Jessica Olin writes:

Lynn Peril’s College Girls: Bluestockings, Sex Kittens and Coeds, Then and Now is a jaunty, comprehensive history of the American college girl that draws on ‘a variety of materials: prescriptive literature, fiction, popular works of sociology and guidance, girlie magazines and pulp fiction, as well as student handbooks and the like’. Referring to the ‘high level of cultural anxiety’ attending the issue of higher education for women, Peril shows that from the beginning girls who wanted to go to college have had to fight against ‘a mixture of condescension, ridicule and derision’. The Raleigh Register in 1831 ‘mocked the “Refined Female College” with a curriculum that featured “scolding and fretting” and “running your father into debt for finery, cologne water, pomatum and hard soap, dancing and frolicking”’.

(LRB 10 May 2007)

Norton | paperback 408 pp. |ISBN: 9780393327151