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

The author of Pink Think takes on a twentieth-century icon: the college girl.

A geek who wears glasses? Or a sex kitten in a teddy? This is the dual vision of the college girl, the unique American archetype born when the age-old conflict over educating women was finally 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.

As in Pink Think, Lynn Peril combines women’s history and popular culture―peppered with delightful examples of femoribilia from the turn of the twentieth century through the 1970s―in an intelligent and witty study of the college girl, the first woman to take that socially controversial step toward educational equity.