Accepting and Vilifying College Women’s Romantic Relationships

The studies that most explicitly explore the intersection of gender and same-sex relationships on campus consider “smashing” or “crushing”—romantic relationships between college women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This is also the longest-standing body of relevant scholarship, with influential studies being published from the 1970s to the present. Early research on smashes, including by Nancy Sahli and Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, illustrates that these relationships were initially accepted among both college students and institutional leaders. However, the social acceptability of romantic relationships among women was replaced with condemnation by the 1920s. Peer pressure and institutional disciplinary processes combined to eliminate smashing from college campuses. Sahli attributed this shift to the increased threat that feminism posed to male power. Women’s colleges, in particular, moved aggressively to disassociate themselves from smashing as romantic same-sex relationships received heightened social scrutiny.Footnote ⁶

Much of this literature centers gender but is agnostic on whether the relationships were sexual or if their participants were LGBTQ+. In a 1994 study, Sherrie Inness described the relationships as “homoaffectionate.” The reluctance to designate these students as LGBTQ+ has been related to limitations of archival evidence and the recognition that contemporary sexual identities do not neatly translate to the past. More recent scholarship has drawn a stronger connection of these relationships to LGBTQ+ people and considered racial dynamics within them. Wendy Rouse argues that some smashes “included physical affection and sexual desire.” While White women have been the focus of this historiography, Rouse notes that elite Black women also engaged in smashing. Moreover, the vilification of smashes in the early twentieth century involved fears that White women’s same-sex relationships would result in “race suicide”—a eugenicist belief that lower birth rates among White women, especially upper-middle class White women, would result in a diminished nation.Footnote ⁷ The collective historiography of smashing reveals no guarantee of linear progress in the acceptance of those who transgress heterosexual norms on campus.

Institutional Efforts to Enforce Dominant Gender Norms

Over the last two decades, scholars have developed an increasingly expansive historiography of institutional efforts to oppress LGBTQ+ college students, including expelling them and, later, refusing to recognize their student organizations. Less explicit, though obvious, in this literature is that college and university leaders found it imperative to enforce and privilege prevailing heterosexual gender norms across the twentieth century. Historians have written about higher education leaders’ use of the discipline system to “purge” their campuses of students—mostly men—who were or were perceived to be gay. These purges started around the same time that smashing among college women became unacceptable, and the historiography highlights similarities and differences among campuses in terms of institutional reactions to those who transgressed heterosexuality.

The best evidence of these complicated gender dynamics may be the purges at Harvard and Dartmouth in the 1920s. Harvard’s president established “a secret court” to discipline a group of students for gay parties and sex, expelling eight, including multiple college men whose only offense was being friends with gay students. Five years later, Dartmouth officials learned of a rural farmhouse where some college men and recent alumni escaped to drink and have sex together, including three who displayed effeminate behaviors in public. Convinced that the effeminate men were the ringleaders, Dartmouth leaders used drinking violations as the official rationale to expel them, despite all attendees drinking and having gay sex. The fact that Harvard leaders operated a “secret” disciplinary body and Dartmouth would not officially use homosexuality as a rationale for expulsion demonstrates institutional leaders’ fears of acknowledging the existence of LGBTQ+ people on campus; that Harvard expelled even students who associated with gay students while Dartmouth targeted only those men who most transgressed acceptable masculinity further shows the complicated role of gender and sexual norms affecting students in higher education.Footnote ⁸

Most campus purges subsided as student activism increased in the mid-to-late 1960s, though efforts to restrict higher education opportunities for LGBTQ+ students endured. The anti-war, Black civil rights, and women’s movements contributed to the creation of the LGBTQ+ rights movement; like college students involved in these earlier forms of activism, LGBTQ+ students began to form campus organizations and sought to receive institutional recognition for their groups. Institutions rarely welcomed the groups, forcing LGBTQ+ college students at some public universities to sue for the benefits routinely provided to non-LGBTQ+ student organizations. These student organizations were denied recognition because they transgressed what institutional leaders considered acceptable gender and sexual norms. Indeed, they made explicit gendered arguments in court as to why these groups could not be recognized, including that they would violate state sodomy laws and attract more LGBTQ+ students to campus.

Similar to the historiography of campus purges, the literature on LGBTQ+ student organization lawsuits highlights differences across campuses. First, LGBTQ+ college students at most campuses did not have to sue to have their groups recognized, although this was probably as much a result of LGBTQ+ college students’ early legal victories as institutional leaders’ being allies. Moreover, some institutions put up longer and harder fights to resist recognizing LGBTQ+ student organizations. Our studies show that the University of Georgia and Virginia Commonwealth University recognized their LGBTQ+ student organizations more readily after losing in federal court than did Texas A&M University; Michael’s work with Charles Thompson on the hyper-masculine culture at Texas A&M detailed how university leaders twice asked the US Supreme Court to take their case after twice losing at the appellate level.Footnote ⁹ These studies combine to show how legal action for basic rights was needed to counter the prescribed gender norms and homophobic bigotry.

Gender Dynamics Among LGBTQ+ College Students

The legal victories of LGBTQ+ student organizations contributed to their spread across the country, and historians have been studying them for the past twenty years. While gender has not been the central focus of this historiography, a close read illustrates complex gender relationships among LGBTQ+ students and tensions over gendered dimensions of the groups’ purposes. Historians have shown that despite helping to establish these groups, women often found them inhospitable. Men tended to dominate leadership positions, and many women realized their male colleagues were unknowledgeable about and inattentive to women’s issues at best and overtly sexist at worst. Even as LGBTQ+ student organizations expanded their names from only using “gay” to acknowledge a wider range of genders and sexualities, distinct lesbian groups formed at many campuses by the early 1970s. Some gay men believed that women were less involved in their groups because they had faced less hostility about their sexuality. Yet women never fully abandoned the umbrella LGBTQ+ student organizations, and LGBTQ+ students closely collaborated to provide services and education as the AIDS crisis emerged in the 1980s.Footnote ¹⁰

Another tension within these organizations related to whether their overarching purposes included efforts to change prevailing gender norms. Some students joined these groups to fight institutions and individuals that perpetuated gender and sexual oppression, unconcerned that their sexual orientation could become public; many others less comfortable about being openly gay joined to form social relationships with fellow LGBTQ+ people, as these groups provided a rare space to meet people with similar gender and sexual identities. Even those students attracted to the organizations for their political potential could divide over end goals. Especially in the early 1970s, many members embraced gay liberation ideas of breaking down patriarchy and creating revolutionary changes to gender and sexual norms. Other politically minded members wanted to create room for LGBTQ+ people to exist within prevailing social norms. As Patrick Dilley has expertly demonstrated in an award-winning history of LGBTQ+ student organizations at universities in the Midwest, the assimilationists largely won this competition. In the end, college students made significant contributions to the larger LGBTQ+ rights movements, providing early legal victories that provided a foundation for legal activism that culminated in US Supreme Court decisions that determined the unconstitutionality of laws that criminalized gay sex and forbade gay marriage. While these legal victories created impressive protections for LGBTQ+ people, they fell short of the possibilities of gender emancipation that liberationists imagined possible a few decades earlier.

Expanding Gender Possibilities

Similar to the established studies on smashes, the emerging research on trans students and drag on campus explicitly considers gender among LGBTQ+ college students by exploring how trans students and drag expanded gender possibilities and expressions on campus. Margaret A. Nash and colleagues studied students dressing as members of the opposing gender, or student drag, from the nineteenth century through the 1940s. “Rather than having a singular meaning,” they wrote, “the formats and functions of drag were varied and complex and occurred both on and off stage as campuses became forums where students created their own cultural meanings of drag.” As with smashing, drag became increasingly scrutinized in the twentieth century owing to its associations with homosexuality, though with institutional and regional variations. Nash and colleagues also highlighted that while the literature focuses on men in drag in theatrical productions, women likewise performed as men, though at times with strict rules for dress that inhibited their performances.Footnote ¹¹

Other scholars have explored the presence of trans students and the place of drag in LGBTQ+ student organizations later in the twentieth century. Jess Clawson highlights tensions around both trans members and drag, as well as the latter’s conflicted role in efforts to educate the broader community, within Florida LGBTQ+ student organizations during the 1970s and 1980s. When Angela Douglas, a trans woman, joined the Gay Liberation Front at Florida State University (FSU), it challenged members to consider their own biases and stereotypes, eventually pushing them out of their comfort zone into more visible public action. At FSU and other Florida schools, students would later use drag as “a form of education that combated heteronormativity by highlighting the constructed nature of gender,” though it also sometimes served to reinforce homophobic stereotypes.Footnote ¹²

David Reichard and Katherine Rose-Mockry both illustrate the complicated place of drag and “genderfuck”—the mixing of elements of traditional men’s and women’s dress—among LGBTQ+ college students in California and Kansas, respectively, in the 1970s. By embracing drag or genderfuck, LGBTQ+ students visibly challenged prevailing gender norms. This occurred across a spectrum, from holding campus events that included professional drag performers to wearing elements of the opposing gender’s dress at an LGBTQ+ organization’s Halloween dance to attending class in drag. However, some lesbians on campus considered drag sexist and the co-option of women’s culture, even as they often embraced typically masculine approaches to dress, including plaid shirts, short hair, and no makeup.Footnote ¹³ Thus, recent historians have provided a scholarly foundation from which subsequent scholars can explore how earlier generations of college students expanded the possibilities of gender expression and identity on and off campus.

The Continuing Importance of Gender

This forum engages with the continued relevance of gender as a lens through which to examine the history of higher education. The LGBTQ+ college student historiography reveals the salience and importance of gender on campus in the past even when not the central focus of historians’ analyses. We are hopeful historians will join us and continue to focus attention on earlier generations of LGBTQ+ college students. As part of this overarching effort, we should consider making gender and gender analyses more explicit. At the same time, this historiography reveals the extent to which institutional leaders have long prioritized perpetuating dominant gender norms over supporting LGBTQ+ students and that progress is not linear; once acceptable relationships and behaviors of LGBTQ+ people can later be villified.

This provides a lesson from history about the fragility and importance of protecting today’s progress. We are living amid increasing attacks on trans people, including explicit attacks on trans students. Multiple states have ordered their educational institutions to rescind protections for trans students and erase trans people from the curricula. Many of the same states have attacked women’s reproductive health care. Recent executive orders have made the lives of trans employees and students worse. The explosion of anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-women rhetoric and legislation is clear. Any historical discussion of this moment must include deep considerations of gender to accurately capture or interpret education in the 2020s. So, of course, the continued gendered analyses of historians of education are warranted and needed.