College girl

“ Rich appointments make a girl’s way harder at college, on the whole. Scholars are distrustful of the appearances of wealth, sometimes unjustly. The wise college girl will cultivate simplicity, that she may be in harmony with her surroundings, and that she may have a free mind.
The girl of wealth may lack the element of the heroic and the romantic in the college career of the poor girl, but her compensations are that she can command all means of culture; she can travel, buy books, visit cities, and meet significant people. ”

“ Every college puts itself to considerable expense in looking out for the interests of its students, for the glory of a great school lies not only in the people whom it collects into its midst, but even more in those whom it sends out. A girl has no right to go so lightly through her school life that she fails to see in it all the self-sacrifice and effort and ambitions that have gone into the building up of what is her privilege and opportunity. In so far as she does this she fails in the team-play spirit. ”

“ The publicity of a college must be injurious to a young girl of refined and delicate feeling, whilst the adoration of other women (as in the late chairing of a wrangler by other girl graduates) is unutterably pernicious. ”

“ If these simple tales serve to deepen in the slightest degree the rapidly growing conviction that the college girl is very much like any other girl—that this likeness is, indeed, one of her most striking characteristics—the author will consider their existence abundantly justified. ”

“ The temptation to exalt some upper-class girl into an ideal and lavish upon her an affection which in society would naturally fall to the lot of some very unideal boy, or man, is one of the greatest ordeals a college girl goes through, and one who successfully resists all inducements to become a “divinity student,” or who gets out of the entanglement without damage to herself, is as successfully “proven” as was Lieutenant Ouless after his little affair with Private Ortheris. ”

“ Here is the “real thing” in a girl’s college story. Older authors can invent situations and supply excellently written general delineations of character, but all lack the vital touch of this work of a bright young recent graduate of a well-known college for women, who has lost none of the enthusiasm felt as a student. Every activity of a popular girl’s first year is woven into a narrative, photographic in its description of a life that calls into play most attractive qualities, while at the same time severely testing both character and ability. ”

“ Here come some of the girls who are entering school and college with her—bright-haired, dark-haired, rosy or pale, tall and thin, fat and short, clever and average, desirable and undesirable,—in fact, all sorts and conditions of girls. Who is to be the leader of them all? She is the ideal freshman, a nice, well-set-up girl who does not think too much of herself, who is not self-conscious, and who does not forget for what she is sent to school. Despite the temptations of school life she uses her days wisely and well. ”

“ All the girls are anxious to see you. I hope you won’t mind receiving a great deal of attention! You know how enthusiastic and unconventional college girls are, and you are of the greatest interest to us just now. Miss Atter{172}bury, a charming girl, is especially eager to meet you. Don’t be too flattered! But we shall all be delighted to see the man who has so ably written up girls’ colleges, and unless I hear from you to the contrary, shall look for you out Monday afternoon by the 1.50 train.
“Of course I shall expect you to take dinner and go to the concert in the evening. ”

“ It makes a girl so conspicuous to go to college."
"A college girl isn't half so conspicuous as a golf-champion. Why, I saw your picture in a Sunday paper last month, Carlotta, beside a prize bicycle rider's, and your weight and height and all kinds of things about you were there, too."
Martine spoke hotly, as she was apt to when excited, and Carlotta made no reply. ”

“ What the school is able to do for the girl depends very largely upon the girl herself. The majority of people with whom she comes in contact do not take that into consideration, and the school is held unfairly responsible for the girl. All any school can do is to use the material it finds. Some one has said, with harsh but true emphasis, that a college does not make a fool, it simply helps in the development of one. As an illustration of its limitations, a school sends out two girls from the same class; one girl it is proud to have taken as a type, the other it is sorry to have represent it. ”

“ He lives in the little place where she does, and he walks six miles and back each time he comes to call. Seems to me that shows he’s fond enough of her to mean business. As for her, college is all nonsense for a girl like that. She hasn’t sense enough to take it in. She’d better be at work or helping [Pg 287] her mother, or making a home of her own. She’ll always be silly and rattle-pated and provoking to sensible people, as long as she lives. ”

“ While she is still a student a girl's service to her school lies largely in her daily work, the mental muscle she puts into all that she does in the classroom and studies out of it. If because of her and a multiple of many girls like her, the college does not possess that sine qua non of all the higher mental life, an intellectual atmosphere, it is the student's and her multiple's fault. ”

“ It is to be feared that the girl graduate, the youthful bachelor of arts who steps smiling through the serried ranks of students, her heart beating gladly in response to their generous applause, has little thought of repaying her debt to man. Somebody has made an address which she was too nervous to hear, and has affirmed, with that impressiveness which we all lend to our easiest generalizations, that the purpose of college is to give women a broad and liberal education, and, at the same time, to preserve and develop the characteristics of a complete womanhood. ”

“ Let us glance for a moment at the alternative opened to girls if they do not go to college. Our college girls come mainly, I think, largely at least, from our upper middle classes. Suppose our girl of seventeen or eighteen has just finished her school life, what is she to do? Dr. Smith says: 'Marry.' But really, it seems to me, she will have to wait until she is asked—and meanwhile she will have to occupy herself in some way. The fact of her entering college does not prevent any young man from asking her hand and many a girl leaves college to be married. ”

“ There is no denying that there is great temptation to violent admirations and attractions in school. In the first place, in school or college the girl is brought into contact with a large circle of people who are immensely interesting to her. The whole atmosphere is full of novelty, of the unusual. Some of the students and teachers whom she meets for the first time represent a broader experience, it may be, than her own home life has given her. They are often new types and new types are always interesting.
I shall say nothing of the idealism of friendship—it plays its part in other books. ”

“ One of these is that it not infrequently happens that a young woman leaves college an entirely different person from the girl who took her entrance examinations, and sometimes the change is for the better and sometimes for the worse, or it may be unimportant and relate only to the way she has got to wearing her hair, or the amount of extra money she considers necessary. ”

“ A woman’s college offers a much wider sphere for a girl’s energies and abilities than does boarding-school. If she loves study, is fond of athletics and is interested widely in human nature, college is the place for her. Here she has a chance for the development of her best mental powers. Deportment is not one of the unwritten branches of the curriculum [115] as it is in the girls’ boarding-school. Nevertheless it is taught by the social preeminence of those who bring the best breeding with them. ”

“ The room they went into was a typical college room, with its bookstands and long chairs and cushions and innumerable trophies, of which Miss Ronald was rather proud. She was a stylish girl, with New York manners and clothes, and a pretty, rather expressionless face, strongly addicted to fads, and after almost four years of college life still something of a fool. She had become popular through her own efforts and the fact that she had a brother at Harvard. If a girl really wishes to be a favorite in college she must arrange to have some male relative at a neighboring university. ”

“ A great army of privileged girls, they are. One cannot help wishing that he might feel sure that when they leave those college halls it might be with a deep appreciation and real sympathetic understanding of the other girls who have turned their eyes with longing toward four years more of study and fun, but whose feet were obliged to walk in other pathways. They are so dependent upon one another, these girls who can go to college and the other girls who cannot go. They do not know it now but neither girl can ever come to her best until the privileged girl sees and understands. ”

“ At no time in life is the love of beauty at once so delicate and so keen as in those years when one is eligible to college life. To foster this perhaps latent appreciation by a direct contact with the beauties of nature is one of the opportunities offered by Bryn Mawr, Vassar, Wellesley, Smith and other well-known women’s colleges.
The three or four years in college among a hundred or more other girls often form one of the happiest and most fruitful periods of a girl’s life. She makes interesting and valuable friendships. ”

“ They are as shy as young partridges—and as near to nature.
Now the question naturally arises whether the difference between my experience and that of 'alumna', is an accident, or whether it can be explained by a consistent theory. One suggests itself to me which may or may not be correct, that the difference is due to the different kind of girl who is going to college now. Only a short decade ago women's colleges drew practically all their students from what might lie called the abnormally intellectual class. ”

“ So far I have said little about the girl who is left out. To many of the fraternity women she seems the most deplorable feature of the system. Except in the college where the societies contain all but a very few of the students, her case does not seem to me serious. To be sure, she misses a great deal of fun and social training; but if she is worth saving, she saves herself in the end; and if she gives up in despair and goes home because she does not “make a frat,” she is not of the stuff that the college needs. ”

“ There is no real reason why they should work, or take a high place, but there seems to themselves every reason why they should have a good time. Parents sometimes seem to hold more or less the same opinion; at others they seem distressed, but powerless. College authorities are regarded as natural enemies; religious influences for the time beat on closed doors; now, Darsie, here comes the chance for ‘only a girl!’ A man like Ralph Percival, at this stage of his life, will be more influenced by a girl like you than by any power on earth. ”

“ Colleges for girls are pledged by their very constitution to make persistent war on the water cure, the nervine retreat, the insane asylum, the hospital,—those bitter fruits of the emotional lives of thousands of women. "I can never afford a sick headache again, life is so interesting and there is so much to do," a delicate girl said to me at the end of her first college year. ”

“ The girl who takes something to college gets more, as, when she travels, she gains in proportion to what she carries with her. For example, if 74 you take to college the family tradition of reading, your college lot is a happier one.
The poor girl in college has certain advantages: she is respected for the effort she has made to get there; she at once excites the interest of her teachers; she finds herself in an atmosphere of sympathy and encouragement. ”

“ The student who takes up college work, not as a specialized training, but as a completion of her general education, stands somewhat by herself. Such a girl may perhaps put off vocational decision until she is part way through her college years. The college sometimes awakens ambitions and brings to light abilities not hitherto discovered; and even when this does not occur, the choice may be made from the highest and most responsible positions filled by women. ”

“ That's what love does to a college boy in spring. It's a kind of rose-colored brainstorm, but it very seldom has complications. By the next fall, the ozone is out of the air; and after a couple has gone strolling about twice, football and the sorority rushes butt in—and it's all over. Freshman girls are a help, too. Beats all how much assistance a Freshman girl can be in forgetting a Senior girl who isn't on the premises! ”

“ If college boys can have secret societies, and the Faculties, to say the least, wink at them, why can’t academy girls? I don’t see!”
This is what Jenny Barton said one evening to a group of girls out in the pretty grove back of the academy building.
There were six of them there. Jenny had culled them from the school, as best fitted for her purpose. She had two brothers in Harvard College, and she had been captivated by their stories of the “Hasty Pudding Club,” of which they were both members. “So much fun! such a jolly good time! why not, then, for girls, as well as for boys?” ”