College Girls by Lynn Peril

Author:Lynn Peril
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2013-04-09T16:00:00+00:00

Tomboys learned how to be ladies at Waverly (1963).

When Kathie accuses Jane of being “afraid to look and act and feel like a woman,” there’s almost no reason to finish reading the book.‡ We know spirited Jane will prove her wrong, and that for a moment nobody will recognize the tomboy turned lady when she gets home for summer vacation.

* Amelia Elizabeth Walden, Waverly (1947; reprint, New York: Berkley Highland Books, 1963), 7.

† Ibid., 104.

‡ Ibid., 127.

Bancroft Beatley was the head of Simmons College, a Boston-based institute of higher learning which at midcentury prided itself on its dedication to women’s vocational education. He, too, sketched a dark future for the traditional liberal arts student. Female graduates of such programs might be interesting, well-read people with discriminating tastes in art and music, he acknowledged, but “unless these women also have made satisfactory adjustments to home and family life . . . unless they are making their lives count in some way for the common good, they will not be happy people.”68

Few commented on the lack of opportunity for women in the professions, inequities in compensation and promotion, the lack of affordable child care, or the necessity of a husband who pitched in with household chores. More common was the belief that it was “unrealistic to expect most men, fully engaged in other occupations, to carry the main burden of work and child rearing in the home,” as a pro-women’s curriculum educator noted in 1955.69

“The one lesson a girl could hardly avoid learning, if she went to college between 1945 and 1960, was not to get interested . . . in anything besides getting married and having children, if she wanted to be normal, happy, adjusted, feminine, have a successful husband, successful children, and a normal, feminine, adjusted successful sex life,” wrote Betty Friedan (Smith ’42) in The Feminine Mystique (1963).70 Friedan castigated the “sex-directed curriculum” of colleges more concerned with training students for married life than for the life of the mind. Friedan did research at her alma mater and other women’s colleges in the 1950s and was shocked by what she saw as the complacency of students who knitted their way through classes, their handiwork symbolic of the domestic futures Friedan believed they’d already mapped out. (This had already been noticed by French writer Simone de Beauvoir. In America Day by Day [1953], she described women’s college students “dressed like boys, painted like street-walkers” knitting through classes in what she attributed to “an anticipation of marriage and maternity.”)71

Friedan thought the “feminine mystique” was promulgated by students who compared engagement rings and sweater patterns more frequently than class notes and career plans, and by professors who didn’t challenge the assumption that the curriculum needed to be feminized. Long before girls reached campus, they encountered the mystique in magazines and prescriptive literature aimed at teenage girls and adult women, in articles and stories that told readers to value social relationships over study, and to hide their intelligence lest boys find them competitive, bossy, and unattractive.

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