The newest dress that I finished in from the Vintage Vogue pattern V1084, which is one that I have admired for multiple years. I absolutely love all of the clever details of this pattern, such as the slim skirt at the front and the fullness at the back, or the high neckline at the front with the low neckline and bow detail at the back. This pattern was from 1956, and as I was making it and looking through the directions, I kept thinking about what kind of things were happening in 1956.
Over the past few years as I spend the majority of my days at university I have gotten more and more curious about the experiences of women before me. Women at college is a relatively new thing in Western history, and even once women started to be more widely accepted into universities, there were still tons of hurdles in place.
The idea to look into this came to me when I started seeing tons of videos and blogs about following tips for housewives from 1950's books. While I think these are interesting and fun experiments, I have two things to nitpick about them. One is that many of the people following these books haven't gone very in depth in their research before starting their little experiment. Not that I blame them in the slightest - it takes a ton of time and frustration researching such niche topics, and it would make for a much less entertaining video. My second nitpick is that these videos lack the complexity of history. Everyday women likely weren't following every single word of these advice books, they were taking advice from their doctors, their mothers (who would have had the influence of a previous generation and time), their neighbors, and the popular culture. They were also each individual humans, and as we know, humans like to rock the boat. It doesn't mean that every single housewife was living a 21st century life, rebelling in massive ways. It just means that there are subtle things that women might have done to fight oppression, and also that some women might have figured out a way to live a life that followed social norms while still being happy. These are things that we do today. Although it is easy to forgot for some, we also have strong gender and societal norms that hugely influence our lives, whether we like the thought or not.
After watching a few of these videos and thinking about how it is genuinely impossible to perfectly replicate history, and how these lack nuance (a pet peeve of mine, which I am aware is wildly arrogant of me), I thought that I would love to look into every day women's lives a little bit closer. If just one person reads my posts about history and realize that some of the myths they have been taught by school and collective memory isn't exactly true, I would be thrilled.
I wanted to start by looking at young women my age, specifically those who went to university. I do check out papers and primary sources about housewives in the 50's every once in a while, but it is just so much fun to look at people who were like you when you are analyzing history. It makes it much easier to empathize, and it is interesting being able to compare their experiences to mine.
Because my special interest in history is the 1930s-1950's, I have been focusing my research on those areas. It has been surprisingly difficult to find sources on this topic without spending an inordinate amount of my time and sending emails to get access into private databases. So far, the most helpful database that I have discovered is for Time magazine, and I was able to find quite a few magazine articles about college girls between the late 1930's and the mid 1950's, and these articles gave me a really interesting view of what college would have been like for young women. It also gave me a better idea of how people viewed these girls.
I am using an educated guess that these articles were approved by the universities that they were writing about, and those universities wanted parents to know that their little girls were safe with them. There is subtle propaganda in each article that hits home that universities are safe, ladylike places that ensure that the young women attending are having appropriate fun and being taught only the things that women need to know. The things that young women need to know seem to be a bit different than what young men were taking at these colleges. Not to say that some women didn't fight back and take courses that weren't usually offered to them - women have been fighting their way into men's spaces for ages now, and that trend does not exclude education. However, the majority of women who were in college or university in the mid twentieth century were in majors such as Speech.
Only 1.2% of women in America went to college in the 1950's, with even less women of colour being accepted into colleges and the workplace after. Women who did get a degree usually did not stay in the workplace for long, since it was expected that they quit once they got married and started to have children.
Life at university included many rules. Most universities had dress codes that did not allow women to wear slacks unless taking part things like chemistry labs, and women's dorms had a curfew of 11pm on week days and midnight on weekends. In an interview with Barbara Anderson, who got a science degree from the University of Richmond in the 50's, she says that they all mostly wore twin sets and pencil skirts to class, along with Weejuns penny loafers and socks.
The rules and judgement of others did not stop women in college from getting things done and enjoying themselves. Many played bridge between classes, played tennis, went bowling, and danced the twist on the weekends. Anderson speaks of the tobacco companies that would come to her campus and would give them all free cigarettes.
Campuses were also the first place that many movements started. Women were often very active in the anti-war, feminist, pro-choice, civil rights, and queer movements. Most campuses were segregated, and even those that were not officially still followed segregation. Even though women of colour struggled through oppression, they were even more involved in these movements, and many were leaders of these movements.
Although there are lots of differences between now and the 50's, there are some similarities as well, such as protests and activism starting in university campuses - this still happens often!
Thank you so much for reading,
~K
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