ABSTRACT
Between 1882 and 1892, Elizabeth Champney (1850–1922) wrote the eleven-volume Vassar Girls series, which chronicles the adventures of different trios of Vassar students and alumnae as they tour the world. This chapter explores the ways that the series defines the then-new category of “the college girl” and uses this category as a way to represent and construct changing definitional concepts—of nation, gender, empire, and education—that played influential roles in the post–Civil War development of the United States as a major economic and political global power. The series manifests these concepts in at least two ways. The first is representational: The Vassar Girls embody an early exercise in creating and marketing a particular conception of the educated American woman, one that shaped certain forms of female agency and wrote women/girls into the consumerist, national, and imperialist narratives necessary for America’s international post-war position. The second method is more dynamic. The books serve as a form of textual school for their original audience of (primarily) white girls who were middle class or who aspired to be. The Vassar Girls books function as meta-fictions that enact and help to constitute the gender, racial, class, and national identities they describe.
