College Girls By Lynn Peril Books Review

Pity the poor college male. Today women make up 58 percent of all undergraduates. Half of all medical students are women, and law schools are on the verge of tipping. Title IX, which mandated sex equity in college sports, has put wrestling and men's gymnastics on the ropes. Even football has come under siege at some elite colleges, thanks to administrators fed up with admitting substandard academic performers to field a team.

Breaking the rules 1950’s style.

By Lynn Peril.

Illustrated. 408 pp. W. W. Norton & Company. Paper. .95.

As Lynn Peril makes clear in her high-spirited if sometimes lip-gloss-thin survey of college women from the days of corsets and curfews to the era of women's studies and hook-ups, women have been greeted with suspicion and worse ever since they began arriving on American campuses some 150 years ago. Back in the day, some feared higher education would turn girls into tiresome harpies with slim marriage prospects. But as female enrollment reached significant levels in the late 19th century, the worry became that women would push out men in an inevitable dynamic of "sex repulsion," with disastrous results for the nation. Eventually, even some critics conceded formal education might provide an "antidote to bluestockingism" - the 19th-century shorthand for headstrong, educated women - and rescue the brainy spinster-in-training from becoming a "noisy zealot." Especially if she were guided toward the proper subjects. In 1854, Harper's published a semi-satirical proposal to create a "College for Females" where the study of "spinology, weaveology and cookology" would culminate in a regular diploma, along with an honorary degree of "F.F.W." - "Fit for Wives."

In researching "College Girls," Peril - a former "slacker" art history major at the University of Wisconsin and the author of "Pink Think" (2002), a pop history of 20th-century ideals of womanhood - seems to have read every relevant advice manual, kitsch-classic magazine article and half-baked psychology tract, and a few serious books, too. Wary of what one historian has called the Northeastern bias of much research on women's education, she offers dutiful accounts of women at black colleges in the South as well as brief accounts of the longstanding coeducational policies of many schools in the West. But it's the goofy antics and traditions at various bastions of privilege that really get her heart racing. Among them are William and Mary's Muffet Club ("open only to girls who had been engaged and jilted") and the "beautiful ceremony," which continues today, where Bryn Mawr sophomores present each freshman with a lantern "to light her steps through the unknown ways of college life." There's a particularly fevered section on supposedly innocent Sapphic crushes, sometimes known as "spoons," whereby a freshman - or "protomathian," as one attempt at gender-neutral nomenclature called female first-years - would pursue a glamorous upperclasswoman with flowers, notes and even locks of hair until her beloved reciprocated, whereupon the pursuer would be deemed "smashed."

Indeed, "College Girls" is a trove of vintage slang: "batting" (picnicking) and its more outré cousin "thicketing," the practice of spending the night in the woods with one's sweetheart and a pile of purloined bedding, almost makes the reader nostalgic for housemothers and three-feet-on-the-floor visiting rules. And then there's the food. Peril describes late-night feasts students whipped up using chafing dishes and stolen Bunsen burners, often in violation of strict rules against snacking, which was believed to divert too much blood away from the brain. (Henry Fowle Durant, the founder of Wellesley, vowed that his school would be free of "pies, lies and doughnuts.") Girls wore their best nighties, but these midnight spreads weren't always genteel: "It is not good form to show aversion when one maiden eats tomato soup out of a powder dish and while another marks the fudge into luscious squares with a nail-file," one 1925 etiquette manual advised.

In organizing her material by topic (sports, dating, fashion and so on) and relying so heavily on an amazing archive of old advertisements and pulp-novel covers for illustration, Peril keeps reaching back to the golden age of blinkered sexism. But the cheery catalog of outrages and oddities gets repetitive, and the reader begins to long for some deeper historical consideration. Peril has very little to say about the legal battles over women's access to higher education, or pretty much anything that happened after 1962. Title IX, passed in 1972, is dispatched in a brief sidebar, given no more ink than the not particularly illuminating tale of a lawyer's daughter who ran away from Antioch College in 1935 to join a Coney Island sideshow as "The Woman With the Disappearing Head."

Still, for all Peril's you-go-girl triumphalism, "College Girls" more than occasionally provokes a nagging feeling of plus ça change. A 1952 magazine article titled "College Girls: If They Could Only Cook" fretted that female liberal arts graduates were likely to suffer "broken marriages and nervous breakdowns" - a sentiment echoed today in news stories that coolly note the gender gap in higher education, or opinion pieces urging women to marry "down." And for all the strides the college girl has made, the benighted past may sometimes deserve the last word: as a riposte to an article warning men "Don't Marry Career Women" that appeared on Forbes.com only this summer, one might cite a headline from a 1929 story in The New York Times: "College Girl Prefers Singleness to Dumb College Boy."

Jennifer Schuessler is an editor at the Book Review.