The *Idea*l Woman

It doesn’t take a genius to see the discrepancy between men and women throughout history in society. Women have always been at the backburner to men in all aspects of life, in particular to our study, in academia. Women were allowed to attend institutions of higher learning but had stereotypes and negative ideas pressed upon them before they even set foot on a campus. Women in academia were not taken seriously. They were cast off from respectable, or even normal, majors of study and were reduced to taking classes made exclusively for them. Before you get excited for special classes, read carefully. These classes entailed learning how to be a good housewife. Cooking, cleaning, sewing, etiquette, hosting, the list could go on and on. How fun does it sound to sit in classes for hours at time to learn how to iron a shirt just right or properly baste a roast? I thought so…

In her book College Girls, Lynn Peril explains, “women needed a specialized program, one that would not merely deal with the generalities of child psychology, for example, but should “prepare the mother to cope with a tired four-year-old, and, in addition, to get meaning out of this”…with an underlying assumption that housewife was the career that most women, if not aspired to, nonetheless found themselves in.” (Peril, 200)
Even if girls were smart and did end up studying something more stimulating than mashing potatoes, being a smart girl was viewed as tremendously unattractive. In fact, the women students were pushed to hide any intelligence at all! Being as smart as or smarter than a boy was too much for them to handle and they did not like the risk of being shown up by a girl, much less one that they were interested in dating. “Men wanted a woman who was “appreciably less intelligent than they were”.” (Peril, 212) There were even published articles in Redbook addressing dating and a woman’s intelligence. “Men are attracted to women to whom they can feel intellectually superior. They tend to marry girls whose I.Q. and educational achievements are less than their own. Indeed, investigations show that the average male has a very marked tendency to shy away from girls whom he suspects of having as many or more brains than he has.” (Peril, 212)

So at this point, men had already captured women’s capability of brainpower if any of the girls wanted to have a family or even date. Perhaps these harsh standards left no more standards to dominate women’s looks, but they were also controlled, too. If college girls wanted to be noticed and pursued by other college boys, they had a visual standard to maintain, to be the “Ideal Woman”. “According to a poll of male students at “two leading Eastern universities…the ideal wife is 5 feet 5 inches, weighs about 120 pounds, does not wear glasses, possesses sex appeal and a good figure.” (Peril, 212)

Women were to dress right, weigh a certain amount, and look sexy, yet innocent, if they desired any male attention. If these standards were not followed, a girl could wave goodbye to any social life with boys, especially since most campuses before the 1950s were not co-ed. This left girls to socialize with other girls only, unless a male specifically came to visit her due to the fact that girls were not allowed to leave campus and fraternize with a boy. Looking good was imperative.

These standards may seem crazy, but if you really focus on it, is it that much different from today? For example, there is still a looks scale placed upon women in social situations at colleges today if they want to be pursued by a boy. She still must look sexy but innocent and maintain a good figure. And for the intelligence factor, how many women are famous for their notoriously dumb phrases, attempting to accentuate the idea that she is an imbecile when it is usually the opposite. One current example of this is Jessica Simpson’s phrase about “buffalo having wings” that was so laughed at for making her appear idiotic that there are national ad campaigns playing on her ‘idiot’ success. Simpson thinks it is cute gaining laughs and attention when, in fact, it’s just an example of Master’s Tools at work, keeping her at the same standards that were used against women in the early century. Jessica doesn’t see her commercial as degrading and a way to exploit her intelligence to make a buck.

Hopefully women like Jessica Simpson will see one day the negative impact that she makes at spreading the falsity about the ‘ideal’ woman. For all the girls out there, don’t worry about being the ‘ideal’ woman. Take the ‘l’ off and you’ll see the hidden word, it’s just an ‘idea’.

-Laura Condyles

sex (mis)education

This week we read chapter seven from Lynn Peril’s book College Girls: Bluestockings, Sex Kittens, and Coeds, Then and Now, titled “Sex Ed and Husband Hunting”
Sex education has changed quite a bit since it first entered the university in the late nineteenth century.

When women first entered institutions of higher learning, sex was quite a taboo subject. Women students were expected to maintain actions of a “mannered lady” and virginity was the pinnacle of this job. Women students were only to attend class and be casual, not sexual, playmates to the male students; “She sells her birthright when she becomes a mere playmate, and forgets that God made her for man’s helpmeet.” (excerpt from The Freshman Girl, Peril, 279)
Most schools were extremely strict when it came to relations between the men and the women. Schools set up stern rules for the women to follow and much more relaxed rules for the male students to abide by. Some of the rules emplaced upon women were curfews, parameters of campus they could not leave without special permission, and certain public places – the only places – where they could interact with the opposite sex. The rules were stringent to follow and had severe consequences when broken. Peril explains, “In order to give girls a place to entertain, special, appropriately chaperoned parlors were set aside for receiving visitors”… “Women almost always had earlier and more restrictive curfews than men” (Peril, 282-283) These restrictions lead to awkward developmental patterns between the males and females. When trying to solve a problem, here being sexual relationships, banning the activity completely only exploits it more and makes the issue a bigger problem than initially. Restricting the students from interacting in a normal, adult, and natural manner and keeping sex as taboo kept college students as uninformed children instead of adults.

Students were extremely misinformed when it came to sex. The universities refused to address it, and when forced to due to student body interest, or demanding, the only answer to sex education was abstinence. “At the turn of the century, sex education was still largely a matter of providing what one writer called “just enough anatomical explanation to blunt the curiosity of the young…and to warn them away from any sexual thoughts, feelings, or actions” ” (Peril, 278) Students were told to ignore anything sexual and just focus on school work. After many demands, schools folded to its students and gave classes on ‘marriage’ that still did not address the issue of sex education, but was one step in the direction and became wildly popular among students.

“Students at Northwesten University complained that the ‘faculty was old and fogeyish, and that sex hygiene is not given enough prominence.” Finally, at the University of North Carolina in 1925, sociology professor Ernest R. Groves responded to the requests of male students with the first-ever elective college course in marriage. It included information on sexual fulfillment in wedlock, the psychology of family life, and child rearing. It even encroached on a staple of today’s self-help industry: how to meet the right girl.” (Peril, 280)

These classes were popular but often still did not explicitly address healthy sex education and contraception practices of the time on many college campuses. Some even told students wrong information! Sadly, sex education still remains like this today in parts of our society. While there are many campaigns to increase knowledge of safe sex and the use of contraceptive, many portions of our media still play on the innocent mind or fanciful stories to tell youth today about sex. Two examples seen are in popular movies today, “Knocked Up” and “Mean Girls”. These examples are funny to people who do already have a base knowledge of sex education, but what about those young adults who don’t? The media still leaves it a mystery to many, a large problem that we have in our society. Young adults have the right to knowledge about sexual education and denying it or keeping it a taboo only minimizes our society back into a mislead youth of the 1950s.

-Laura Condyles

I'm a Beautiful (but dumb) Bride!

Since coming to college I have attended three weddings. I plan to attend one more in December and know of several other weddings, engagements, or planned engagements. These matrimonial plans are all the plans of female friends. With these kinds of experiences happening all around me, I have to wonder: why spend the money to attend university if you’re just going to get married? Granted, conceptions of work and home have changed drastically in the years since women first began to attend college, but marriage continues to mean different things for men and women. Considering laws preventing married women from working remained in place up unto the 1950’s, a women’s place is stereotypically thought to be in the home taking care of her husband and children.

The question of why women bother attending college if their ultimate plans are marriage is explored by Lynn Peril in her book College Girls: “The more one reads mid-twentieth-century prescriptive literature aimed at teenage girls, the more one wonders that any of them went to college at all” (287). If a girl were to attend college it was mainly to look for a husband. Although the college girl would inadvertently receive an education as well as (hopefully) a husband, a woman was expected to downplay her intelligence during the dating process. Popular notions of men and women held that “…men don’t want their wives to be intellectuals…[and] dominating, intellectual women didn’t make good wives…” (Peril 211-212). Popular culture also had significant influence on whether women chose to attend college and the priorities these women set once they entered university: “Books and articles suggested that female intelligence should be hidden, lest it frighten men off, and described college as a smorgasbord of prospective husbands rather than as a place of learning” (Peril 287). Unfortunately, popular culture has not changed much.

A commercial for Gartner Studios, a company specializing in invitations, features brides that have gone through a mental breakdown due to the overwhelming demands of planning a wedding: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cmku_ZaB714 . The mental institution is full of women in white dresses. The only male featured is a hospital staff member. This commercial makes it very clear that weddings are not only the responsibility of women, but also a significant goal and moment in a woman’s life. Maybe if these women’s fiancées helped in wedding plans, they wouldn’t have gone insane! Commercials like this create the expectation that a woman’s primary hopes and plans should center on marriage, children, and the creation of a family.

Given the number of weddings I have attended already, I would argue that expectations for women have changed only to a certain extent. Popular culture today, as it has in the past, continues to encourage women to invest their efforts in the home as opposed to other spheres. Unfortunately, this encouragement de-emphasizes the importance of higher education. If a woman is going to spend her entire life as a house wife, a college degree seems almost obsolete.

-Irene Davidson

A Woman's Place?

In one of the chapters of her book College Girls, Lynn Peril opens with an interesting and somewhat unsettling quote: “Proud Daughter: “I have made 100 in algebra, 96 in Latin, 90 in Greek, 88-1/2 in mental philosophy and 95 in history; are you not satisfied with my record?” Father: “Yes, indeed, and if your husband happens to know anything about housekeeping, sewing and cooking, I am sure your married life will be very happy” (178). The father’s response conveys much of what was expected of young women; marriage, homemaking, and childbearing were thought to be a woman’s primary responsibilities in life. A college education was a unique experience for a woman and was thought to be almost a deterrent to her divine role in life. While it may appear that this ideology has changed since the early 1900s when this quote was used, dominant images of women in current popular culture would say otherwise.

Historically speaking, a college education was believed to prevent a woman from adequately fulfilling her appropriate roles which were wife, mother, and homemaker: “That a college education somehow unfit women for household duties was perhaps the most resonant criticism of college for women…” (Peril 187). The popular notion “…was that college kept women from learning housekeeping skills by filling their heads with unnecessary things like dead languages…” (190). Thankfully, experts and educators in favor of women’s education argued against these ideas and believed that higher education produced wives and mothers that went above and beyond their expected responsibilities and duties. Popular culture served as a perfect venue to advertise these ideas: “Articles appeared in magazines and newspapers in which [women’s college] presidents defended liberal arts education as excellent training for the future housewife” (196). While I am grateful for the historic defenders of education for women, the fact that very few publicly challenged the assumed role for women is an interesting one.

The film Mona Lisa Smile is a perfect example of a woman frustrated in her attempts to encourage women to look beyond what is socially expected of them. In the film Julia Roberts plays the role of an art history professor, Katherine Watson, at the prestigious all-women’s school: Wellesley. In the following clip Ms. Watson presents a unique lecture to her class using images of housewives in advertisements. This lecture is in response to a school newspaper article accusing Ms. Watson of encouraging her students to betray the expected roles of wife and mother: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5PwQkM0KlY . To an extent this film challenges the idea that women are expected to become housewives regardless of whether they have a college degree or not.

As much as I would like to believe that these expectations no longer exist, current pop culture continues to uphold these expectations. The following three commercials defend the idea that a woman’s place is in the home as a wife, mother, and homemaker. Her primary responsibilities are to her husband, children, and the upkeep of the house. The Jif Peanut Butter commercial has a mother teaching her two sons to equally share the peanut butter sandwich: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdYFVN35h5w&feature=related . Jif’s catchy slogan, “Choosy Moms choose Jif”, blatantly makes the assumption that the only people who should be interested in peanut butter and other cooking and food products are women taking care of their families. The Swiffer commercial plays on the supposed emotional attachment women have with their cleaning products: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_JpYfScoHs . The woman featured in the commercial can’t stand her mop anymore and moves on to the more improved Swiffer product which significantly increases her quality of life. Obviously, since a woman’s only duties are house cleaning! The last commercial is for Bounty paper towels: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGrSMdi87zM . A father and son stare dumbfounded at a spill on the kitchen floor until Mom swoops in and saves the day with one Bounty paper towel! This commercial makes the statement that men do not belong in the kitchen and are clueless when it comes to anything having to do with the home.

While the argument is rarely made currently against women in higher education, the belief that a woman’s place is ultimately in the home continues to be reinforced in popular culture.

-Irene Davidson

Sadie Hawkins Dance, In My Khahi Pants, or, the Tri-Polar College Girl

Scan the cafeteria for some good seating
I found a good spot by the cheerleaders eating
The quarterback asked me if I'd like a beating
I said that's one thing I won't be needing
And since I'm rather smart and cunning
I took off down the next hall running
Only to get stopped by a girl so stunning
only to get stopped by a girl so stunning

She said, "You're smooth, and good with talking.
You're going with me to the Sadie Hawkins"

The Sadie Hawkins Dance
in my khaki pants
There's nothing better
oh oh oh
The girls ask the guys
it's always a surprise
There's nothing better
baby do you like my sweater?

-Reliant K, “Sadie Hawkins Dance”

Before reading Chapter 7, “Sex Ed and Husband Hunting,” of Lynn Peril’s College Girls, I didn’t know the history of the Sadie Hawkins Dance. While I remember taking issue with the idea that Sadie Hawkins was the only event where it was acceptable for girls to ask guys out in high school, I was unaware that Sadie Hawkins was a girl so ugly that she had to quite literally chase down and capture a husband for herself. Charming. That Sadie Hawkins days are still so ubiquitous that Reliant K wrote a widely popular song about the tradition is somewhat disturbing to me. For some reason, girls have never been able to ask guys to Sadies in a private, personal settings still holds true. Peril’s section on Sadie Hawkins finally explained the bizarre tradition at my high school where senior girls would stand on the balcony and all at once drop down banners with their intended dates’ names on them for the whole school to see. I always found this incredibly strange, but now I can see that it is just a continuation of a highly public fight to get a man.

The Sadie Hawkins tradition is part of a constant tension for college (and high school) women between being beautiful and sexually available and being über-studious shrews. Peril notes that “portraying the college girl as an eroticized playmate defused the threatening image of a man-hating intellectual harpy by reducing her to a sexy submissive pussycat” (Peril 317). It seems to be my theme this week, but it really is astounding how far we still have to go, how far we haven’t come. We are either harpies, or we’re frail and need to be protected, or we’re well-educated prostitutes. On the conservative side of the spectrum, Peril relays that “in the 1930s, Elizabeth Eldridge declared William and Mary’s rules to be the most conservative…Eldridge dryly wondered whether proximity to the sights of Colonial Williamsburg resigned ‘the co-eds to living in the deliciously quaint pattern while on other campuses their gayer sister go whither they please unquestioned’” (Peril 284). While W&M certainly no longer has rules on where students may go on dates, this idea that women need to be forced into protection is still present. While I agree that services like Campus Escort and Steerclear are incredibly valuable when you need to get across campus late at night and that it’s always safest to go out in groups, I hate that friends always ensure that I walk with a friend or get a ride from one of those services late at night or that I go to the frats with friends, but never bug their male friends about the same issues. On the hyper-sexualized side, however, you only need to look at the latest late-night tv ad for Girls Gone Wild to see just how crucial the idea of the promiscuous college girl is for an unfortunately large chunk of our economy.

Eldridge illustrates this perpetual tension when she describes the ideal coed: “bluestockings in class, and silk hose and silver slippers in the evening. It’s a big order, but a girl today must be equal to it if she is to deserve the name of co-ed” (qtd. Peril 290). The college girl of yesterday, of today, and hopefully not of tomorrow must be bright, intelligent, and forward-thinking in class but must revert to the mindset of a (hypersexual) Disney Princess on the weekends.

-Cate Domino

Women’s Studies Students – the New College Girls

In her book College Girls: Bluestockings, Sex Kittens, and Coeds, Then and Now, Lynn Peril notes that “as part of the protest movement, students held teach-ins and ‘free university’ classes on racism and black history in addition to those on the pacifism and conscientious objection, and at the Free University of Seattle in 1966, a course on women’s history. From these roots grew the demand for including in the traditional curriculum such interdisciplinary courses as, first, black studies…and, finally, women’s studies” (Peril 222). The rise of women’s studies courses and departments were met with serious opposition, and, unfortunately, continue to face serious criticisms, both from college culture and academia.

Much like the College Girls of yesteryear, as a women’s studies major I have been told to hide the nature of my education from men. Much like advice book author Frances Strain’s observation that “it takes discipline to hide a Phi Beta Kappa key and wear instead a piece of swank costume jewelry…but it pays if a girl is matrimony bound” (qtd. Peril 213-214), friends have advised me to answer only with my first major, government, to that ubiquitous pick-up line, “what’s your major?” In a strange, circular, irony, the social need for women to hide their education has landed squarely on the shoulders of women’s studies majors, yet, thankfully, we are too confident in our feminist identities to hide them. I always respond with “government and women’s studies,” and if the frat boy in question makes a quick exit, then I’ve saved myself time – he wasn’t worth it anyway.

Women’s studies faces harsh critiques from within the academy as well. Peril notes that “even today, women’s studies is attacked by academics for its ‘unfocused’ interdisciplinary nature, and mocked by antifeminists for the touch-feely nature of ‘consciousness raising’ and for what they consider its fractious identity politics” (Peril 223). I am consistently surprised when people who I generally consider to be well-educated and open-minded ask if I have a major other than women’s studies, and when I inform them that I am also a government major, respond with “oh, thank God you have a real major, too.” As if women’s studies isn’t a “real” course of study. Feminists’ work is never done, yet even women’s studies professors have advised me and other students to take a second, more mainstream major and even to go to grad school in that field to prepare for inevitable continuing budget cuts in women’s studies departments and fields. It is unfortunate, but today’s women’s studies major truly faces the same binds as the college girls in the early 20^th century – we are expected to really be preparing for something other than what we are earning a degree in and to hide that degree from eligible bachelors. How far we haven’t come!

-Cate Domino

Come one, Come all

One of the best indicators of a prospering and equal society is citizen’s access to education. Education provides the skills necessary to determine the role of duty for people in regards to intellect and enter into those networks to people with similar roles and education. Access to this education that determines roles, in particular elite and specific education that prepares people for highly skilled and prestigious positions, is the indicator of equality in that society. Within the last century, our country has seen equality by the existence of co-education of male and females in our universities.

We see equal access to education examples in Gina Barreca’s book Babes in Boyland; A Personal Narrative of Co-Education in the Ivy League. In her book Babes in Boyland, Barreca takes her reader through her personal experience as a student at Dartmouth college as the school newly became desegregated from and all-male school to a co-educational institute of higher learning. In her book, she often cites the woes of entering into a ‘boy world’. Girls are often looked over or treated like morons and are not given nearly the amount of respect as a male student, even if the wit and intellect of the female student soars over that of the male student. She is able to take her account of these negative aspects and make her book funny and entertaining as readers, particularly young readers who currently experience co-education in colleges today, gain insight to males and females first ‘learning’ how to ‘learn’ together in the 1960s and 70s.

Barreca explains how she felt like an outsider as a girl entering a world of boy’s education by even signs in bookstores, “The sign suggested that the campus lad not adjusted to the fact that women were now actual full-time, legitimate students at what had always been an all-male college.” (Barreca 53) Conversations and examinations of this prejudice even happened in bathrooms!
“First Girl: “Why do they like the girls from other schools better than they like us?
Second Girl: “Because they can drive them home. We’re always right here, all the time, and you need to drive us away, not jut drive us home, to get rid of us….They help them type. They’ll even do their laundry.” (Barreca 63)

The males at Dartmouth were not ready for the girls. The girls came on campus as a spectacle and were unfairly treated as lesser students by the males. They were not taken as seriously and tested just because they were female. This is an example of oppression, and a pathetic time between sex relations by creating false ideas that women were lesser. We see an issue almost exactly like this in more recent times. Over ten years ago, Virginia Military Institute was ordered to become co-educational. The school and alumni stopped their feet and refused by giving the state two alternative options to allowing females into their school: one, going private and two, setting up a military cadet core at an adjoining all-female school nearby, Mary Baldwin. VMI implemented the all female cadet core but eventually fell to the state and had to admit girls into their freshmen class. Once the girls arrived, many were tested beyond necessary by males in order to make them drop out and leave the school and even some violent actions were taken, such as sexual assault. Over the years, the acceptance of females have dramatically risen and today they are said to be seen as equals, yet the haunting memory still lasts.

How long must women endure this “you can’t do what I do” mentality from men? Whether it’s in education, the workforce, or any social scene in life, women often become a spectacle when trying to cross over into “boyland” or a “man’s world”. This is an exact example of oppression and women have to often deal with receiving criticism when they attempt to do something that isn’t engineered or predetermined for their gender. Hopefully this can phase out over time as the preconceived notions of women being ‘lesser’ phased away from schools such as Dartmouth and VMI.

-Laura Condyles