College women or college girls? Gender, sexuality, and in loco parentis on campus

Undergraduate women's struggles to terminate the university's role in loco parentis represented a revolutionary moment on American campuses in the 1960s. Though the end results were strikingly similar across regions and schools, the paths to change were very different on historically black college campuses when compared to predominantly white college campuses. Challenges to in loco parentis regulations took place earlier on coeducational campuses than at women's colleges. At each college or university, students forged a common language of rights to rescind long-standing non-academic regulations.;Student protests against in loco parentis policies emerged out of widespread civil rights activism and Black Power ideology by mid-decade at Howard University in Washington, D.C. and at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia. Undergraduate women framed arguments against in loco parentis rules in terms of civil rights and student respectability successfully to dismantle non-academic regulations on campus by the late sixties. On predominantly white campuses, the tradition of student self-government influenced the shape and tone of women's anti-in loco parentis protests. The movement to end the role of the university in place of the parent harbingered the women's rights movement of the late 1960s at the Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio and at Simmons College in Boston, Massachusetts. Women's protests on each campus mobilized female students and significantly impacted their understanding of gender issues within the broader American culture.;The underlying concern of administrators and parents regarding morality and sexuality on campus permeated campus debates. The in loco parentis ideology ultimately proved obsolete as campus officials realized that they could not codify or enforce individual morality in the face of strident student demands for privacy and self determination. Undergraduate women struggled to redefine femininity and women's roles in light of shifts in the gender and race structures of American life. During the 1970s undergraduate women pressured campus administrations to institute programs and services the students themselves deemed necessary to their success and welfare on campus. College women learned to navigate campus life without the special protections and pre-established women's community that in loco parentis policies and women's self-government had once provided.