{"id":86086,"date":"2015-05-27T16:30:07","date_gmt":"2015-05-27T20:30:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=86086"},"modified":"2015-05-27T20:42:35","modified_gmt":"2015-05-28T00:42:35","slug":"she-taught-the-boys-anatomy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/05\/27\/she-taught-the-boys-anatomy\/","title":{"rendered":"She Taught the Boys Anatomy"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"college<\/a>

From the poster for The College Widow<\/i>, 1927.<\/p><\/div>\n

In her essay \u201cYellowstone Park,\u201d collected in Memories of a Catholic Girlhood<\/em>, Mary McCarthy describes a friend:<\/p>\n

\n

In school she had the name of being fast, which was based partly on her clothes and partly on the direct stare of her reddish-brown eyes, very wide open and rounded by the thick lenses of her glasses so that the whites had the look of boiled eggs. She made me think of a college widow.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Now, there\u2019s a term you don\u2019t hear anymore! The \u201ccollege widow\u201d! Once a byword for a predatory vamp, the college widow is an extinct American species. <\/p>\n

I\u2019ve read various definitions of the college-widow meme, which appears regularly in books and films from the first half of the twentieth century, and was de rigueur in any discussion of campus life. In some cases, these characters were portrayed as literal widows\u2014young women who\u2019d known the marriage bed and were hungry for young collegiate flesh. But more often, the term seems to have applied to a townie\u2014or grad; at any rate, a woman hanging around\u2014who dated men in successive senior classes, and were subsequently \u201cwidowed\u201d with each passing graduation. In Slang and Sociability<\/em>, Connie Eble\u00a0defines her as \u201ca girl whom new men meet from year to year but whom no one ever marries.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the Marx Brothers classic Horse Feathers\u2014<\/em>many a modern viewer\u2019s only exposure to the trope\u2014the college widow is just sort of there, without explanation. (But then, it is a Marx Brothers movie.) Horse Feathers <\/em>was in fact a parody of the play (and subsequent 1927 film) The College Widow,\u00a0<\/em>about a college president\u2019s daughter\u2014played by Drew Barrymore\u2019s grandmother, Dolores Costello\u2014who seduces rival schools\u2019 football stars at her father\u2019s behest. It\u2019s as creepy as it sounds.<\/p>\n

The excellent blog Paper Pop<\/a> has this to say on the subject:<\/p>\n

\n

Filmmakers had to assure us that our heroes were healthy, red-blooded American men, who would never resort to all that Brideshead Revisited<\/em> stuff that was rumored to go on at many an all-male campus. Obviously in the 1910s\u20131940s (the heyday of this trope), prostitution couldn\u2019t be depicted on screen, so our protagonists couldn\u2019t get their kicks that way. Once the Hays Code came into effect, adulterers must be punished. And for a hero to seduce an unmarried young woman would be caddish. So the college widow served as an effective outlet for all of our heroes\u2019 wants and needs (and those of the writer): it proved the protagonist was straight, sexually desirous and<\/em> desirable, and yet still a gentleman. Of course, the trope began to be played for laughs even more often than it was played straight, in movies like Horse Feathers<\/em>. With the rise of co-education and the fall of the production code, the college widow found herself expelled from campus in favor of flirtatious co-eds.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Put in this way, the college widow\u2019s death seems a mercy. Especially when one considers the lyrics to the popular prewar ditty \u201cMimi the College Widow\u201d:<\/p>\n

\n

Pride of the university
Mimi the college widow
She taught the boys anatomy.
Mimi the college widow,
To know her is to love her, it\u2019s sure.
She laid the cornerstone of knowledge,
Also the whole damn college,
She\u2019s Mimi the college \u2026 widow.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Sadie Stein is contributing editor of <\/em>The Paris Review, and the <\/em>Daily\u2019s correspondent.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In her essay \u201cYellowstone Park,\u201d collected in Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, Mary McCarthy describes a friend: In school she had the name of being fast, which was based partly on her clothes and partly on the direct stare of her reddish-brown eyes, very wide open and rounded by the thick lenses of her glasses […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":178,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13115],"tags":[10056,18258,18255,18256,18257,3072,18254],"class_list":["post-86086","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-our-daily-correspondent","tag-1920s","tag-college-widows","tag-dolores-costello","tag-horse-feathers","tag-paper-pop","tag-slang","tag-the-college-widow"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nWhat Was the College Widow?<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Sadie Stein examines a dead piece of slang: 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