Those that reply “no” simply haven’t read or seen convincing enough imagery. Because I certainly am nostalgic. I’m nostalgic for a time, a place, and an ideal that I’ve never personally experienced: the women’s college.

It’s a concept that used to sit squarely associated with upper-class sophistication. Families packed their children off to these institutions – Wellesley, Bryn Mawr, Mount Holyoke – with some of the family jewelry, and perhaps a horse, to study Literature and Art History and maybe find a husband to boot. Many of these schools existed in a kind of domestic partnership with near by all-male schools: Wellesley to Harvard, Vassar to Yale, and so on. Because of the close physical proximity and the tendency of both schools to attract the same “types” of student, many of their alums ended up married.

My grandmother attended Agnes Scott in the 50’s. A small smile appears on her face when she recalls the orchestrated courtship between students. The boys from the men’s college nearby would call her dormitory’s phone, the girls would line up and down the hallway and wait their turn to receive the phone and be asked to some dance or soiree. The image makes me smile as well. Despite my constant monologues on feminism and equality (just ask my housemates), I still find that a part of me yearns to know what it was actually like in those feminine institutions during the mid-20th century, all coifed curls and 10 PM curfews.

These schools, in their heyday, boomed. The reason? The elite higher education institutions of the day prohibited admission of the gentler sex, necessitating the creation of separate universities where lucky daughters would earn their degrees. By 1927, a coalition of prestigious women’s schools emerged, the “Seven Sisters” of Vassar, Smith, Wellesley, Mount Holyoke, Bryn Mawr, Radcliffe, and Barnard. These colleges were considered the feminine counterpart to their all-male colleagues, the Ivy League. If anyone has seen the 2003 film staring Julia Roberts, Mona Lisa Smile, you’ll get the feeling: a kind of female-version-of-Dead’s Poet Society, an Amazonian utopia of feminine intelligence. They are also the alma maters of some illustrious literary alums: Margaret Atwood (writer, Radcliffe), Elizabeth Bishop (poet, Vassar), Emily Dickinson (poet, Mount Holyoke), Ursula Le Guin (writer, Radcliffe), Sylvia Plath (poet, Smith), Gertrude Stein (critic and writer, Radcliffe), and more.

But, despite this legacy of badass (excuse my French) women, the “women’s college” itself is a dying breed. In the 1960’s, there were 244 single-sex institutions of higher education in the U.S. Now there are 44. It’s an inevitable, but nonetheless unhappy, phenomena. Kids don’t want to go to college without the opposite gender anymore.

On one hand, I understand this: I did not choose (or even really consider) a women’s college for myself. But on the other, I don’t: I do have experience in an all-female learning environment, and it was one of the best things that has ever happened to me. I had the great good fortune to receive my secondary education at a private, all-girls school in the south. It was exactly like you would imagine it to be. Uniforms were crisp plaid and saddle oxfords, physical education courses included required lessons in dance and poise, and the favored afternoon treat of “tea cakes,” frothy confections consisting of crumbly bases piled high with white glaze and baked fresh in-house. Everything was white and soft and distinctly feminine. I still recall the heady scent of the blooming magnolia trees in spring, covering the campus like a blanket. When I recount fond memories of my experiences at an all-girls’ school, many people who don’t understand the allure balk: “but it’s crucial to be educated alongside boys at that age, you’ll be handicapped for life not knowing how to interact with men!” As if the absence of male genitalia in my high school classrooms would somehow render the male sex a mystery to me for life. It was truly a treasured time in my life. Who wouldn’t want to experience that kind of closely caring community?

The answer is girls and boys both, apparently. To flip the gender coin, today in the U.S. only four non-religious all-male schools remain, including one just a stone’s throw away two hours southeast in Hamden-Sydney. This university itself was once a bastion of masculinity, admitting only men until 1985, when fiscal necessity trumped the protests of reluctant alums. Those holdouts were evidently placated with a compromise: while the gentler sex would be admitted, the ratio of male-female students would never creep above 51-49: the male would always hold the majority. I like to tuck this little fact away to remind myself with when I feel W&L is getting too progressive (insert sarcasm here). Despite that tidbit, we have come a long way since the 80’s: now, the school is affectionately referred to by some as “Whiskey & Libido” University – a nickname that is, truthfully, appropriate.

So, W&L went the co-ed route, and barely any masculine fortresses of higher education remain impervious to feminine intrusion. Likewise, one of the few remaining women’s colleges, Sweet Briar here in Virginia, went belly-up in May 2015, 114 years after the institution’s inception. In old photos, the women of Sweet Briar all look so much older than I feel now. I mean, those women were undeniably women when I, at age 22, still find it difficult to use that word when referring to myself or my peers without discomfort. This, I think, is the crux of why my generation has killed off the single-sex institutions of our grandparents’. They – and their sepia-colored scholars – are simply too old for us. We have outgrown them by slowing the process of “growing up.” And while I’m quite happy where I am, the nostalgia still comes, for a time and place and an ideal where I might be a little less millennial, and a little more adult.

To continue with Shenandoah’s apparent and impromptu Emily Dickinson theme this week (see our most recent Poem of the Week, Dickinson’s “To Tell the Beauty Would Decrease,” here: https://shenandoahliterary.org/blog/2017/10/to-tell-the-beauty-would-decrease/), I thought it only appropriate to talk gluten. Dickinson herself was, after all, a skilled baker of bread.

Am I the only one who is fed up with the gluten-free, dairy-free, paleo/Whole 30/high-fat, low-carb whatever-else-there-is food fad? Growing up, I ate what my mother put on the table – there were no “special dietary needs” (save legitimate allergies and the month I would only consume blue foods) in my adolescent vocabulary. A stable of my diet – and one that is evidently now considered blasphemous – was bread. In all shapes and sizes, savory and sweet, as an accompanying player or the star of the show, I loved bread.

The poet Emily Dickinson evidently loved bread, too. During her life, which began with her birth in Massachusetts in 1830 and ended with her death in 1886, Dickinson could most reliably be found in her kitchen, the place in the house she thought most “creatively nourishing.” I can’t say I disagree – I’m writing this very post hunched over my kitchen counter, watching a cast-iron pot in the oven. Dickinson was a prize-winning baker, a well-known giver of sweets, and a benevolent fattener of children with her famous gingerbread. She was responsible for rising early and baking the family’s daily bread, as her father preferred the taste of his daughter’s bread to any other.

She also loved the chance to experiment with new recipes. An excerpt from a letter to her friend reads, “thank you, dear, for the quickness which is the blossom of request, and for the definiteness – for a new rule (Recipe) is a chance. The bread resulted charmingly…” Dickinson is right – a new recipe is a chance: a chance to negotiate. Every person who really loves to cook knows this. A rule (recipe) is no hard-and-fast rule, per se, they’re meant to be broken, changed, and edited. You receive a recipe from a friend or acquaintance, you try it out, you make changes and personalize it.

What Dickinson understood is that baking, and baking bread, is an imperfect science. Not only in the obvious way, meaning that bread almost always contains some sort of leavening agent that forces a chemical reaction (yeast, by the way, is quite literally a living fungus that feeds on the sugars in flour, facilitating the “rising” action of bread dough – ah, science), but also in the more subtle way – there involves a question, a series of experiments, and a conclusion. Take the bread I am currently watching bake in the oven, for instance: my question – did I let this dough rise long enough on the counter, in the right climate, before I baked it? My experiment – let’s bake this thing and see how it turns out. My conclusion – to be determined, when this bread comes out of the oven. If my experiments prove fruitless (i.e., this bread is awful), then it’s time to edit some part of the recipe or methodology. Go back to the drawing board, and try something else. It’s supposed to be fun.

I see writing in the same light. We have a subject that we want to explore, we set about exploring it in a series of experiments, and either we are happy with the conclusion or we are not. So writing is a lot like cooking bread, in my opinion. People are intimidated by them both, myself included. The great things is, both can be edited. And poetry, like bread, can bring people together.

Being in the kitchen reminds me of this. When writing, like baking bread, was fun, not stressful or obligatory. Just filling journals in my childhood bedroom with countless short stories and angst-y poetry. When bread was an ally, not suddenly public enemy number one. For Dickinson, the kitchen acted in the same way, as an inspiration incubator. She often wrote early versions of poetry on the backs of flour labels. Like this one:

The Things that never can come back, are several —
Childhood — some forms of Hope — the Dead —
Though Joys — like Men — may sometimes make a Journey —
And still abide

Written on the back of a recipe for coconut cake. Baking is considered a traditionally “female” enterprise. Maybe poetry should be, too. Both  are nourishing, and quite forgiving.

I just got my bread out of the oven and sliced it. Today is one of my dearest friends 22nd birthday. I gave her a piece and her eyes closed with the audible crunch of the bread. “All I want for my birthday is this entire loaf to myself,” she said. No edits necessary this time, it appears.