College Girls: Bluestockings, Sex Kittens and Co-Eds, Then and Now

Lynn Peril takes on a twentieth-century American icon: the college girl. The dual vision of the American archetype - a geek in glasses or a sex kitten in a teddy - was born when the age-old conflict over educating women was laid to rest. College was a place where women found self-esteem and yet images in popular culture reflected a lingering distrust of the educated woman. Thus, such lofty cultural expressions as Sex Kittens Go to College (1960) and a raft of naughty pictorials in men’s magazines. Peril combines women’s history and popular culture - peppered with delightful examples of femoribilia from the turn of the twentieth century to the 1980s - in an intelligent and witty study of the college girl, the first woman to take that socially controversial step towards educational equity. This is a paperback original.