement slated for the distant future, parents’ worries have only multiplied.
“Proof that the sex lives of college women remain an object of intense cultural fascination can be found in a book like Laura Sessions Stepp’s Unhooked which documents the semi-anonymous ‘hooking up’ that is now the norm. Stepp’s intention was to study this phenomenon open-mindedly, ‘hoping to understand rather than intending to censure.’ But journalistic objectivity was soon replaced by alarm and even horror. She found girls who were ‘exhausted physically, emotionally and spiritually’ by the practice. The girls’ behavior is starkly contemporary, but the adult’s characterization of it — and of the specific ways that sexuality can deplete a woman — could have been lifted from a 19th-century tract. In placing the blame for these developments on three forces (?the ethic of female empowerment; parental expectations for academic and professional achievement; and reluctance on the part of authorities on campus to intervene in students? social lives?), Stepp occupies the squishy middle ground where many progressive women unhappily find themselves: Yes, yes, yes to female freedom and empowerment, but Jesus Christ, why are these girls giving blow jobs to guys they hardly know?
“She pulls herself together long enough to conclude the book with a ‘Dear Daughters’ letter. It’s the kind of ‘sex is a beautiful thing, when it’s between two loving people’ lecture that has been making young girls want to jump out of the nearest window from sheer embarrassment since the early 1970s. (My lecture arrived, in my mother’s Palmer Method handwriting, on my bedside table midway through 12th grade, and the extent to which it mortified me — my mother was a nurse and knew how to draw a fairly precise medical illustration — cannot be overstated).”
But here’s my favorite evocation of the way things were:
“The most arresting part of Peril’s book is the brief, vivid, and appealing portrait she presents of herself as an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin 25 years ago. She arrived with a butch haircut, a suitcase full of punk clothes mail-ordered from New York, and a “tough-chick persona.” I suspected that she was romanticizing her past, but then she shows us her freshman ID card, and she really was a fright. Underneath, though, she was as timid as any 18-year-old girl plucked from home and set down on the campus of a huge university. Too shy to raise her hand in class, or even to order a pizza over the telephone, she was so rattled by a boy who flirted with her on the first day of French II that she promptly dropped the class. ‘In my heart of hearts,’ she writes — the phrase itself a kind of linguistic Fair Isle sweater — ‘I knew I wasn’t ready for college yet.’ She wandered through her four years, her melancholy settling into a depression, and despite all of her bravado — and a short, fun fling with feminist theory — she ended up in the greatest of all girl majors: art history.”
Linguistic Fair Isle sweater–how perfect.
“She pulls herself together long enough to conclude the book with a ‘Dear Daughters’ letter. It’s the kind of ‘sex is a beautiful thing, when it’s between two loving people’ lecture that has been making young girls want to jump out of the nearest window from sheer embarrassment since the early 1970s. (My lecture arrived, in my mother’s Palmer Method handwriting, on my bedside table midway through 12th grade, and the extent to which it mortified me — my mother was a nurse and knew how to draw a fairly precise medical illustration — cannot be overstated).”
But here’s my favorite evocation of the way things were:
“The most arresting part of Peril’s book is the brief, vivid, and appealing portrait she presents of herself as an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin 25 years ago. She arrived with a butch haircut, a suitcase full of punk clothes mail-ordered from New York, and a “tough-chick persona.” I suspected that she was romanticizing her past, but then she shows us her freshman ID card, and she really was a fright. Underneath, though, she was as timid as any 18-year-old girl plucked from home and set down on the campus of a huge university. Too shy to raise her hand in class, or even to order a pizza over the telephone, she was so rattled by a boy who flirted with her on the first day of French II that she promptly dropped the class. ‘In my heart of hearts,’ she writes — the phrase itself a kind of linguistic Fair Isle sweater — ‘I knew I wasn’t ready for college yet.’ She wandered through her four years, her melancholy settling into a depression, and despite all of her bravado — and a short, fun fling with feminist theory — she ended up in the greatest of all girl majors: art history.”
Linguistic Fair Isle sweater–how perfect.