Glimmering Girls tells the story of three extraordinary American women during a time of sexual and cultural repression. Francie and her friends Liz and Amanda are college students, coming of age intellectually, emotionally, and physically in a setting where men were forbidden entry to women's dorm rooms, and women were locked into those rooms after curfew. College life for women was governed by one simple, cardinal rule: Marry Before Graduation or Be Lost Forever. Any thirst for adventure was supposed to be satisfied by the occasional panty raid. Francie and friends, however, find all this hard to swallow, and they resist their appointed futures as elementary school teachers and holders of the precious "MRS" degree. Doing the unthinkable, the three move off campus to live in a house with three men-Liz's boyfriend and two handsome, mysterious Southern twins who fix foreign cars in a shop off campus. There the young women's rebellion against expectations deepens, and they begin the real-world education of pursuing their dreams. Francie yearns to be a writer, and is encouraged by her Russian literature professor. Then she meets Joshua, a talented and dedicated piano student, who presents the ultimate challenge: does she maintain her "virtue," or give in to her sexual desires, finally breaking fully free of repressive "respectability"? Glimmering Girls follows Francie, Liz, and Amanda through this and other discoveries and adventures. Ultimately, each finds a way to live fully at a time when their entire culture seemed arrayed against them.
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Editorial Reviews
From Booklist
Imagine being "campused." Horrors! For that meant virtual imprisonment in one's dorm room as punishment for not having both feet solidly on the floor while entertaining a male guest. So things went, along with strictly enforced curfews, panty raids, and girdles for proper young women, in 1959, especially in the South. Transplanted New Yorker Francie, a first-semester University of Florida senior, is delighted that Amanda and Liz, though more worldly than she, accept her, after which it is soon bye-bye to dateless roomie Mary Ella and hello to off-campus housing with her newfound friends and three other students--men! Sputters Mary Ella, living embodiment of feminine dreams of the time (she's bent on getting an MRS before graduation), "Consider me grateful I don't have to share this room with a loose woman next term." Survivors of the era Gerber depicts may shake their heads in recollection and cheer Francie's efforts at independence, while younger readers will appreciate the charm and fast pacing of a period piece presaging the feminist movement. Whitney Scott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
"As a woman of that period I enjoyed particularly the detailed account of dorm regulations, of surveillance, of two "feet on the floor" rules for evening guests. [Gerber] hasn't forgotten much about what it was like to move into adulthood—sexual and social—in a world so restrictive, fearful, and distrustful of natural impulses."—Janet Burstein, author of Telling the "Little Secrets": American Jewish Writers of the New Wave
"Gerber's fine attention to craft is abundantly evident, from the wonderful pacing of the narrative to her sympathetic and adroit rendering of her independent and intelligent artist-as-a-young-woman protagonist struggling through an era of American life that refuses to extol such qualities in women."—Andrew Furman, author of Contemporary Jewish-American Writers and the Multicultural Dilemma: Return of the Exiled
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Gerber seems to remember my youth better than I do!!!!,
By Melody Moskowitz (Tucson, AZ United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Glimmering Girls: A Novel of the Fifties (Library of American Fiction) (Hardcover)
Although I "went away to school" to what I would have thought was college vastly differernt from the Florida university that is the scene of Gerber's most recent triumph, the similarities among the experiences of her young woman protagonist and mine and those of my friends startled me. I guess that for almost everyone who was a teen in the 1950s in the USA the intense repressiveness made secret-keepers and rule-breakers of us all. Glimmering Girls is both a wonderful novel, beautifully written and absorbing, and an important social document that I hope will be read by many. Gerber successfully recreates a time when women's bodies didn't belong to us, when female sexuality was supposed to be an oxymoron, when the MRS. was a degree more devoutly to be wished for than a PhD, and "true love" and its "inevitable" consequence -- a happy marriage -- was the only legitimate transition to adulthood for a girl. And yet, for all the astute revelations of the repressiveness of life for women in the decade before the Women's Liberation Movement began to stir, there is no hint in this book of the polemic; it's just a wonderful story about a time that is thankfully past (although the current administration seems to be doing its best to revive it) -- or is it?
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
from Hadassah Magazine, Aug/Sept 2005 by Joan Baum,
By A Reader (California) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Glimmering Girls: A Novel of the Fifties (Library of American Fiction) (Hardcover)
Hadassah Magazine August/Sept 2005
Glimmering Girls: A Novel of the Fifties by Merrill Joan Gerber, The University of Wisconsin Press, 249 pp., $26.95. Merrill Joan Gerber's Glimmering Girls recreates with cool humor and aching passion what it was like for college-educated young women to grow up at a time when the spirit of the age remained the `50s, even when the decade changed. The story is set in conservative 1959 and ends with Francie's college graduation. Although the feminist, free-wheeling `60s don't explode until the new decade is half over, Francie's not waiting. A good Jewish girl, whose letters home to her parents in Brooklyn are filled with appreciation and updates on her life--from studying hard on a pro forma education major to observing the rules of the heavily chaperoned dorm. Restless to experience life, and unlike her more typical roommate Mary Ella Root, who looks to get a Mrs. degree, Francie falls in with Liz and Amanda. The two propose that they move in together off campus - with three guys. one of whom, though of Francie's "tribe," is in love with Liz. The other two are amiable identical twins in love with cars. As Francie discovers, however, experiencing life involves secrecy and taking half-understood risks, some of which propel her into anxiety. Having run off for a couple of days with Liz and Amanda and the twins to a lakeside cabin, will she ever get back to finish her term paper? Could she become pregnant if semen leaks through her skirt? Will she ever get back to civilization and her term paper, having run off for a couple of days with Liz and Amanda and the twins to a lakeside cabin? Will she and Joshua, a Jewish boy and fine pianist whom she beds and loves, get together again? Meanwhile, Francie, a Phi Beta determined to be a writer, is turned down for a graduate school fellowship by a dean who says women are unreliable. Though she is poised on the edge, uncertain, Francie senses that "something is definitely going on here, something shattering and monumental enough to bring tears to her eyes." One thing's for sure, Francie and Liz have escaped from "the innocence of the Garden of Eden, no longer glimmering girls, more like illuminated women. Gerber movingly captures the ambivalence of the coming of age of bright young women, and of the brave new world in which they will make their way. That Francie is Jewish and far from home gives the tale special resonance. Her path may be rougher than Liz's or Amanda's, but then again, she's burning bright. --Joan Baum
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