Alexander Wright's 1937 book, How To Live Without A Woman, was a celebration of bachelorhood. But it seems that Wright's strategy for life without a woman was to get his female friends to feel sorry for him and do his housework for him.
A woman friend will help you dispose of your useless accumulations. "They have not the slightest regard for the accumulations of others," Author Wright warns.
Mr Wright maintains with a little judicious flattery any woman will help solve a bachelor's housekeeping problems.
Doesn't really seem like he was living without a woman if he was still getting women to do all his work. And you have to wonder how long he managed to keep any female friends before they figured out what was going on.
This campaign was kinda genius, because they never explained what brought these three or four or five or six "wild & crazy" women together. Were they a troupe of actresses? Bank robbers? Insane asylum escapees? Rogue fashion models? You could stare at the ads all day in wonderment.
Back in the 1930s families were concerned about whether they should send their young daughters off to college, fearing they might come home infected with communism. So in 1934, psychologist Stephen M. Corey set out to determine whether such fears were justified.
Corey administered the Thurstone Attitude Scale to 234 female freshmen at the University of Wisconsin, examining their attitudes with respect to six topics: Reality of God, War, Patriotism, Communism, Evolution, and Church. A year later he retested 100 of these students when they were sophomores.
Godless communists?
When he presented his findings at the Midwestern Psychological Association convention in May 1940, he assured everyone that it was safe to send young women to college, saying, "There was no great difference in the girls' attitudes. The average co-ed apparently would rather mix with stag lines than picket lines."
He also emphasized that the young women lost none of their feminine habits at college. A United Press reporter paraphrased his words:
He found that in general college did little to upset or change a co-ed's home training but that she might learn to apply her makeup better, dress better and talk better. "But she won't talk about Communism — college offers too many other diversions."
However, if you look at his 1940 article in the Journal of Social Psychology*, in which he published the results of his study, you find somewhat different information. There he revealed that after a year at college the attitudes of the young women did change slightly, but consistently, in the direction of liberalism — which is to say that they showed less sympathy for god, war, patriotism, and the church, and more sympathy for communism and evolution.
Corey wrote in that article, "The opinions of the students appeared to have undergone at least a degree of liberalization during their one year of attendance at a University."
I guess he wasn't actually lying to the folks at the Midwestern Psychological Association. It's all how you choose to spin the data.
San Bernardino County Sun - May 5, 1940
* Corey, S.M. (1940). "Changes in the opinions of female students after one year at university." The Journal of Social Psychology, 11: 341-351.
Paul Di Filippo
Paul has been paid to put weird ideas into fictional form for over thirty years, in his career as a noted science fiction writer. He has recently begun blogging on many curious topics with three fellow writers at The Inferior 4+1.