The Mischief Continues…
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- Fake Mount Holyoke blue laws, appeared in Amherst College newspaper
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- Senior hazing a freshman, 1936
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- A senior hazing a freshman, 1950
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- Seniors hazing a freshman, 1941
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- Helen Clark Severinghaus PhD ‘27
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- Helen Clark Severinghaus PhD ‘27 was written up for missing curfew.
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- Annette Mowatt Ransom ’36
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- Annette Mowatt Ransom ’36 was fined 50 cents for a third absence.
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- Annette Mowatt Ransom ’36 again fined 50 cents, this time for damaging school property.
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- Annette Mowatt Ransom ’36 was repeatedly scolded for not attending chapel.
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- Snow sculpture, 1980s
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- Fake note from Mary Lyon
» Read the feature article, “Mischief Managed“, from the fall 2013 Alumnae Quarterly.
November 5, 2013
Who else was there that night, when we spent the night partying in the library, perhaps in 1989 or 90..? After an exciting 007-style security evasion, skulking behind bookcases as the flashlights passed, we danced on the tables and low shelves, turned the paintings upside-down, and finally left when we were too tired to cause any more trouble. We did make sure the doors were pulled to and no one could break in before we left:-)
My favorite piece of mischief came on the first day of classes of Spring ’79. Several screw-driver wielding students changed all of the room numbers in Clapp overnight creating a very interesting and chaotic morning.
This brings to mind the oft-quoted (but usually mis-attributed) line “Well-behaved women rarely/seldom make history.”
The earliest evidence of a version of this phrase appeared in an academic paper in the journal “American Quarterly” in 1976 by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. The statement used the word “seldom” instead of “rarely” or “never”: 1
Well-behaved women seldom make history; …
In 1976 Ulrich was a student at the University of New Hampshire, and she earned her Ph.D. in History there in 1980. She is now an eminent Pulitzer-Prize-winning Professor of early American history at Harvard University. The article containing the phrase was titled “Vertuous Women Found: New England Ministerial Literature, 1668-1735″. The goal of the paper (and much of Ulrich’s work) was the recovery of the history of women who were not featured in history books of the past. She was interested in limning the lives of ordinary women who were considered “well-behaved” or “vertuous” (an alternate spelling of virtuous).
So we should celebrate MHC’s own long-history of ‘mischief’. 🙂
I loved this Mischief article, but was disappointed it didn’t include reference to what my friends and I fondly remember as “The Great Caper” — a week-long undertaking necessitated by the deposit (by unknown miscreants) of a large framed oil portrait of Elizabeth Mead in the Abbey dorm room of Alexis Chapin ’72 — a birthday gift for Lexy that arrived shortly before Winter Break 1970. We (7 from the Class of ’72) decorated the portrait with candy canes, stealthily moved it to the attic of Abbey (access through the first floor phone booth!) and composed rhymed Treasure Hunt-style clues which we then hid behind various favorite paintings that hung around campus. The last clue placed was the initiating clue for the Hunt. We had a male friend tape it to the discolored spot of the wall in Mead Hall where the stolen portrait had hung. Members of MHC’s crack Security Force spent several hours that night criss-crossing the campus, finding and solving clues, until they finally located the missing portrait. We succeeded in our objective of returning the portrait without our identities being discovered and without incurring any punishment. Several years later, however, I was moved to confess my involvement in this matter to members of the Security Force who were escorting me to deposit proceeds from that evening’s Summer Theater performance and who were jovially recounting their part in the Treasure Hunt three years earlier. Luckily, my “permanent record card” was not within their reach. (Documenting photos available on request.)