Abstract

Upon entering the male domain of higher education in the late nineteenth-century, college women challenged not only conservative beliefs about women's minds but also restrictive notions about the female body. By the 1920s, attending college had "become the thing to do." Using extensive primary research in college archives, this work examines female students' attitudes toward their bodies in the midst of this cultural transformation This social history makes clear that young women's attitudes toward their bodies developed in relation to a set of cultural discourses that were contested, historically specific, and continually mediated. ;To explore the impact of ideas about race, class, educational mission, and coeducation on women's attitudes toward their bodies, I analyzed Smith College, Spelman College, and Cornell University. Students' specific experiences were then compared to popular ideals of health, femininity, and female beauty. ;Prior to the early 1900s, local campus cultures shaped students' ideas about their bodies. At Smith and Cornell, in response to the feared effects of "mental work" on women's femininity and reproductive organs, efforts to prove female health included vigorous exercise, weight gain, and hearty eating. At Cornell, its controversial coeducational design compelled "coeds" to also demonstrate female propriety. For African American students at Spelman Seminary, post-Civil War efforts to counter racist stereotypes dominated bodily concerns. Spelman students resided outside the "protective," race-specific concerns that dominated discussions about white, middle-class women's reproductive health. ;Beginning in the 1910s, an emergent national student culture rooted in mass consumerism and the idealization of modern youth recast female students' body images. On all three campuses, students donned flapper fashions, bobbed their hair, conducted active mixed-sex social lives, and memorized new nutrition and home economics standards. Yet, even as campus cultures converged, students continued to mediate popular discourses, particularly in regard to dieting practices. While white women joined the "dieting craze," African American women at Spelman College did not.