B Girls

May 14, 2021 10:07 AM

My deepest pleasures come from accounts of and by the original B girls. Those lucky few who, given the chance to create a school in their own image, rose to the occasion. Free to decide on their classes and lifestyles, these pioneers rejected dogma, prohibition, curfews, and dress codes, embraced annual non-resident work terms, and, as a decades-long study by sociologists proved, almost routinely turned their backs on the politics of their conservative daddies. From The Bennington Girl by Jill Eisenstadt
posted by chavenet (21 comments total)

I expected that paragraph to end really differently because, you know, B-girl.
posted by evidenceofabsence at 10:52 AM on May 14, 2021 [12 favorites]

Yep, as the comment above says it would be good to acknowledge that for many Americans the term b-girl already exists in a different meaning: it's a positive term for a woman who breakdances.
posted by splitpeasoup at 11:18 AM on May 14, 2021 [10 favorites]

(Not complaining! Just thought it was funny that it could be read differently—"I do want to know more about the original women who created a school of breakdancing in their own image, rising to the occasion and rejecting dogma, prohibition, curfews, and dress codes!"—almost up to the end. Sorry for the derail.)
posted by evidenceofabsence at 11:26 AM on May 14, 2021 [10 favorites]

Thanks for posting this. It's a lot to think about.
posted by ob1quixote at 11:34 AM on May 14, 2021 [1 favorite]

Historically, the b-girl/breakdancer is 35(?) years old, the b-girl/Bennington trope is at least 80 years old.
The partner of a friend teaches at Bennington and they have a sort of fascination with 80's era Bennington, the time before Liz Coleman. Coleman made her mark on the school forcibly and, in the opinion of a lot of people, to the school's detriment. N.B. 'Bennington' has lost its cultural place as the marker of a certain kind of person. The 80's Bennington was probably the last moments of that. And the place really did chugs out an out-sized number of working, culture defining artists - considering each class is only about a hundred students.
posted by From Bklyn at 11:48 AM on May 14, 2021 [7 favorites]

Mod note: Dual meaning of B-girl noted, but now let's let that point drop so the post can be about the actual subject - thanks.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 11:56 AM on May 14, 2021 [12 favorites]

Very glad to see the Shirley Jackson cameo (by resemblance).
posted by doctornemo at 12:08 PM on May 14, 2021 [2 favorites]

The essay presumes you have the exact same cultural context as the author, when she's saying stuff like "Oh everyone knows" "everyone" knew that back when men had no shame whatsoever apparently. Reading the author's Wikipedia filled in the cultural gaps.
posted by bleep at 12:48 PM on May 14, 2021 [7 favorites]

It's really talking about the fact that when you treat women like people then they decide who to have sex with, which was a huge problem for a system completely dependent on their male family being able to sell that decision in exchange for power.
posted by bleep at 1:22 PM on May 14, 2021 [7 favorites]

My favorite nigh-defunct wordy musicians, Uncle Bonsai (or Spotify) met at Bennington and seem to fit.
posted by clew at 2:25 PM on May 14, 2021 [2 favorites]

The essay presumes you have the exact same cultural context as the author

I think the cultural context of a certain slice of Americans from the far northeast is that they assume their cultural context is universal. To me teenagers reading Franny and Zooey is about as current as Little House on the Prairie. And I only even know the reference because I grew up just across the border from upper New York state.

Anyway it is funny to see the author constantly giving all these examples of just how broadly universal the "Bennington Girl" trope is when each time it just reinforces what a tiny tiny slice of America it reflects.
posted by GuyZero at 3:10 PM on May 14, 2021 [24 favorites]

"Dual meaning of B-girl noted..."

I'm old enough to remember a 3rd meaning for "B girls".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bargirl

(I'll show myself out)
posted by aleph at 4:05 PM on May 14, 2021 [5 favorites]

There is no such thing as a universal experience but I think this is a really good essay about existing in real life and as a fantasy projection of older men/a specific culture. So you didn’t go to Bennington in the 80s, so what! I read people’s memoirs all the time. It’s a legit genre.
posted by Hypatia at 5:34 PM on May 14, 2021 [11 favorites]

I find myself kind of torn by this; there are indeed some good aspects of it--finding out and becoming the sort of person that you want and deserve to be, as opposed to what successive generations of dudes want and expect you to be--but I'm also getting at least a whiff of some of what was talked about previously on the blue, particularly in this comment. (For what it's worth, Eisenstadt seems to have been conscious of this, and the bit about being intimidated by her classmates reminds me of a similar bit in, of all places, the Netflix cartoon series Big Mouth, when Jessi goes to a private school overstuffed with overachievers.)
posted by Halloween Jack at 5:51 PM on May 14, 2021 [1 favorite]

Roethke is, at least, open-eyed about his transgression.

'Glass House' is a good bio of Rotheke.
So I'll add this for the "b-list girl."

"In 1952, she reunited with Roethke in New York and later married on January 3, 1953. She moved to Seattle, where Roethke was an English professor and poet at the University of Washington. Beatrice taught French at a Bellevue high school. While living in Seattle, Beatrice met a fellow schoolteacher and friend, Jean Walkinshaw, who would later produce a documentary titled I Remember Theodore Roethke. Beatrice continued to live in Seattle until her husband’s untimely death in 1963. In 1972, she married a British schoolteacher, Stephen Lushington, and remained in England."
posted by clavdivs at 6:42 PM on May 14, 2021 [1 favorite]

Thanks, clew. Your brief mention unearthed a whole chapter of life I had forgotten in which I heard Doug at His Mom's on Pete Fornatale's or Vin Scelsa's radio show and was for a short while obsessed.

I think also of a friend a little older than me. When her son came of college age - a creative, talented guy - she had to choose between the state college she could afford and Bennington, where he had been accepted but would require debt. She chose to support his study at Bennington. As she explained it "Life is all about connections. He could go to the cheap school and make great friends. Or he can go to the expensive school and make great friends whose connections will actually get him somewhere."

Watching his post-college trajectory, it looks like she was right, and this author is right. The name-checks in the final paragraphs could be matched by those about just about any private liberal-arts college with less mystique but equivalent connective power. Network effects are everything. If the "B-girl" is a thing, it's because those girls had access to the channels that could make them into a thing.
posted by Miko at 8:18 PM on May 14, 2021 [10 favorites]

This is grand.
"As he tells it, several weeks before the graduation ceremonies of 1949 a student, Miriam Marx (Groucho’s daughter), came to him in hysterics. She told him that she was going to be expelled because of a curfew violation. Kunitz was sympathetic. She was young and vulnerable, and he felt that expulsion would be disastrous for her. He organized a meeting of the student body to protest the school’s decision. That night, the president of the college barged into Kunitz’s house and testily warned him to stop the protest. Kunitz was repotting a plant at the time and threw it in the president’s face. Then he packed up his car."
posted by clavdivs at 9:03 PM on May 14, 2021 [4 favorites]

Only the Bennington Girl will pass.
posted by lock robster at 6:48 PM on May 15, 2021 [1 favorite]

“ Bennington women were the first to wear dungarees!”
Talk about living in a bubble.
posted by Ideefixe at 9:40 AM on May 16, 2021 [3 favorites]

I went to Bennington in the 80s. I am a B Girl. AMA.
posted by morerio at 8:58 PM on May 16, 2021 [6 favorites]

I went to Bennington in the 80s. I am a B Girl. AMA.

Did people really still give a shit about Salinger?
posted by GuyZero at 9:49 AM on May 17, 2021