Pity the poor college male. Today women make up 58 percent of all undergraduates. Half of all medical students are women, and law schools are on the verge of tipping. Title IX, which mandated sex equity in college sports, has put wrestling and men's gymnastics on the ropes. Even football has come under siege at some elite colleges, thanks to administrators fed up with admitting substandard academic performers to field a team.

Indeed, “College Girls” is a trove of vintage slang: “batting” (picnicking) and its more outré cousin “thicketing,” the practice of spending the night in the woods with one's sweetheart and a pile of purloined bedding, almost makes the reader nostalgic for housemothers and three-feet-on-the-floor visiting rules. And then there's the food. Peril describes late-night feasts students whipped up using chafing dishes and stolen Bunsen burners, often in violation of strict rules against snacking, which was believed to divert too much blood away from the brain. (Henry Fowle Durant, the founder of Wellesley, vowed that his school would be free of “pies, lies and doughnuts.”) Girls wore their best nighties, but these midnight spreads weren't always genteel: “It is not good form to show aversion when one maiden eats tomato soup out of a powder dish and while another marks the fudge into luscious squares with a nail-file,” one 1925 etiquette manual advised.

This is cache, read story here