College Girls Peril, Lynn. College

College Girls

Peril, Lynn. College Girls: Bluestockings, Sex Kittens, and Co-eds Then and Now. New York:

Norton 2007.

While going to college is more often than not considered more of a right than a privilege by high school graduates of both genders, and issues of attendance are mainly confined to questions of making the grade, or making tuition payments, the subtitle of Lynn Peril's 2007 sociological analysis College Girls: Bluestockings, Sex Kittens, and Co-eds Then and Now highlights that this was not always the case. Women had to first win the right to be taken seriously as educational material at all. Education was deemed to make women unmarriageable at best, or worst to be dangerous to the female body because of the ways it taxed feminine brains and perhaps even made women unable to have children. Education for women was either mocked or rendered inferior in quality to the education pursued by men, as women were forced to take classes in domestic science rather than the same subject as their brothers. When women's presence on campuses became more accepted, the 'bluestocking' image shifted slightly, as women on the campuses became sexualized, along with the culture of college in general. Education began to be seen as an enhancement to marriage, rather than a detriment -- provided that women studied the 'correct' subjects.

Rather than studying, women were encouraged to make themselves beautiful and to pursue coveted 'MRS' degrees, even to drop out before completing their schooling if they married. The image conveyed by the media was and sometimes is that to be a woman and to be 'college material' on a level of a male is potentially dangerous to what is 'womanly' and either a woman must eschew learning, make learning secondary to being schooled in sexuality during her years of young adulthood, or at very least go about learning seriously in a womanly fashion about appropriately feminine subjects.

Media images are never cohesive, although sexuality and studiousness is always presented in conflict -- as if women must choose between having a body and a brain, but can never have both. Even today, the image of the over-sexualized college girl persists, in images of girls on 'spring break' who have 'gone wild,' to cheerleaders. Also, although they have dimmed so much, the question as to how to balance work and family life remains for women in a way that it does not for men, harkening back to the idea that women, unlike men, must choose between being either bodies or brains.