They may not have pants, but they have plenty of boyfriends.

January 31, 2010 6:25 PM

"Miss average college girl (1941) tells the maximum and minimum size of her wardrobe." The New York Library scanned a page from the September 1941 issue of Design for Living: The Magazine for Young Moderns to compare the highest and lowest numbers of a given item in women's wardrobes by college.

Some highlights:
-The average woman spent $240.33 a year on clothes
-Kneesocks were not favored
-The sweater/skirt combo was all the rage
-Bare legs and ankle socks were preferable to stockings in the winter

Via Sociological Images

posted by emilyd22222 (50 comments total)

Seven boyfriends!
posted by autoclavicle at 6:28 PM on January 31, 2010

Who would have thought that Smith would have lead the United States in dickey possession?See, I have learned something new. Who says MetaFilter is not educational?
posted by GenjiandProust at 6:29 PM on January 31, 2010 [2 favorites]

According to this inflation calculator, $240.33 in 1941 is equivalent to $3,680.78 today.
posted by Houstonian at 6:35 PM on January 31, 2010 [6 favorites]

Heh, Bryn Mawr girls had 3 dresses to Texas's 7. We had wool skirts, sweaters, saddle shoes and boyfriend shirts and WE LIKED IT. Anassa kata'!
posted by Countess Elena at 6:37 PM on January 31, 2010 [4 favorites]

Wow, Houstonian. I bet that's because, for one thing, women who got to attend college were of a higher social class back in the '40s than presently, and for another, clothes were more expensive before automation and globalization and so forth. (You know, back when people were paid money to make them.)
posted by Countess Elena at 6:41 PM on January 31, 2010

As a Smithie myself, I demand a dickey recount.

Seriously, though, this was fascinating. I wish they had published the full numbers (and how many people they asked per college).
posted by julen at 6:41 PM on January 31, 2010

Seven boyfriends!

In your wardrobe!
posted by Sova at 6:45 PM on January 31, 2010

Typical girls are....
posted by The Whelk at 6:51 PM on January 31, 2010

Great point, Houstonian. That's over $300/month- more than many women today. I would wager that this is partially due to clothes being more expensive in 1941, in addition to the point that Countess Elena raised. There were probably a lot more handmade items in there, relative to the mass-produced items that make up the bulk of clothing purchases today.
posted by emilyd22222 at 6:54 PM on January 31, 2010

According to this inflation calculator, $240.33 in 1941 is equivalent to $3,680.78 today.

Inflation for apparel has been much lower than headline inflation over time. My quick calculation using CPI data for Apparel shows that $240 in 1947* would equate to about $750 today.

Using the headline CPI data for ALL items from this same data set shows that $240 in 1947 equates to $2430 today.

*I know the article says 1941, but the data I found on the BLS website only goes back to 1947 and I'm not digging any further.
posted by mullacc at 6:55 PM on January 31, 2010 [1 favorite]

What is meant by the average girl having seven boyfriends, anyway? Is that over a certain period of time? Was the definition looser?
posted by danb at 6:56 PM on January 31, 2010

The average woman spent $240.33 a year on clothes

$240.33 in 1941 is equivalent to $3,680.78 today

I honestly don't think I've spent $3,680.78 on clothes in ten years, let alone one year. I can't even comprehend it.
posted by amyms at 6:58 PM on January 31, 2010 [5 favorites]

Seven boyfriends!

In your wardrobe!

...
posted by loquacious at 7:01 PM on January 31, 2010 [1 favorite]

What is meant by the average girl having seven boyfriends, anyway?

This probably meant seven boys she was going on dates with. My understanding is that women could date a number of men unless they decided to "go steady" with one. I'd bet they just asked the women how many boyfriends they had at the time.
posted by emilyd22222 at 7:02 PM on January 31, 2010

How much is seven boyfriends, adjusted for inflation?
posted by faster than a speeding bulette at 7:03 PM on January 31, 2010 [15 favorites]

My grandmother, who graduated from Wisconsin around the same time, had a string of "boyfriends" she kept dancing attendance, as did many of her peers. They were encouraged to not focus on a single boy until they were truly serious; she met them for sodas after class or she'd save them dances at a dance or they'd come to visit her in her sorority ... she only narrowed it down (to 1) when my grandfather gave her an ultimatum. She did have solo boyfriends in high school, I think, but once she wasn't going to her parent's home every night, she was encouraged to have a lighter hand.
posted by julen at 7:04 PM on January 31, 2010

emilyd22222: “This probably meant seven boys she was going on dates with. My understanding is that women could date a number of men unless they decided to "go steady" with one. I'd bet they just asked the women how many boyfriends they had at the time.”

That seems to me to be the case, and I get that sense from a lot of 40s-50s culture. In fact, I've always been interested in this strange phenomenon: that, in the 40s and early 50s, men and women seem to have been much more 'non-exclusive' outside of marriage; you see this all the time in old movies, women blithely leaving their boyfriends for other guys whereas today that would seem a bit frowned upon, at least as far as I can tell. Our general loosening of certain social mores seems to have prompted unconscious reactionary backlashes, I think. At the very least it seems strange that exclusivity seems more prized now on college campuses than it did in the 40s.

This is interesting to me because, when you drop the veil that many tried to raise on the whole thing (especially in the 50s), it's apparent that kids back then probably had about as much sex as they do now. Frequent conservative panics notwithstanding, those numbers seem pretty much consistent, at least with the feeble estimates that we can make.

Combining those two facts: since they were having about the same amount of sex, but seem to have changed partners more frequently and readily, it seems rational to assume that the average college student in the 40s probably had a larger number of sexual partners than the average college student today. Hm.
posted by koeselitz at 7:20 PM on January 31, 2010

My grandmother also had several handfuls of boyfriends in the 1930s. I think the word we might use today is "suitor", as they were basically trying to win her hand in marriage, but without marriage no commitment was implied.
posted by shii at 7:42 PM on January 31, 2010

>: What is meant by the average girl having seven boyfriends, anyway?

This probably meant seven boys she was going on dates with. My understanding is that women could date a number of men unless they decided to "go steady" with one. I'd bet they just asked the women how many boyfriends they had at the time.

Nope.

A boyfriend is a term used in fashion for an article of clothing modified from a corresponding men's garment.

posted by dunkadunc at 7:45 PM on January 31, 2010 [1 favorite]

dunkadunc, if you read the text it's pretty clear that's not what they're talking about...
posted by danb at 7:49 PM on January 31, 2010 [2 favorites]

Nope.

FAIL.

"Though he's not exactly an article of clothing...the BOYFRIEND...he's certainly what every girl would like to wear on her arm this season."
posted by phunniemee at 8:06 PM on January 31, 2010

men and women seem to have been much more 'non-exclusive' outside of marriage

If you watch a lot of MST3K or Fun With Shorts, you see this pop up a lot in Social Hygiene films. "Are You Ready For Marriage?" and the like, the line they keep pushing is that women shouldn't commit right away because Marriage is a Big Deal and they stressed "mature discussions". It seems like an effort to stop teenage marriage (with the undercurrent of "if you can only have sex in marriage then kids will marry quickly just to have sex and We Can't Have That" ..cause otherwise they wouldn't have to have whole films about it) for some noble reasons and some class ones. Some of them are really direct, "Lower-Class people marry sooner" and the like.

It's an odd bit of thought from a time that's growing increasingly alien, so yah.
posted by The Whelk at 8:17 PM on January 31, 2010

Having watched many of the social hygiene films of which he speaks, I think The Whelk is right. The clear message they seemed to be sending to teens at the time was to date lots of different people, keep it light and casual, and don't get "serious" (which seems to be code for having sex) too quickly. Whether it actually worked, well, who can say, but that seems to have been the intention.
posted by DiscourseMarker at 8:27 PM on January 31, 2010

This reminds me of an article I read in the Boston Globe back in the 80's, when I was at Smith. The article compared campus style trends at Smith, Northeastern, and RISD. I can't remember what it said about Northeastern and RISD but their verdict on Smith fashion was something along the lines of "The 'French Lieutenant's Woman' look is in fashion this year, the popular look combines a long wool coat with a big wool scarf wrapped around the head."

That article was passed around the breakfast table to everyone's amusement. "French Lieutenant's Woman??? Are they kidding? Fashion statemen? It's February in Western Massachusetts! It's FUCKING COLD OUTSIDE!!!"

Somehow I'm not surprised that my Smith sisters led the nation in dickey ownership. Back then we weren't allowed to wear pants to chapel or shorts off-campus, unless covered by a long coat. (That particular rule always puzzled me.)
posted by ambrosia at 8:44 PM on January 31, 2010 [1 favorite]

Well, there's the fact that social hygiene films take that tack, and I hadn't thought about it, but having seen MST3K a lot I can say: you're absolutely right about them. But I also think that there was an odd generational shift in the early and mid 1950s, during which a certain paradigm had to go underground. In the 30s, there really was (in many quarters) an atmosphere of social permissiveness and openness, at least in contrast to the way things were later in the 50s; but by then that atmosphere had to go underground, and found expression mostly in those 'gritty' writers and filmmakers who worked under the headings of true crime and detective novels and what was later termed 'noir' - Raymond Chandler et al. There's this sense of an amoral world that I think the 1940s and 1950s mainstream found endlessly fascinating; but of course it began more and more to marginalize that element even as it saw it as intriguing.

So in that period you have films on the one hand that are sexually moralistic in a dizzying, almost pathological way – say, for example, A Place in the Sun, with Liz Taylor and Montgomery Clift (good god, I could look at them for a while) - a movie about the terrible, horrible, horrendous, evil, fantastically hellish things that will happen to you if you have sex even once! Worst of all - horror of horrors - you'll never get to fool around with Elizabeth Taylor.

And on the other hand we have better movies by more intelligent filmmakers, say for example Elia Kazan's masterful film Splendor In The Grass, starring Natalie Wood; it's an awesome and subversive movie, in that it reveals more than other films the things people actually said about sex, and implies something different about what happens as a result of it. Basically: girl meets boy; girl wants desperately to have sex with boy; girl's mother cautions her that 'a woman doesn't enjoy those things the way a man does,' and that boy won't respect her; boy, who also wants sex, is advised by his father to 'find the type of girl who does, and have your fun on the side' - and when girl finds out, she has a nervous breakdown.

Fucking right. I sometimes don't know how any woman got by in that bygone era. Seems like pretty much every teenage drama from that time period ought to have ended with the girl having a nervous breakdown. Awful stuff, the stuff we've done to girls over the years.
posted by koeselitz at 8:56 PM on January 31, 2010 [6 favorites]

I say, shouldn't that read "Seven gentleman callers?"

*taps out pipe*
posted by chillmost at 10:36 PM on January 31, 2010 [1 favorite]

Seven boyfriends!

Yeah, but seven guys with whom she was regularly going out for a hamburger and shake, maybe the movies, maybe dinner and dancing. She wasn't fucking Bashful, Doc, Dopey, Happy, Sleepy, and Sneezy, she was socializing with them.
posted by pracowity at 10:37 PM on January 31, 2010

No, she was just fucking Grumpy.
posted by louche mustachio at 10:53 PM on January 31, 2010 [4 favorites]

Well, wouldn't you be?
posted by pracowity at 11:09 PM on January 31, 2010 [6 favorites]

Girls were encouraged to be cautious in marrying because divorce was anathema and only found among the most unfortunate, and good-for-nothing very rich people, and actresses. Tut tut. An unmarried pregnancy was a family disaster.
posted by Cranberry at 11:51 PM on January 31, 2010

"No, she was just fucking Grumpy."
"Well, wouldn't you be?"

Nicely played.
posted by kyrademon at 12:20 AM on February 1, 2010

My mother was an undergrad at the University of Pennsylvania from 1943 - 47. She was on scholarship, from an immigrant family, and there is no way she spent that much on clothes (she had more basic stuff to pay for.) That said, people on average in that era dressed more formally, in college and elsewhere, and dressed up for dances and other functions, so some of this is understandable, especially before WWII. No seven boyfriends for Mom, but I agree that what they meant anyway was people you dated, not people you were "going steady" with.

Birth control was not particularly reliable, abortion was illegal and risky, and "good girls" were not supposed to have sex before marriage. Of course, some people were definitely having sex, but you took a big chance and everyone knew the horror stories.

The war changed a lot of things, i.e. a lot fewer men around on campus so fewer guys available to date. She and her friends went to USO dances and she met one soldier that she corresponded with during the war. She said it was a major deal when the war was over and the men came back to school ("The men come back to Penn" was the headline of the school paper, I think).

Stockings became scarce during the war also, with silk pretty much unavailable and nylon being used for things like parachutes, tents, etc., etc.. Supposedly, when they resumed production of nylon stockings after the war, the first 50,000 pairs were sold in six hours.

One last thing about people dressing up more in that era. My mother got married in 1947, and she talked about how she and my father were painting their first apartment, ran out of paint, and what a pain it was that they had to change out of their paint clothes into better clothes just to go to the hardware store to buy paint. It just was not done to run to the hardware store in your paint spattered clothes in that era.
posted by gudrun at 12:48 AM on February 1, 2010 [5 favorites]

I have seven boyfriends in my closet right now. Four of them are bowling shirts.
posted by dabitch at 4:14 AM on February 1, 2010

Well, tell them to cut it out, then.
posted by koeselitz at 4:18 AM on February 1, 2010 [2 favorites]

I was surprised they included Oregon State... but, to the difference of other schools, which are called by their proper names in the graphic, OSU is called by their "Beaver" mascot (also Oregon's state animal). I was hoping that the slang meaning for beaver originated after this poll, but apparently it dates from 1927. I guess I'll just have to hope that the innuendo (in a study of women...) was unintended.

I went to the U of Oregon some 50 years after that poll, so I had to read this sentence twice: "girls at the co-ed schools are always squeezing coke dates in between matinee and juke joints." You see, there were lots of joints in Eugene, and, err, some coke as well, but the first weren't places you go to and the second wasn't fizzy...
posted by fraula at 4:39 AM on February 1, 2010

Oh, the "Beaver" for OSU is my Oregon-centric mistake. It's only now I notice that there's a "Beaver" college in the description too. But I'm not alone... gosh I love the web. A quick Google search led me to this Wired article written in 2000: Beaver College Not a Filter Fave.

In 1927, the following dirty little ditty was published in an anthology of American folk verse:

She took off her clothes from her head to her toes and a voice at the keyhole yelled, 'Beaver!'

Poof, "beaver" had a new meaning in the English language. Poof, little Beaver College, founded in 1853 in Beaver County, Pennsylvania, had the seeds of a PR problem.

posted by fraula at 4:54 AM on February 1, 2010

Beaver College Not a Filter Fave.

The same problem has forced a venerable magazine named The Beaver to change its title to Canada's History.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 5:08 AM on February 1, 2010

Two bits says men spend less on hats than they did in the 40s. Even if you reversed the inflation (that is, adjusted today's numbers with the inflation you would have applied to yesteryear's).

Another two bits says that maybe two people here on MetaFilter know how much two bits actually represents in money (without looking it up).
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 5:51 AM on February 1, 2010

It means a shave and a haircut.

also 25 cents
posted by The Whelk at 6:11 AM on February 1, 2010 [2 favorites]

It's a quarter, right?
posted by Sweetie Darling at 6:12 AM on February 1, 2010 [1 favorite]

CD don't be so sure. I bet many young men buy baseball hats quite often, while back then a man would buy a hat rather infrequently. They were built to last a long time.
posted by oddman at 6:18 AM on February 1, 2010

What is meant by the average girl having seven boyfriends, anyway? Is that over a certain period of time? Was the definition looser?

Either the definition was or the average girls were.
posted by Pickman's Next Top Model at 6:24 AM on February 1, 2010 [1 favorite]

For context, some social hygiene films.

"Going Steady" "Are You Ready For Marriage?" "Young Man's Fancy" (Note the casual "I'd hardly call that dressed" line) "What To Do On A Date" "Toward Emotional Maturity" ("It wasn't long ago that you started to think about emotions objectively") "How Do You Know It's Love?"
posted by The Whelk at 6:32 AM on February 1, 2010 [1 favorite]

"Beginning To Date" The rules! So many rules!
posted by The Whelk at 6:40 AM on February 1, 2010

It means a shave and a haircut. "Shave and a haircut... two bits." The two bits is the price of the haircut.

This reminded me that my own mother went to college in 1955 on a scholarship as the daughter of a deceased Methodist minister. Not only did the scholarship cover tuition, dorm room, meals, and books, she also got a clothing allowance. Sadly she threw it all away, leaving school without a degree, when she got knocked up by my father and was forced to marry him. The good news is, 15 years later she returned to school and got her degree.
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 6:45 AM on February 1, 2010

This is great. Thanks!

And regarding Beaver College: I've lived near Beaver College in Glenside, PA for most of my life. It changed to Arcadia University a few years ago, but everyone around here still calls it Beaver.
posted by chihiro at 7:28 AM on February 1, 2010

Two bits says men spend less on hats than they did in the 40s.

Yes, but we spend way more on space helmets to wear to work in our astro-colonies.

Two bits, four bits, six bits, a dollar...
posted by albrecht at 7:41 AM on February 1, 2010

It's a quarter, right?

Same as in town.
posted by chillmost at 8:57 AM on February 1, 2010

"Two bits, four bits, six bits, a dollar... "

All for the Gators, stand up and holler!
posted by oddman at 10:26 AM on February 1, 2010

And here's some information on why a quarter came to be called two bits (just after the introduction).
posted by gudrun at 12:09 PM on February 1, 2010