Dear Mum and Dad: letters home from a women's hall of residence at the University of Nottingham 1952‐55

Abstract

Editor's note: ’Dear Mum and Dad’ is rather different from the kind of academic article that the Journal usually publishes, in that it is an autobiographical account of one person's educational experiences. The paper tells the story of a young woman's three years as a student at Nottingham University through her letters to her parents written between 1952 and 1955. Memory and reflection engage with this contemporary source to produce both a vivid and humorous reconstruction of student life in the 1950s, and the identification of a set of serious issues concerning gender and higher education. Young middle‐class women at university were involved in learning financial independence, developing communal life in their halls of residence, investigating relationships with male students individually and collectively, and making subject and career choices. This subjective account reminds us that the parameters of the feminine norm were not cultural fixtures of the higher education institutions of the 1950s, to be p...