ABSTRACT
In a letter to the editor of University Monthly in 1893, a student from Fredericton, New Brunswick, used images he described as ridiculous to clinch his argument that women undergraduates could not be members of the Literary and Debating Society. “Imagine readers, if you can, a young lady student ascending the rostrum to expound her views on the subject of debate to the assembled students of the opposite sex. Carry the illustration farther,” he suggested. “Imagine her taking part in the varied festivities of smoke-out night or Hallowe’en or scrambling for apples in the lower hall.” 1 This letter conveyed an assumption that was central to the construction of student identity in Victorian Canada: the rights to full participation in college life belonged to male undergraduates alone. For most university men, no aspect of college life was more important than the meetings of the literary and debating society, and the students’ right to talk about politics, manage student affairs, complain about the faculty, or practice public speaking, like the freedom to indulge in Halloween pranks, was considered integral to a man's undergraduate experience. The undergraduate's identity, with its odd mixture of dignified ritual and childish misbehavior, was an expression of his masculinity. “For a woman to enter college was to enter a man's world,” an Acadia alumna of 1891 remembered. “The young men had their college customs, societies, sports and pranks and did not like the idea of having women enter into these or of having to change them on account of women being in the same institution.” 2
