Life on Campus: Life Magazine’s “College Girl” as an Ordinary and Ideal Symbol of America in the 1930s

Abstract

ABSTRACT From its start in 1936, Life magazine offered a portrait of the nation that blended the ideal with the typical through certain kinds of recurring characters. One was “the college girl,” the subject of Life’s first “photo-essay,” a 1937 feature on Vassar students. Such “girls” were more than a curiosity: in this era, women students constituted 40% of college enrollment. This paper analyzes their representation in more than one hundred articles and advertisements published between 1936 and 1941, the magazine’s first five years. It concludes that these characters served as symbols—of regional identity, of American superiority, of Life’s self-proclaimed wholesomeness—yet they also validated the real-life experience of many young women, whose presence in higher education would plummet after the war. One of the most visible media characters of her time, Life’s 1930s “college girl” illuminates a part of women’s history largely forgotten today.