The 1920s are famously the era when Victorian sexual attitudes were finally declared moribund. Early in the decade, movies, novels, and newspapers showcased young women defying nineteenth-century standards of behavior. Though many were no doubt exaggerated, such sensational pictures of the habits of “jazz-age” youth did register an actual cultural rift between the generations. The gulf had been widening since the late 1910s but was still news in 1920 because the crises of war and influenza pandemic had deflected the nation’s attention. When those emergencies ended, though, it became apparent that young women and men were interacting in new ways. They mixed more easily and unrestrictedly than past generations had. They were going out on dates unchaperoned, dancing to jazz music, smoking cigarettes together, forming intimate emotional bonds, and even engaging in the limited form of sexual experimentation known as “petting”. None of this conduct would have been respectable in their parents’ generation, so its rise seemed to indicate a sudden revolution in gender relations.
College students, according to historian Paula Fass, not only followed the new trends but also invented them (Fass, 1977, 261-290). It was primarily university students in the decade following WWI, she argues, who created the first youth-oriented peer culture, which would dominate campus life for decades, become common to young people throughout society, and fundamentally reorganize gender relations. The alterations, moreover, were especially noticeable at large and expanding coeducational public universities, like UC Berkeley (Fass, 129-159; Horowitz, 193-219).
To get a better idea of how the transformation came about locally, this essay will look first at the crucial events leading up to 1920s, exploring how the war years accelerated changes in gender relations at Berkeley. The second part of the essay will ask to what extent Berkeley’s undergraduate women participated in and benefited from the 1920s peer culture.
How did wartime conditions accelerate gender change on campus?
The combined crises of WWI and the 1918-19 flu epidemic catalyzed the changes in gender relations. Superficially it may be hard to see how those hazardous and somber events are connected to the atmosphere of youthful self-indulgence that followed. The crises, after all, called for collective self-sacrifice and unstinting service from the students. A closer look at campus life in 1917-19 can perhaps give us a better understanding of how the disruptions in university routines relaxed and sometimes suspended the previous rules of engagement between men and women.
First, we must keep in mind that the university in those years was overrun by servicemen. In total nearly 1,000 male students volunteered or were drafted, and yet there were soon more men on campus than ever before, both as students and as military men. The grounds, buildings, and equipment had been placed at the disposal of the War Department, which put up numerous barracks and converted playing fields into training grounds. There were men in every kind of uniform, for the campus contained an Army Training Center, a Naval Unit, and an Ambulance Corps, to say nothing of the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC), established in 1916, which absorbed the university’s earlier Cadet Corps. The largest wartime program, the School of Military Aeronautics (in above picture), gave pre-flight training to over 2,000 pilots, with a peak enrollment of 1,500. Another 1,900 men came to Berkeley through the Student Army Training Center. Hence, despite an initial drop in male enrollments, the gender balance on campus itself was heavily tipped toward the masculine. Moreover, we should keep in mind that thousands of other college-age men were stationed or training in the San Francisco bay area, which added to the temporary demographic imbalance.
Second, in addition to being constantly surrounded by military men, the women students were energetically recruited into the university’s war effort; it was seen as a way to give them both new career goals and service opportunities. The university went so far as to divert the curriculum itself into wartime channels. Dean of Women Lucy Stebbins’s exhaustive description of the university’s war-related initiatives designed specifically for women stresses an array of new programs and courses: a curriculum for nurses; a course in “First Aid and Home Care of the Sick” to free the trained nurses in every community . . . for the critical needs of war time”; Home Economics courses that “(1) inform all college women of the food problems created by the war, (2) train women in food conservation and the use of substitutes in the household, and (3) and equip specially qualified women to become community leaders in food conservation”. Over a thousand undergraduate women registered for the new courses in the first semester, and as the war went on, they became an obligatory part of every woman’s course list. In addition, the university offered to “refocus” women’s college work through “short intensive training . . . in the special application of their previous education and experience” to war work:
“Women who have been trained in physical education may become reconstruction aides ... Those trained in manual arts and design may become teachers of occupational therapy and assist in the first stages of the reeducation of the wounded man for work. Women trained in scientific work may become laboratory technicians. Others with fundamental training in agriculture may become leaders of groups of women working on farms or in orchards and assist in meeting the shortage of farm labor.” (Annual Report, 1918, 186).
The women’s extracurriculum came in for equally radical changes. The “extracurriculum” is what historian Helen Horowitz calls the complex of student government, sports, and other organized social, cultural, and philanthropic activities that occupied students' time outside of the classroom (Horowitz, passim). At Berkeley, the extracurriculum was, moreover, the arena in which women had made noticeable progress in the 1910s by building an elaborate complex of women-only organizations and activities. Their efforts had the enthusiastic support and encouragement of the university president, Benjamin Ide Wheeler, who sought to harness student activities to his interconnected goals of self-government, character-building, and public service. He had intertwined the women’s undertakings especially with a continual round of fund-raising for various campus projects. When the war started, the women’s activities were turned almost exclusively in patriotic directions. They were expected to volunteer in the local campaign for food conservation, raise funds for War Relief and ambulance teams, and plant vegetable gardens. As the Dean of Women reported, “In the work rooms in Hearst Hall, knitted garments, hospital garments, children’s clothing and surgical dressings were made by the students under the supervision of faculty women who have given generously of their time” (Annual Report, 1918, 187). Students were also encouraged to volunteer at the Berkeley Chapter of the American Red Cross to learn nursing skills. In many ways the war-course work and the extracurricular activities overlapped.
Some women apparently felt emboldened enough by their “war work” to use it in protesting against campus symbols of male privilege, such as the Senior Men’s Bench at the southeast corner of South Hall. Even though the bench had lost its strategic placement when Wheeler Hall opened in 1917, a group of women dared to sit on it and knit garments for war relief in 1918 while another group invaded the men-only campus lunch counter (Gordon, 81). The men, however, swiftly took back their territorial symbols, which the changing shape of the campus in the 1920s would soon render irrelevant.
Most changes in those years would come about in less confrontational ways, through the adoption of different modes of socializing with members of the opposite sex. Universities provide three levels of interaction among students: the curricular, the semi-official extracurricular, and a third social level: “the basic friendship, living, and dating associations that consumed the largest part of the leisure time of . . . students” (Fass, 1977, 133). In 1917-19 at Berkeley, this social level, too, was dominated by the war. We are lucky to have an unusually vivid and personal account of how the military atmosphere affected the social lives of women students. In weekly letters, Agnes Edwards, a freshman in 1917, described the details of her new Berkeley life to her parents on the family farm in the Imperial Valley. Agnes Edwards was far from an average undergraduate; she insisted on grasping every opportunity the university offered, whether financial, scholastic, recreational, or social. Her atypical ambition allows her letters to reveal a set of interconnected changes that the war made in women’s college life. We learn about her struggles to support herself while keeping her grades at competitive scholarship levels and about her career ambitions. Most importantly for our purposes here, though, she constantly reports on an endless stream of social engagements with young men—mainly cousins and relatives of hometown neighbors—already connected to her family. Just weeks into her college life, the parental networks had put her in touch with numerous young men from all parts of the west coast who were stationed in the San Francisco bay area. Entertaining them is clearly the part of familial social obligations she enjoys most:
I sent Mrs. Swain a card & she wrote right away saying Russell Graham [her nephew] was here in Berkeley at the School of Aeronautics, & gave me his address. Also gave me Frank’s address [Kittie’s son]—he was held over to the 2nd camp. I wrote both of them notes, & Russell came up last night to see me. He will only be here one week more, then has a week’s leave [and] . . . will come back here to wait for orders. He is very nice indeed—doesn’t act much like a lawyer. I’m going to the movies with him tonight—it’s Sunday too—& then some night next week we are going down to a big hotel for dinner. Gee—I’m afraid I won’t know what to do. Garrett is coming up here . . . soon, & Gerald may come later in the winter. A regular epidemic of cousins. Frank Swain is coming the first chance he gets ... (Edwards Partin, 18).
In addition to the familial alibi, the wartime call to support the troops also kept her social calendar crowded and relaxed some of the usual rules governing the relations between young women and men. When cousin Russell arrives to take her to San Francisco for their movie date, Agnes and her landlady agree that cousins do not need chaperones and that Agnes is an unusually mature girl anyway(19). After longer acquaintance with the aviators (this picture shows her with one), she admits that some of them are “regular flirts”, but they nevertheless get a pass:
“I think they’re rather spoiled because everyone entertains them so much. There are dances every week & they’re in on all the college affairs”.
The abundance of men in uniform even prompts Agnes to adopt a tone of superior depreciation toward mere college boys: “Yes we had a peach of a time when the aviators were over. The fellows were very nice & the swellest dancers. Best time I’ve had for ages, because they were all so wide awake & are real men. These college fellows mostly act bored to death all the time” (p. 80).
Between trips to the Presidio for dances at the Army Officers’ Training Camp and boat rides to “Goat Island” (Yerba Buena), where the naval officers trained, Agnes debated which “war courses” to take, tried to find time to knit socks for the cousins once they move to other bases, made and boxed up candy for them. And she reports on all kinds of university events—Charter Day, graduation, pep rallies, football games—that invariably turn into war rallies. The war reorganized university routines for women in ways that wove the previously separate strands of academic, extracurricular, and social life into a more uniform pattern, with patriotic sentiment at its center. Agnes’s letters let us see just how deeply wartime university life immersed women students in collective experiences that allowed for relatively unconstrained association and close emotional ties with members of the opposite sex.
In the midst of this hyper-charged swirl of activity, in October of 1918, the flu epidemic arrived on campus, putting a near stop to the already diverted campus routines. The flu was first brought by aviators barracked on campus. The women students’ activities were consequently redirected yet again; they were pressed into service as nurses and makers of the gauze masks that all citizens were required to wear. According to the University Chronicle for January 1919, over 1,000 students made masks in their spare time. The crisis, though, also required the services of hundreds of women volunteers doing more perilous work, for over 1,400 students and servicemen living on and around campus eventually needed treatment for the flu. The size and rapidity of the onslaught immediately overwhelmed the small infirmary, which had approximately fifty beds. Several of the larger barracks and the gymnasium were quickly converted into hospitals, but only for men. “To have men living in crowded boarding houses, fraternities and clubs at this time when infection was everywhere, was out of the question,” Dr. Legge, the University Infirmary’s director, explained in his annual report for 1919.
And yet, his report went on to admit, the sick women students were simply left in their overcrowded housing. Many of them were recruited to care for the sick, but when they themselves fell ill, the university’s very few beds were already full:
"During the period of the epidemic the women students were inadequately provided for, as but a limited section of the Infirmary could be reserved for their use. A service department was instituted by Drs. Lillian Moore, Romilda Meads and Ruby Cunningham of the Infirmary and these, with the cooperation of the Dean of Women, and student helpers, ministered to the women who were ill in sororities and club houses. Their services were crowned with success and without their help it would have been impossible to have provided adequate medical and nursing service to our college women. The Berkeley Chapter of the American Red Cross was our great angel of mercy.” (Annual Report, 1919, 99).
As one historian explained, “The unsung heroines of the 1918 influenza epidemic at Berkeley were the university women” (Adams, 55). Three hundred and twenty students did maintenance work and nursing in sick rooms. Four campus women died nursing the sick: two professional nurses and “two unselfish and devoted” women students, Elizabeth Webster and Charlotte Norton”. As Dr. Legge reported, they fell “in the service of their brothers in arms” (Annual Report, 1919, 99). In his report’s closing peroration, Dr. Legge expresses a sentiment that was often heard when the crisis ended:
“The memory of these four women should shine as an inspiration to all of what American women did for humanity when the call was sounded.”
As Dr. Legge’s description of the students dying “in the service of their brothers in arms” indicates, the pandemic deaths transformed these women into fallen heroes. Such patriotic sacrifices became yet another argument in favor of giving women equal civil and political rights. In his appeal to the U.S. Senate to pass the Nineteenth Amendment, for example, President Woodrow Wilson drew on the same sentiment: “We have made partners of the women in this war. Shall we admit them only to a partnership of suffering and sacrifice and toil and not to a partnership of privilege and right?” (“Appeal”, 406) Nationwide, the confluence of the two crises thus seems to have raised the status of women as citizens and even removed opposition to their political equality.
To what extent did Berkeley’s undergraduate women participate in and benefit from the 1920s peer culture?
We’ve been tracing wartime trends—the greater freedom of association between the sexes in the social realm and the boost in political status for women—that might have prepared the way for the 1920s peer culture on college campuses. The next part of this essay will look at the effects of that peer culture itself on Berkeley’s undergraduates with special attention to women students.
Let’s first take a quick look at changes in the student body’s size and gender composition from prewar to postwar. In 1916, enrollments stood at 5659, with 44% (2412) women; in 1920 they jumped to 9,689, with 45% women, before settling into a1920s average of around 9,000 at mid-decade. Women accounted for a substantial share of the growth; in 1926, they made up 47% (4246) of the 9,036 undergraduates. Taken together with the enrollments at the newly founded UCLA, the increases indicate that a higher proportion high-school graduates were heading to UC campuses in almost equal numbers of male and female. With college becoming a more normal destination for middle- and upper middle-class California teen-agers, its social functions were bound to change.
Some important changes in parity between male and female students did come about quickly after the campus returned to normal. The all-male ASUC and the all-female AWS, for example, merged in the early 1920s, and women were thus no longer excluded from the primary student governing body. The event was a milestone of sorts: the first time a previously exclusionary male student organization opened itself to women’s full participation. Construction also began on a large new ASUC building (Stephens Hall), which was planned before the war and opened in 1923. Men and women thus shared not only an organization but also facilities that had previously been denied to women, the most important of which was a restaurant where they could finally buy lunch on campus for the first time. The old ASUC lunch counter had been men-only. The disappearance of such blatant exclusions made the campus a friendlier and more convenient place for the women, so the extension of the new ASUC’s campus presence can be counted as a contribution to sexual equality.
When recalling this merger five decades later in an interview with the Oral History Center, former Prytanean member Ruth Norton Donnelly (’25) makes it sound like a decision that was entirely up to the women:
"We reorganized the A.S.U.C., and abolished the Associated Women’s organization, on the theory that if we were a coeducational institution, we should have a student body organization that included both men and women. Obviously, we felt that women no longer needed to band together for protection. I shall not debate the matter of whether or not we were right” (145).
There is a strong sense here of the 1920s marking the beginning of a new era for women students, which was no doubt an important part of the students’ consciousness of their break with the past. Norton Donnelly indicates that women in the twenties saw themselves as pioneers primarily of a new social regime in which the sexes would associate freely. Her description emphasizes the new social mingling rather than the more equal sharing of campus political power. The social and political changes were, of course, compatible, but the stress on the social significance reflects a broader trend toward the elevation of social popularity as the measure of an individual’s status.
Another sign of growing gender equivalence that started in the early 1920s was the appointment of a Dean of Men in 1923. Women had had a Dean of their own since 1904, but men, as the unmarked majority of student body members, had not been perceived as needing special attention from the administration. Suddenly, it seems, they had become more problematic. Thus, although it was a continuation of separatism, the creation of a Dean of Men at least put the sexes on an even administrative plain. It also indicated the changing nature of student government: in the old regime, senior men maintained discipline and meted out justice for various kinds of student infractions in partnership with the faculty. But in the early twenties, when student tribunals became more lenient, the faculty dissociated itself from the process, turned its role over to the administration, and the new deanship was soon created. The ASUC still played a role, but it was directly overseen by the administration (Stadtman, 282-3), as student leadership focused less on discipline and more on stimulating and coordinating leisure-time activities.
The sexual integration of the ASUC thus coincided with changes in the size and functions of student organizations and activities: they assumed new social roles, had greater campus centrality, and encouraged students to devote more time and energy to the extracurriculum. As historian Verne Stadtman points out, the Associated Students not only controlled “the bookstores, athletics, almost all special-interest activities, and many student services” (Stadtman, 282) but also concentrated power in the hands of the students with the largest amount of spare time because the majority of seats on its legislative council were for activities representatives. Its leaders were thus the people with the longest lists of extracurricular pastimes: “the glee clubs, bands, debate teams, athletic squads, class committees, spirit organizations, and publications” (Stadtman, 282). Such students were often affiliated with fraternities and sororities, which both populated the organized activities and mustered votes for winning ASUC elections. The Wheeler-era “moral overtones” of student activities were muted as they became increasingly bound up with the social lives of the campus’s leisure class.
The structure of Berkeley’s student government thereby gave disproportionate weight to organizations and activities run by undergraduates who came from the highest social-economic ranks. The resulting student culture thus marginalized or ignored the large number of students, male and female, who had little spare time for such activities: those who did not have wealthy parents supporting them and were working their way through college; those commuting from their parents’ home; or those who were carrying an inordinately heavy academic load in order to graduate early. The outsized power of fraternities and sororities in the system not only stratified the student body by class but also often denied membership on ethnic, religious, and racial grounds, compounding the problem of housing discrimination already rife in the town. The interdependence of Berkeley’s student social structure with its student government in the 1920s might be said to have created and rigidified new categories of outsiders and insiders.
It’s little wonder, then, that the concentration on student activities and certain aspects of the new modes of socializing were viewed by some as negative forces in student life. When the women’s debating team in 1923 beat the men’s debating team, as reported in the Blue and Gold, the topic was the campus’s preoccupation with activities.
We also find a contrasting a pair of complaints in the annual reports of the deans of men and women in 1924, which sheds light on the gender implications of the student culture. The Dean of Men blamed “the excessive attention given to undergraduate activities and to social affairs among student organizations” (30) for both the rise in disciplinary problems (primarily drunken carousing among fraternity men) and the students’ mediocre grades. Dean of Women Lucy Stebbins, however, complained that too many of the current activities failed to engage the students. She recommended establishing additional student organizations to increase community spirit and cohesion in the female student body. It is striking that the two deans, looking at the same phenomenon of the campus culture, come to such opposite conclusions. The Dean of Men saw the problems it made for those at its center, who were distracted and sometimes corrupted by it, whereas the Dean of Women saw the problems for those on the margins, who felt dispersed and disengaged. Why, in a decade known for integrating the genders, would these opposite perspectives still prevail?
Dean Stebbins’s report indicates that the youth culture taking root at Berkeley may have integrated some women into its higher echelons—especially since fraternities and sororities served as filters for identifying plausible mates—while leaving many on the sidelines. Looking into the reasons for the women’s disconnection, the dean points to the university’s refusal to provide housing. Stebbins had long claimed that the lack of university-built dormitories disproportionately affected women, who often could not find affordable, safe, and sanitary accommodations. She warned in 1919 that the university’s policy would limit its geographic draw: female students would increasingly be living with their families, she predicted. Her 1924 survey shows her forecasts had come true: women students were primarily local. Of 3852 women registered (up 1404 in five years, over a 50% increase from 1919), a majority of the women (1989) were “living at home” (34). Most commuted from towns in the Bay Area, and 974 of them resided with their families in the city of Berkeley itself. Stebbins notes that some families felt obliged to move to Berkeley because of the lack of available student housing. “Sororities and clubs”, on the other hand, served quite a small proportion of the women, only 13%, but had accrued great significance because the housing shortage had given them increasing desirability and selectivity. She frankly labels these trends “divisive”.
Paula Fass has shown that the youthful peer culture in 1920s America developed fastest at coeducational residential universities where most students lived on campus, whereas commuter campuses like UCLA had modified versions. Berkeley, however, seems not to have fit either model but rather to have been a residential university for men but not for the majority of women. Just what the local consequences of this gendered pattern were for the absorption rate of the new youth culture would require more research, but Fass’s generalizations about students who lived at home in the 1920s might give us some indications (Fass, 135-6). They tended to be only moderately involved in the extracurriculum, to be at least partially self-supporting, and to be more critical of the social hierarchy. They also tended to have above-average grades, and there is evidence that Berkeley’s undergraduate women excelled academically: in the years 1922-24, for example, two-thirds of the seniors elected to Phi Beta Kappa were women (Blue & Gold, 1922, 298; 1923, 304; 1924, 364). Odds are that at Berkeley, as elsewhere, living at home served as a counterweight to the peer culture.
Counterweights, though, are also important for cultural transitions. As Fass notes, the women were the most active leaders in the social life of the students: “Men dominated the activities, women the social functions” (Fass, 1977, 200). To create freer manners and morals, they needed to set new standards for acceptable behavior as well as overturn the old ones. Sororities and boarding houses, for example, accepted the housemothers who functioned as chaperones, and all approved women’s living quarters had parietal rules governing visits with men as well as curfews. And as couples spent more time together privately, limits on sexual behavior also had to be enforced through more informal methods of gossip and reputation assessment. Such unwritten rules might have been easier to keep in a place where over half of the women still lived with their parents. Indeed, the oral histories (conducted in the seventies) of women who had been active in the twenties stress their lack of rebelliousness:
“As for parallels to the student rebellions of the 60’s, I think we had none of that. We were completely in sympathy with our professors . . . . We attended social events with them, and we felt very close to the controlling elements in the government of our university” (Elladora Hudson Furbush, 135).
