Wednesday, January 22, 2025

How I get my plots, Part Two

Welcome, I’m Mary Louisa Locke, the author of the USA Today best-selling Victorian San Francisco Mystery series and the Caelestis Science Fiction series. In this daily newsletter, I reflect on my life as an indie author trying to age gracefully. Occasionally, I will also publish some of my shorter fiction in this newsletter to read for free.

Daily Diary, Day 1603:

Research certainly helped me develop the plot for the fifth novel in the Victorian San Francisco mystery series, Pilfered Promises, and this previous Historical Tidbits post on this book goes into my research in some detail. However, I thought I would go into some detail on the sixth book in the series, Scholarly Pursuits because at first I was having so much difficulty finding any detail on the subject that I was afraid I would never find a workable mystery plot.

I did not start out working on this book with any particular agenda in mind. Because I have spent most of my adult life at institutions of higher education—either as a student or a professor—I was simply curious about what life was like for a nineteenth-century female college student. I also wanted to find a mystery plot where Laura Dawson and her friends could be the main protagonists since they had such small roles in the previous novel, Pilfered Promises.

These goals led me to follow these characters across the San Francisco Bay to Berkeley, where they were attending the university in the fall and spring of 1880-81. This Historical Tidbits post goes into some detail about what I was able to learn about the real women who attended this institution and what their life on campus would have been like. But it took a lot of digging to finally come up with the actual mystery plot, and so I thought I would give you a glimpse of the sources that finally got me there.

To start off, I read traditional histories of the University of California, Berkeley. The Illustrated History of the University of California, 1868-1895, by William Cary Jones (1895), was useful because it listed all the graduates of the university from its founding to 1895. It even included where former students lived and their occupations. For most of the women, instead of an occupation, their husbands’ names were listed! It also had mini-biographies of the various faculty and administrators.

The University of California: 1868-1968, by Verne A. Stadtman (1970), the official centennial publication, included a chapter about student life, with the tantalizing mention of a series of internal divisions within the student population in the late 1870s that led me to look for more detail on student life. However, not a single woman was mentioned in this chapter…it was as if they didn’t exist.

What I did learn was that in this time period Berkeley was the only branch of the state’s emerging university system, and having just moved from its temporary housing in Oakland in 1873, the Berkeley campus only had four completed academic buildings. The town itself had less than five thousand residents. In the fall of 1880, there were 216 full and part-time undergraduate students enrolled, less than a third of them female. There was no official student housing, and one source estimated that over half of the students commuted to the school from Oakland or San Francisco…generally at least an hour trip each way (which meant that my protagonists, Laura Dawson and Seth Timmons, weren’t aberations.) The courses offered were fairly traditional. Students in the College of Letters could choose either a classics or a literary course of study, and those students in the College of Sciences could choose to study agriculture, mechanics, mining, engineering, or chemistry. But none of this gave me any idea about what life would be like for the small minority of women on campus.

Fortunately, I did find an academic monograph that was all about women who attended coeducational institutions like Berkeley in this period. Bright Epoch: Women and Coeducation in the American West by Andrea Radke-Moss (2008) described in detail the gendered nature of women’s experiences on college campuses, which determined everything from where they were supposed to walk, what courses they should take, and what extra-curricular activities they could participate in. This book also discussed the prevalent expectations that women would be “civilizing” forces on campus and described the kinds of hostility women encountered if they challenged these accepted norms. Unfortunately this didn’t tell me which of these sorts of rules existed on the Berkely campus.

A second source, The Quack’s Daughter: A True Story about the Private Life of a Victorian College Girl, by Greta Nettleton (2014), while not giving me insight into Berkeley, did provide an important example of the difference between how a young college woman was supposed to comport herself and how she might actually behave. Consequently, this biography of Cora Keck, who attended Vassar in the mid-1880s, proved particularly helpful. It described the very active social life pursued by young women whose parents thought their daughters were safely sequestered in an all-female institution. Cora and her friends found a variety of Harvard, Yale, and Andover men (Cora called them “Dudes”) to escort them to ice cream parlors and take them ice skating, boating, and on carriage rides out into the country. Cora also went with different classmates to New York City, where they attended the theatre, went shopping, and had champagne dinners with a number of young men. (As an aside, Cora’s experiences would also inform a section of the next books Lethal Remedies.)

Perhaps most interesting, Cora and her friends filled scrapbooks with mementoes of these activities, including cheap photographs (which felt very much like modern selfies) in which Cora and her friends posed with the “Dudes” they had met in town. This kind of scrapbook became an important part of the plot of Scholarly Pursuits.

However, it wasn’t until I discovered the Blue and Gold, the university yearbooks (digitized and available for free online), that I got the specific material I needed to flesh out what the lives of Berkeley students—including women--were like in 1880-81. See this Historical Tidbits and this one for more detail. It was in the pages of these yearbooks and research in the San Francisco newspapers that I finally discovered my mystery plot.

Much to my surprise, I discovered that Berkeley students were involved in violent cane rushes where the freshmen and sophomores battled to subdue and tie up their rivals. They brutally hazed fellow students, in one case resulting in a shooting and a Grand Jury report. Throughout the year students engaged in periodic “beer busts,” culminating in an annual night of drinking and revelry called the “Burying of the Bourdon.” And in the three years prior to the opening events of Scholarly Pursuits, one faction of students started an anti-fraternity paper, the Oestrus, which garnered death threats sent to the paper’s editors, and another group of students published a scandalous “bogus” program for the yearly Junior Exhibition, which resulted in mass suspensions and a brief ban of fraternities. Finally, in June of 1881, the Board of Regents recommended that the president of the university and several of his faculty supporters be fired.

I confess, as someone who went to college in the late-sixties, a time when Berkeley was known for its liberalism and student activism, all this came as a complete surprise, and in this Historical Tidbits I went into a lot of detail about the role of fraternities on campus in these scandals.

What didn’t surprise me was the ample evidence these yearbooks revealed that the women who attended Berkeley in this period experienced an environment that included both subtle and not-so-subtle hostility to their very existence at the school. For example, when the members of the senior class of 1881 were asked if they believed in co-education, every one of the men said no. And while they might have said they were just joking—many of their answers to other questions were obviously meant to be satirical—I suspect that the women in that graduating class (who all answered yes to the question) might not have found the joke amusing. In fact, one of the women said her future occupation was going to be “Women’s Rights.”

There was no indication that any of the writers or editors of the yearbook were female, and hostility towards women on campus showed up in a number of other ways as well. The description of a cottage where female students lived was called “the hen-coop,” and numerous illustrations in these yearbooks portrayed women unflatteringly as ugly old maids or overly masculine. One entry in the 1879 Blue and Gold was all about a fake society called the Marthenian Literary Society, which stated that the goal of this society was “…to promote the noble cause of co-education” but then went on to say that the most popular debate of the society was: “Resolved that old maids are neither useful nor ornamental…” which was “…decided in the affirmative.”

And it wasn’t that difficult to imagine what problems this sort of environment might produce--where young women were away from home for the first time, very aware of the degree to which they were challenging traditional attitudes about women’s place in society, and where young men were pressured to demonstrate their masculinity through alcohol and not so veiled violence. And from this juxtaposition I found my crimes and the story of real events, I finally found my crimes for Scholarly Pursuits.

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