Course

HIST-481/482

Document Type

Student Paper

Publication Date

Winter 2-19-2019

Disciplines

History | Women's Studies

Description, Abstract, or Artist's Statement

This project examines the changing demographics and culture surrounding higher education in the United States in the period following the Second World War and the relationship to normative constructions of femininity at Augustana College between 1945 and 1962. The college used a variety of means to reconstitute feminine norms, including social and sexual control and ritualized expressions of heterogamy, to construct a rigid femininity for women students. This allowed the college to reassert its norms and values in a changing world and to create continuity with the past. The Augustana Coed of the postwar period was white, northern European, middle-class, and asexually heterogamous. These norms constrained higher education for women within known parameters.

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