“Abracadabra”: Intimate Inventions by Early College Women in the United States

Abstract

What did it mean to aspire to become a college woman in the last quarter of the nineteenth century when this social identity was taking shape? I take a core sample of a particular place and time, Smith College in western Massachusetts in the early 1880s to examine the early formation of student culture as a critical element in the transformation of Victorian daughters into the New Women of the early twentieth century. In the first-person narratives of an extraordinarily well-documented circle of undergraduate friends whose private papers constitute what I call a group archive, we can observe a new social identity under construction. The individual identities that emerge are vibrantly personal yet nonetheless demonstrate the power of the group in shaping each other’s identities. Residential college culture heightens our awareness of identities as relational, and mutually constituted. In memorabilia books, diaries, and letters home a new sense of themselves emerges as intellectually capable, ambitiously self-confident, organizationally talented, and exuberantly free to improvise their own social world. The friendship group provides the fertile medium for self-invention and their narratives the very instruments through which the self is fashioned.