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Acknowledgements
My research was generously funded by a Margaret Storrs Grierson Scholar-in-Residence Grant from the Sophia Smith Collection and Smith College Archives. I would like to thank the staff of the SSC and SCA for their assistance and in particular to acknowledge the unstinting support of Smith College Archivist Ms Nancy Young.
Notes
1. This is the period during which categories of sexual identity and the binary distinction between heterosexuality and homosexuality were ‘being constituted’ through medical and psychological discourses. Much scholarly energy has been devoted to asking when female same-sex desire becomes culturally recognisable as lesbian (perverse) desire. While this is a reasonable question, the effect of this investigative focus has been to construct this period as a liminal phase in which the dominant historiographical trajectory marks an inexorable movement towards pathology. I critique the epistemological assumptions which underpin this paradigm in Newman (Citation2008, 124–80).
2. An undated (c.1889–1893) newspaper clipping titled ‘Smith College Girls on a Lark’ reporting on the marriage of two Smith students from Dewey House approaches the event in terms of its humour, concluding: ‘The whole town is laughing over the affair today and wondering when the honeymoon will end.’ ‘Smith College Girls on a Lark’, undated newspaper clipping, Box 1477, Helen Putnam photos 80 CLA 1893, SCA.
3. For instance, the Babies’ Own Journal notes: ‘there is no social institution which demands so rigid an adherence to its own peculiar code of etiquette as the Institution of Crush. Let it be written in words of fire:—Observe the Punctilio!’ ‘The Lady from the Lodge’, Babies’ Own Journal, p. 4, Class Records, 1909, SCA.
4. This is Derrida's definition of the ‘archontic function’ (1996, 3).
5. The title ‘Half-Man dance’ refers to the composition of cross-dressed ‘men’ and ‘women’ in the dance party (i.e. half of each).
6. Smith hosted the Freshman Frolic every year to introduce new students into college culture and sophomore students were expected to ‘play the part of the gentleman’ to the younger student (Horowitz Citation1984, 162).
7. Photograph titled ‘“Man” Dance after Exams’, February 1898, in the album of Elizabeth Coakley, Oversize Collection, Smith College Archives.
8. Garber (1992, 70, 267–303) suggests that the black-tie signifies a class and gender crossing, associated as it is with a specific type of masculinity (white, upper class). Although as fashion historian Fred CitationDavis notes, the tuxedo was originally regarded as
something of a populist slap at the reigning men's formal attire of the time (1880s) […] but by the time of the first world war, the tuxedo's anticonformist origins had largely been forgotten and wearing it had become de rigueur for formal occasions. (1992, 66)
It is possible that for these students wearing a tuxedo signified some degree of non-conformity or modernity.
9. A convention that continued until 1928 when male students from Amherst College were invited to participate in Smith College drama productions (Maida Goodwin, ‘Something to Liven Us Up’: A History of Theatre at Smith Exhibition Catalog/Notes, n.d. Theater Exhibit, SCA). It was common during the last half of the nineteenth century for female actresses to perform ‘breeches’ roles as young boys and young men in a range of different settings including the ‘principal boy’ of pantomime tradition. Indeed, one of the great romantic figures of the nineteenth-century stage was Charlotte Cushman's Romeo in Romeo and Juliet (Merrill Citation2002).
10. Photograph titled ‘The Wedding Party’, ‘The Beautiful Children’, and ‘The Bride and Groom (Brownie & Tilly)’, from the Scrapbook of Elizabeth Rusk (1916), Oversize Collection, SCA.
11. While there is very little information about the rationale for ‘mock’ weddings at Smith specifically, this phenomenon seems to have been a fairly widespread cultural custom in nineteenth-century America, which continued into the twentieth century in some areas (Smith and Greig Citation2003, 132–37).
12. Smith College Customs, n.d., p. 1, Box 580 Administration, Social Regulations, Folder 34, SCA.
13. Letter from E. Little to ‘Mother’, 28 April 1907, Class Records 1907, SCA.
14. Letter from G. Gane to ‘Mother’, 16 February 1892, Box 1487, SCA. The fact that both Gane and Little commented about these experiences in letters to their mothers seems to support Sharon Marcus's argument that ‘in the Victorian instance, homoeroticism did not subvert dominant codes of femininity; rather, homoeroticism was one of those codes’ (Citation2003, 5).
15. King (Citation1995, 232) comments of theatre as ‘an object of historical study’ that its status is ‘somewhere between event and text’, an observation which fittingly captures the slippage between the photograph of the theatrical performance (as a staged event), the position of spectators of both the photograph and the performance, and the visual culture that students participated in at Smith.
16. I discuss these issues in more detail in Dever, Newman, and Vickery (Citation2009).
17. This position was influenced by Terry CitationCastle's discussion of the appeal of German mezzo soprano Brigitte Fassbaender in the role of Octavian in Der Rosenkavalier when she argues that the male persona is a ‘narrative fiction’:
What we see before us—in the intoxicating boudoir scene at the start of Rosenkavalier—is Fassbaender, the diva, draped languorously across another, making passionate love to her. No matter how artfully ‘true to life’ the boyish gestures, Fassbaender in drag fools no one. (1993, 230)
Having experienced a similar response to an all-male performance of Twelfth Night, I now find Tracey Sedinger's argument that: ‘for the spectator, the cross-dresser makes possible the experience of desire in its purest form; like the psychoanalytic theorization of fantasy, he/she articulates desire in relation to the failure of perception’ (1997, 74), a more convincing explanation of the seductive appeal of the cross-dressed figure.
18. Sedinger argues that the cross-dresser ‘ruptures an epistemological/libidinal nexus that defines sexuality via object choice and produces the modern dichotomy between homo- and heterosexuality’ (1997, 66).
19. Of Cushman's huge popularity with female fans, Lisa Merrill notes: ‘Charlotte was a woman they might both desire to be or to be desired by’ (2002, 129; original emphasis). I have taken the liberty of adding onto this succinct phrase.
20. Diana Fuss (1995, 11) argues that
for Freud, desire for one sex is always secured through identification with the other sex; to desire and to identify with the same person at the same time is, in this model, a theoretical impossibility […] [but] why assume that any subject's sexuality is structured in terms of pairs?
21. In her analysis of student rooms at Royal Holloway, Jane Hamlett argues that students ‘used their walls to express their new identities as college students' (Citation2006, 138).
22. Going away to college signalled women's entry into the public sphere in large numbers (Horowitz Citation1987, 56–68).