by Ashleigh Bonina and Kaylie Yaceczko
In 1932 Caroline Pardee was the editor of an unusual edition of The Buchtelite. It seems as though the main difference from the other editions was that it was written by the women of the university and printed on pink paper. The article talks about associating the color pink with women, Leap Year, and romance.
Unfortunately this special issue of The Buchtelite is unavailable, but we can still think about the position of women and their relation to writing and having a voice in these articles and on campus as a whole.
Caroline Pardee and the pink Buchtelite had a great significance to the University due to the general attitude towards gender roles in the literary world at the time. In a 1925 editorial entitled “Masculine Literature” in the Acheronic literary magazine—under an almost entirely male staff— the editors explain how “Many of us are inclined to consider the pursuit of literature a weak, or feminine, or childish occupation… If we but take the trouble to look about us, we will see that nearly all strong writers were men. Shakespeare, Burns, Conrad, Kipling; all were men, red-blooded men. Most of the writers in this magazine were men. This is but natural” (Acheronic, vol. 2 no. 4, pg 12-13).
There seems to have been a general idea that women solely wrote about “feminine” and “weak” subjects, such as love or nature; however, the literary journals at the University had a fair mix of content from both men and women.
While there is no way of knowing if this accurately represents the mindset at UA as a whole, it shows how women were supposed to act. But there is a notable exception mentioned, when the Pardee clipping mentions Leap Year, an occasion when women were allowed to shake off some of their assumed feminine modesty.
Anthony Pankuch and Jessica Wilson’s study of Leap Year-themed postcards held in the David P. Campbell Postcard Collection at The Cummings Center for the History of Psychology at The University of Akron shows how Leap Years — like 1932, the year of the pink Buchtelite — allowed for a loosening of gender roles. They note of the postcard at right that “Images such as this demonstrate how postcards emerged as an acceptable medium to provide satirical commentary of leap year [marriage] proposals and reflect the fear of jeopardizing male control of female sexuality” (6). For more on how Leap Year was linked up to movements ranging from suffrage to rodeo, see Pankuch and Wilson’s article in Student Projects in the Archive.
This was a time when women were trying to break into a male dominated arena and make their voices heard. The suffragettes had earlier fought to have their voices heard within their own government and country, but publications like the pink Buchtelite helps us see this fight happening closer to home and on our own campus.