UK Women's League - Our Rightful Place

UK Women's League, 1923 Kentuckian

One hundred year ago, coinciding with the end of the World War I and the achievement of suffrage by American women, the lives of women students at the University of Kentucky began to take a subtle turn.  Influenced by the creation of Leagues of Women Voters chapters across the nation, students founded a Women's League at UK in the spring of 1920, with part of its purpose to bring "dormitory" women together with "the town girls."  Additionally the League hoped to "bring to the university certain notable experts on vocations for women."  Student culture was changing rapidly and the Women’s League advocated for additional personal freedoms for women students, a campaign that would last well into the 1960s on the UK campus.

Since 1880 UK women have sought equality at the University of Kentucky.  Information about the struggle and the women who led the push for equality can be found in the recently published, Our Rightful Place: A History of Women at the University of Kentucky, 1880-1945.

https://www.kentuckypress.com/9780813179377/our-rightful-place/    

Use the code FAU25 for 25% off. 

Depicting UK Women Students

Hugh Hefner's passing is being marked by the ongoing controversy regarding his objectification of women.  Unfortunately, the University of Kentucky has a long history of emphasizing women's physical appearance more that their intellectual ability and presenting images of women as sexual objects.

The first woman to be recognized at a UK commencement in 1884, Leanora Hoening, received more comments about her appearance that her academic achievement. A reported wrote that she "was a fresh, healthy young woman, with an eye as full and bright as a dove's, and the head of a Greek Venus on a neck like a lily-stalk.  She was a happy, wholesome, appetizing creature, with an expression of frank good-fellowship about her, well mingled with a becoming and maidenly modesty.  

Writing in 1916 about Margaret Ingels, UK's first woman graduate in Engineering, a reporter noted breathlessly that Ingles was not of the "mannish" type but rather "ladylike" and added that, "she is medium height (about five feet two inches) and of slender figure.  She is really pretty; has large, intelligent gray eyes, the slightly tanned complexion of the outdoor girl and the long upper lip that denotes a poetical temperament and a love of ease and luxury.  But this feature is given the lie by the strength of her chin and the way she closes her mouth as she works."

Kentucky Kernel Front Page, January 18, 1957

By the mid-twentieth century the Kentucky Kernel represented the changing culture in it pages by portraying women students  as "Kernel Kuties" or "Kernel Pin-Ups."  

Front Page Kentucky Kernel, September 28, 1950

What will this generation of women students demand from the popular culture in regard to the representation of women on campuses across the United States?