M. Louisa Locke's Blog, page 4

Under Two Moons Free Promotion

[image error]Just a quick post letting you know that Under Two Moons, the second book in my science fiction trilogy, is free on Kindle through Saturday, May 11, 2019.

I am incredibly proud of this trilogy, which is primarily the story about a young woman who is coming to grips with living in a world where the natives have psychic abilities and some key animals are sentient. In fact, Under Two Moons introduces, Silence, a large feline, who has become one of my favorite characters.

I really have enjoyed alternating writing in the the past world of Victorian San Francisco with this near future world (New Eden) that I helped create as part of the open source, multi-authored Paradisi Chronicles, so I am pleased to announce that I am currently working with my daughter, Ashley Rey, on the sequel to The Stars are Red Tonight, the novella we wrote in this shared world.

This new book, which we have entitled To Sleep, Perhaps to Die, will continue the origin story of the Kuttner family (who was one of the ten Founding Families of the Paradisi Project) that we started telling in the novella. Our hope is to have this short novel done and published by mid-summer, at which point I will dive right back into researching and writing the next full-length book about Annie and Nate Dawsons’ continuing adventures into solving crime in Victorian San Francisco.

Meanwhile, a reminder that Between Mountain and Sea, the first book in the Caelestis Series trilogy, is free for a limited time for all Amazon Prime subscribers, and all the books in the Trilogy (and the boxed set–which includes a bonus short story) plus the novella are free to subscribers to Kindle Unlimited.

M. Louisa Locke, May, 8, 2019

 

Maids of Misfortune: A New Audiobook Edition

[image error]I am very pleased to announce that a new audiobook edition of Maids of Misfortune is now available. This is a completely new version, narrated by Alexandra Haag, who has narrated all the rest of my Victorian San Francisco mystery series and my science fiction trilogy. In addition, if you get the book from AppleBooks, Nook, Kobo, or GooglePlay, you can get it for under $10.

I am particularly excited about the fact this book, as well as most of the rest of my books, are now available to rent as audiobooks from libraries.

I decided to have this new version of Maids of Misfortune done for two reasons. First, I was so happy with the way that Alexandra Haag has been interpreting my characters that I wanted listeners to get a chance to hear her narrative interpretation of this crucial first book in the series. However, I couldn’t do this until my contract with the first narrator was completed, which happened this year.

Just as a personal side-note, I met Alexandra through a mutual friend (who I do water aerobics with) who acted rather as a match-maker. Only after meeting Alexandra and deciding to hire her did I discover she was the wife of my dentist! Small world.

My second reason for paying to put out this new second edition was that I could distribute this audiobook version entirely through Findaways. The first edition of Maids of Misfortune, because of the nature of my contract with the first narrator, had to be exclusively distributed through ACX, a branch of Amazon. This meant it could only be available on Amazon, Audible and Apple, and I had no control over the price they set.

In contrast, Findaways lets me distribute to dozens of different audiobook stores throughout the world, it lets me make the book available to libraries, and it lets me set the price (everywhere but on Amazon and Audible.)

Anyway, I am so pleased with this second version of the book that I am suggesting that those of you who have already heard the first version consider buying this one as well.

That is one of the reasons that–where I could–I priced the book at $9.99 (under half of what Amazon and Audible are charging) and I have been ecstatic that AppleBooks and Nook have discounted it further for now.

[image error]And while I am talking about discounts, I have a short promotion running on Uneasy Spirits. In conjunction with a BookBub promotion of Maids of Misfortune, I decided to drop the price of this second book in the series from $4.99 to $2.99 until April 26.

Although I find it difficult to believe that any of you who subscribe to this blog don’t already know about Uneasy Spirits, or haven’t already read it, I would love it if you passed on the word to your friends that for less than three dollars you can get the first and second ebooks in this series. In addition, I believe that if you already have purchased a copy of Uneasy Spirits on Amazon (or do so during this sale), the audio book version (narrated by Alexandra Haag) is only $7.49!

Uneasy Spirits: $2.99 April 21-26 at Kindle AppleBooks  Kobo  Nook  GooglePlay and international retailers.

M. Louisa Locke, April 22, 2019

Come check out my updated website

In December of 2009, I had just put out my first book, Maids of Misfortune, when I published my first blog on my newly created website. Except for a little tweaking here and there, I haven’t changed the look of that website since then. However, I recently did a major update, and I would love some feedback from you all about what you think of the new look.

First, a Little History: 

It is hard to believe, but in 2009, the whole indie author movement was in its infancy. The explosion of ebooks and audiobooks as alternatives to print and the expansion of the online market place as an alternative to physical bookstores hadn’t happened yet. And there certainly wasn’t a vibrant industry devoted to helping indie authors achieve success.

In fact, most of the advice that was out there for authors was still directed at people interested in traditional publishing (focused on how to get an agent, sell your book to a small publishing company, or organize a book signing tour.)

For those of us who had decided to forgo the traditional publishing route (see my January 2010 blog posts on this decision), there were only a few author pioneers (for example, Joe Konrath and April Hamilton) who were giving advice on how to get stories to readers (with Kindle Direct Publishing and Smashwords as the major methods for producing and distributing ebooks) or how to market these books once they were published.

Myspace! was the place authors were supposed to go and establish their social media presence; Facebook existed but had no author pages and had only recently instituted the like button on personal pages. There was no KDP Select, with its exclusivity or promotional tools, and there were just a few ebook promotion sites (BookBub wasn’t even a twinkle in someone’s eye.) And the various tools that many authors have become used to using–like Scrivener and Vellum–hadn’t yet been developed.

For new indie authors who are reading this, I feel like I am telling you about the time before telephones and cars, when we indie authors had to walk 5 miles in the snow to sell a book. And in someways this was true. But there were some real benefits to be an “early adopter.” First of all, there weren’t so many decisions to make. Mostly the advice was simple––build a website listing your books, publish a blog to attract readers, and experiment with price to get those readers to try your books. And, the competition for readers who had embraced ebooks or bought their books on-line was substantially less..

In addition, because I had no idea whether my one book would sell, and I definitely didn’t know if it would make me any money, I decided to do as much as I could myself–and only paid a professional to design my covers.

I had a few skills that helped me going into this brave new world. I wasn’t afraid of computers, I knew how to create a word document, I knew how to search the internet for advice, and I was good at following someone else’s written instructions. I also had a husband who knew html and could help me out when I couldn’t understand something too technical. Oh, and I like learning new stuff.

Otherwise, I was pretty much a DIY indie author, which meant I formatted my own books to upload as ebooks and in print and designed my own website, using the free wordpress.com software. The only money I spent was for a professionally designed cover (shout out to Michelle Huffaker!)

My Initial Website:

Since Maids of Misfortune (which was hopefully going to be the first of a series of books) was set in Victorian San Francisco, my guiding principle was that my website should reflect the Victorian era. I confess my original plan was quite ambitious. I had this idea that I could build a website to look like a Victorian house (with each page being linked to a different room in the house.)

On the other hand, I also wanted a website that I didn’t have to depend on someone else to build or maintain. The whole thrust of being an indie author, for me, was to keep as much control over the process of publishing and marketing as I could. So, I pretty quickly jettisoned the whole–Victorian House–idea and was satisfied with building a website with a very simple theme where I could use a Victorian wall paper pattern as my background and install an old-timely font. And, as a remnant of that original plan, I called my blog the “Front Parlor.”

And off I went, adding my books and short stories as they were published, and writing blog pieces about my indie author journey, the history of Victorian San Francisco, and announcing promotional opportunities. And the website and blog worked for me. For a number of years, I wrote 2-3 posts a month and averaged 40-50,000 visitors to my website a year. I also felt quite smug when I heard other authors complain about the expense or difficulty of upgrading or even updating their websites, which had been designed by professionals.

However, over time, I started to worry that the original design wasn’t working.

Enter the Paradisi Chronicles:

Four years ago, I published Between Mountain and Sea, the first book in an open-source science fiction world, called the Paradisi Chronicles, that I had helped create with multiple other indie authors. The question became, how did I reconcile the fact that I now had two series, in two different genres.

I didn’t want two websites. Not just because of the extra work, but because it was quite evident from the reviews of my science fiction work that (as I had hoped) fans of my historical mysteries were enjoying my science fiction. So I just added a tab for the Paradisi Chronicles and hoped for the best. However, as the number of works I have written in that series (a trilogy, a short story, and a novella that I co-wrote with my daughter) grew, the more dissatisfied I became with the way that the science fiction series felt like an un-appreciated step-sibling on the site.

Consequently, when two indie authors I respect (David Gaughran and Sarah Woodbury) both mentioned how pleased they were with their new websites, designed and installed by a fellow indie author, Caro Begin, I decided it was time to do something about my dissatisfaction.

My New Website:

First of all, I do want to say that Caro made the whole process very painless. She has created a website theme that is specifically designed for authors, which makes it very easy to keep book links up-to-date. Even better, it is a theme that I can easily maintain on my own.

Second, she did a great job of working with me to create a design that gave equal billing to both my historical mysteries and my science fiction, without making to abrupt a break with the old website. You will find the color scheme is pretty much the same, and that the blue Victorian wallpaper and the old-timely font still play a role, and none of the content was lost–just rearranged in a few places.

In short, I feel like the old site has had a great face-lift, just in time for me to embark on my second decade of indie authorship.

So, go and look around, and let me know what you think.

M. Louisa, April 20, 2019

 

Discounts for Spring 2019

First of all, thanks to everyone who has bought the most recent book in my Victorian San Francisco mystery series, Scholarly Pursuits, and said such nice things about it in comments and reviews. This certainly motivates me to get right back to writing. I am currently doing research on women in the medical professions in San Francisco for the next mystery, while working on the sequel to the novella I co-wrote with my daughter,  The Stars are Red Tonight, which is set in the Paradisi Chronicles universe.

[image error]And the first two discounts I wanted to tell you about are on Between Mountain and Sea, the first book in my Caelesis series. For a limited time, the ebook edition, which is currently only found on Kindle, is on the Prime Reading list. What that means is that if you subscribe to Amazon Prime you can borrow Between Mountain and Sea for Free–all you have to do is be signed into your Amazon Prime account when you click to buy the book. 

Amazon Prime is different than Kindle Unlimited (which is a separate subscription service), and prior to the folks of KDP asking to include Between Mountain and Sea on the Prime Reading list, I had no idea that prime membership (which I use to get free shipping and stream movies) also included access to a rotating list of about 1000 ebooks, which you can borrow for free. To see the entire Prime Reading list, click HERE.

I hope that those of you who are fans of my mystery series but have been hesitant to give my science fiction work a try will use this opportunity to try this book for free. I have been very encouraged by how positively both readers who are familiar with my mysteries and readers who are new to my work have responded to this series–with 78% giving Between Mountain and Sea 5 stars. 

[image error]And, for those of you who prefer audiobooks, Between Mountain and Sea is not only available to buy in a whole lot of different stores, but in Barnes and Noble’s online store, they have discounted the audiobook edition 50%, so it is only $7.50. I don’t know how long this discount will last, but I also noticed they had the next two audiobooks in this series, Under Two Moons and Through Ddaera’s Touch, discounted 23% for now as well. 

[image error]And speaking of audiobooks. I am very excited to announce that I have had a new edition of Maids of Misfortune produced by Alexandra Haag, who has narrated all of my other Victorian San Francisco mystery books, as well as my Paradisi Chronicles trilogy. I am sorry to say that listeners didn’t respond well to the narrator for the original edition of Maids of Misfortune, which is why I switched to Alexandra. However, now that my original contract with that first narrator is over, I am very pleased that I have been able to get this new version produced by Alexandra. It is not available everywhere yet, but it is available on iTunes–for the discounted price of only $7.99 which is a wonderful deal. 

And finally, the boxed set of the first 4 books in the Victorian San Francisco Mystery series is available on Kobo at a 40% discount until March 25. All you have to do is put in the code 40MAR at check out. Here is a page listing all the boxed sets currently involved in this Kobo promotion. 

So, lots of opportunities to get some reading and listening materials at a discount as you look forward to sunnier weather after a very long winter.

M. Louisa Locke, March, 22, 2019

When Men will be Boys: Masculinity and Late 19th Century Fraternities

[image error]When I started research on my newest book, Scholarly Pursuits, the sixth novel in my Victorian San Francisco Mystery series, my only agenda was to take some of my series characters across the San Francisco Bay to solve a crime on the University of California campus at Berkeley. I was primarily curious about what life was like for college students in 1881, and since my mystery series focuses on women and their experiences in this period, I assumed I would mostly deal with what life was like for my female characters. (If interested in this topic, see this post.)

What I did not expect was to find myself researching college fraternities and the role they played in the emergence of a new kind of hyper-masculinity among young men of the late nineteenth century.

In fact, if you had asked me before I embarked on the research for this book, I would have guessed that there weren’t any fraternities on such a recently-established, state-supported campus (the University of California was founded in 1868 and opened its first campus at Berkeley in 1873.)

Instead, I learned that in 1881 there were five male fraternities and one female fraternity (which was not yet called a sorority) and that four years earlier, Berkeley’s Zeta Psi fraternity was the first fraternity in the nation to have built their own fraternity house.

I also discovered that members of these campus fraternities had played prominent roles in the brutal hazing of fellow students, drunken beer bashes, and the creation of scurrilous fake publications, sparking an anti-fraternity movement on campus that resulted in a temporary ban on fraternities that divided the students and faculty and may have resulted in the recommendation by the Board of Trustees that the university president be fired in May, 1881.

The rest of this essay can be found posted on the Historical Fiction Authors Cooperative website. When you have finished reading it, do take a look at the wonderful books in its catalog.

M. Louisa Locke

Who were the Women Attending Berkeley in 1880-81?

[image error]In Scholarly Pursuits (now available), I set the mystery on the University of California campus at Berkeley during the spring term of 1881. The university, first opened in 1863, didn’t enroll any women until 1870, and between 1874 and 1881, only ten percent of the bachelor’s degrees granted by the university went to women.

This is not surprising, given that one of the decade’s most popular books was Sex in Education (1873), a book by Edward Clarke, a Harvard medical school physician, who argued that women who were educated in the same fashion as men would face an inability to conceive and produce healthy children, life-long illness, and possible death. Clarke only produced anecdotal evidence to support his claims, nevertheless, his views gave a veneer of science to already held prejudices against women attending institutions of higher education, particularly co-educational institutions like Berkeley.

As a result, in 1880, less than a third of young people who attended four-year colleges or universities were female and only nineteen percent of bachelor’s degrees granted by these institutions were granted to women. And the University of California at Berkeley followed national patterns when it came to women’s enrollment.

For example, in the academic year, 1880-1881, less than a third of the currently enrolled students were female. To translate this into actual numbers, there were only 216 students enrolled as undergraduates that year, sixty-two of them female. In addition, only slightly more than half of the women who were enrolled were full-time students (compared to the male population of students, where eighty-five percent were enrolled as full time students that year.)

[image error]

Women were definitely in the minority wherever they went on campus.

For instance, there were only four women in the whole senior class in 1880-81, and the two of them who majored in chemistry were probably the only two females in their upper- division science classes.

Since the primary characters in Scholarly Pursuits were freshmen, I am going to examine this group of women, the graduating class of ’84, in more detail.

At the start of the year, there were fourteen women listed freshmen, only eight of them registered as regular, full-time students. Eight of those fourteen freshmen women (fifty-seven percent) eventually obtained bachelor’s degrees, which was actually a fairly good percentage, given that only twenty-four percent of the men who started with them in this class made it to graduation.

These fourteen women were young. The youngest was Adelaide Graham, who was only fifteen when she started out, and the oldest were the twins, Mabel and Maude Walcott, who were nineteen.

While these women apparently didn’t agree with Edward Clarke and his belief that the use of one’s brain would damage a woman’s reproductive ability, neither was there much evidence to suggest they were particularly radical in their goals for attending the university. None of these young women were majoring in one of the sciences, in fact all but one of them were taking the literary versus the more difficult classics course of studies in the College of Letters. And, according to the Illustrated History of the University of California, 1868-1895, among the women from this class who graduated, nearly two-thirds of them were listed as having married, and the only occupation any of them listed was teaching, which was generally seen as the occupation that was most compatible with motherhood.  

Berkeley at this time didn’t have any sort of university-sanctioned housing or dormitories for its students (see my blog post on how this deviated from other contemporary universities). This meant that most of them had to find housing for themselves. Angie Bemis, Blanche Newell, and Margaret Scobbie, the three women who commuted from San Francisco, and Bella Taggart, who commuted from Oakland, may have been living with their parents, and Helen Gompertz, and Carrie LeConte, who were the children of Berkeley faculty members, were definitely living at home. 

However, based on the information I found in the local Berkeley directory, the rest of the students seemed to be living in some of the boarding houses that had sprung up on the edges of campus, including Mabel and Maud Walcott and Louise Brier, who were boarding along with siblings who were also attending the university.

With such a small number of women starting out in the class of ’84, it would have been easy for them to get to know each other. First of all, the entire freshman class (all sixty-eight of them) were required to take the basic English and Math classes held in one of the large North Hall lecture rooms. 

[image error]

North Hall, U.C. Berkeley

The accepted convention in this period was that women sit together in the front of the classroom and this ensured they would get to know each other. It also meant that each morning as they walked to the front of the room, they would be painfully aware of the fifty or more young men watching them as they did so––most likely aware that many of these men were not particularly pleased with the presence of women in their classes.

However, this would also encourage them to develop strong friendships with the other women, as they sat together, walked with each other to the next class, or perhaps used their breaks between classes to go down the hill to get a pastry at the Golden Sheaf Bakery, just west of campus.

[image error]

After their English and math classes were over, over forty percent of the freshman would peel off to take either the more rigorous Latin and Greek classes required of classical studies majors or the expanded math and chemistry classes required of students in one of the departments of the College of Sciences. The rest (about forty students and thirteen of the women) would stay together for the truncated Latin class for the literary studies majors. This group would then split further because they could chose between French or German for their required modern language as their fourth class their freshman year.

For fictional purposes, I had two of my female characters, Kitty Blaine and Celia Beale, taking the classical studies course, whereas in the real freshman class there was only one woman, Bella Taggart, who did so. This would have meant that in her Greek and Latin classes she would have been the only woman present (along with the seven men taking these classes). 

The fourteen female freshman would have also had opportunities to meet some of the other forty-eight women on campus, even if they didn’t take classes with them. They would have passed them on the stairs of North Hall, met them in the Ladies Lounge of South Hall (which contained the classes in the sciences), or in the temporary library that was housed in that same building. 

After classes were over, some of these first year women might have even struck up a friendship with an upper class woman who was an exercise enthusiast at the Harmon Gymnasium, which was open to women every Wednesday and Friday afternoons while the male students were marching around campus as part of their required military drills.

[image error]

Illustration from 1880 Blue and Gold Yearbook

In contrast, there were lots of opportunities for Berkeley men to socialize with each other outside of class. They had the weekly military drills, the rifle club, baseball and football teams, all-male glee clubs, and the five male fraternities, not to mention Bachman’s, the local Beer Hall. 

There were, however, a number of extra-curricular activities that Berkeley women could attend, where they could meet women from the other graduating classes, as well as get an opportunity to socialize with men.

In 1880-81, there was the small University Bible Students club, the newly formed Philosophy Club, the various graduating class glee clubs, the Durant Rhetorical Society and the Neolaean Literary Society and the meetings of the “class unions,” where all the members of a graduating class would gather.

None of the first year women attended either the Bible or the Philosophy Club, but ten of them belonged to the Class of ’84 Glee Club, along with sixteen men from their class. Only one of the first year female students, Isabella Miller, was a member of the Durant Rhetorical Society, while three of the part-time students, Lizzie Beggs, Louise Brier, and Alice Chapman, belonged to the Neolaean Literary Society (although in later years five other of their female classmates would join.)

The Durant and Neolaean societies held weekly meetings, and I couldn’t help but wonder if the reason so few of the young women joined was because of how busy they were with their school work. Given the popular idea promulgated by Clarke and others that  too much academic work would damage a woman’s health, it could be that those women taking a full-course load feared over-extending themselves with extra-curricular clubs. Surely they would have been aware of how many of the previous class of freshmen (thirty percent) had failed to make it through the end of year exams and matriculate on to their sophomore year.

The difficulty in finding time outside of the classroom to study would be particularly true for those students who, like Laura Dawson, one of main characters in Scholarly Pursuits, commuted to campus from San Francisco. The three hour round trip between San Francisco and campus (which would include taking a ferry across the Bay and then a train to Berkeley), on top of at least four hours in classes, wouldn’t leave them much time to go to the library, exercise at the gymnasium, sing in the glee club, or attend a weekly literary society meeting.

It could be that some women were also hesitant to join organizations where they would have been even more of a minority than they were in the classroom. Both of the literary societies had only recently permitted women to join at all. The year before, the Durant Society had no women members, and I suspect that one of the only reasons that Isabella Miller felt comfortable joining this society (where women were less than a fifth of the membership) was that her brother belonged.

The Neolaean Society seemed more welcoming. In 1880-81, a quarter of the members were women, one of them an officer, and while that year the society’s glee club members were all men, by the next year, half of them were women. 

However, this was not to say that every male was welcoming. Many of the men on campus were still uneasy about co-education in general, and the Blue and Gold yearbooks frequently included unflattering comments about and illustrations of Berkeley co-eds, with constant references to them as old maids.

[image error]

From the 1881 Blue and Gold Yearbook

These negative attitudes by some of their male classmates (which are a plot element in Scholarly Pursuits) might explain why four years later, all of the class of ’84 women who answered the yearbook survey of seniors gave their political affiliation as “women’s rights.” It also might explain why only one of the women in this freshman class, Mable Walcott, ended up marrying a fellow Berkeley student—a young man, I might say, who didn’t impress me greatly when I noticed that his response on this same senior class survey to the question about whether or not he supported co-education, simply answered “yum, yum.”

In short, the young women of this freshman class would have been very aware that society in general, and many of their fellow students specifically, thought that they shouldn’t be at Berkeley. The fact that they obtained their degrees at over twice the rate of their fellow male classmates, demonstrated just how dedicated they were to prove everyone wrong.

Scholarly Pursuits is now available in print and on all major retailers!

M. Louisa Locke

Scholarly Pursuits arrives Tomorrow

As you can tell, I am excited about the launch of Scholarly Pursuits, the  sixth book in my Victorian San Francisco Mystery series, the first full-length novel since Pilfered Promises came out in July 2017. While I have published two novellas since then, I do know that is a long time for some of you to have waited, and I apologize. But if you pre-order today, the book should show up first thing on your eReaders tomorrow morning, and the print book is already available to order. 

Meanwhile, I was just sent the link to this video featuring “Nine Enthralling Long-running Mystery Series” that I thought you all might find fun. My Victorian Mystery Series is number six on the list.

M. Louisa Locke,  March 4, 2019

In loco parentis: A comparison of 19th century and 20th century coeducation

[image error]

Berkeley 1880-81 Blue and Gold Yearbook

Introduction: I confess, that like many historical fiction writers, I often choose my characters and plots as a way to explore certain subjects. For instance, my primary goal in starting to write my Victorian San Francisco Mystery series was to further explore and tell stories about the women I had studied for my history doctorate. Consequently, during the past ten years I have researched jobs women held in a variety of occupations including domestic service, spiritualism, public school teaching, the printing industry, and department stores.

However, while doing the research about public school teaching for Bloody Lessons, the third book in my mystery series, I discovered that the University of California had opened up its door to women in 1870, and I decided that at some point I would like to see what life was like for women attending a coeducational institution in this period.  (Bloody Lessons is free until February 5, 2019)

Fortunately, I had created a number of characters for Bloody Lessons that I could eventually send off to the University of California, at Berkeley, and the result is the forthcoming book in my Victorian San Francisco Mystery series, Scholarly Pursuits (now available for pre-order.)

My initial reason for doing this was simple. I was curious about what had changed (or hadn’t changed) for college women since I had gone off to college in 1967.

Much of what I discovered in doing this research surprised me, and in later blog posts I plan on looking at a range of issues, including the role of fraternities on the Berkeley campus.

However, in this blog post, I am going to concentrate on comparing the ways in which college institutions tried to regulate the behavior of their students, particularly women, in both the late nineteenth century (the setting of my Victorian mysteries) and the middle decades of the twentieth century (when I went off to college).

Scholarly Pursuits Characters: The four characters I introduced in Bloody Lessons and then followed across the bay to the University of California, Berkeley, in Scholarly Pursuits, were Laura Dawson, Seth Timmons, Kitty Blaine, Celia Beale, and Ned Goodwin. Laura Dawson, the younger sister of Nate Dawson, came to San Francisco to teach school, then she began to support herself as a typesetter (see Deadly Proof). Seth Timmons, a civil war veteran and a former cowboy, had met Laura at the San Jose Normal school and, like Laura, then began to work in the printing trades. Their friends, Kitty Blaine, Celia Beale, and Ned Goodwin, were all initially studying to become or were teachers before accompanying Laura and Seth to the university in the fall of 1880.

While Seth, in his early thirties, was over ten years older than the average student at Berkeley in that year, Laura and her other three friends fit the profile better in terms of their ages—which ranged from late teens to early twenties. The women were certainly average in terms of the reason they were at Berkeley––to pursue either a classical or literary degree in the College of Letters, which was seen as the best road to a teaching or administrative position in the higher grades (where they could get a higher salary.)

And while all of these characters, except for Ned Goodwin (who lived in one of the two fraternity houses near campus), commuted from San Francisco to Berkeley––this also fit the student profile for this period. Forty percent of the freshman class in 1880-1881 lived in either Oakland or San Francisco. The reason for this was appears to be that there were no dormitories on campus and the town of Berkeley was so small that it was hard (and expensive) for students to find places to board near by, and it was therefore easier to live at home or board outside of Berkeley and do the two-hour round trip commute to Oakland or San Francisco.

The fact that I had both Laura and Seth work part-time also reflected the reality for many students at this time. One history of the university stated that half of the students in 1874 held jobs, working on campus, working in the manual trades in San Francisco, or working for private families to put themselves through college.

So, when I sent these characters off to the university, I felt I could honestly portray their experience as typical of college students attending Berkeley. What remained for me to do was discover what their life on campus would have been like—compared to my own experience at Oberlin College in the late 1960s.

Twentieth Century Oberlin College:

In 1967, when I left home to attend Oberlin College (a small liberal arts college in the middle of nowhere in the state of Ohio), most colleges still accepted the idea that they should act in loco parentis (like a parent) towards their students. As a result, most schools like Oberlin had regulations governing student behavior, on and off campus––rules that were often different for women and for men.

Some of these regulations said students couldn’t have a car on campus or leave campus over night without their parent’s permission. Others said women, not men, weren’t allowed to ride bikes with out that permission and that women were responsible for cleaning their rooms (while men could leave that up to the paid housekeepers.)

From my perspective as a student, a lot of these rules were a nuisance and were pretty much unenforceable––something we laughed at when we received the student handbook as freshmen. Although I remember being shocked when a friend broke her arm riding a bike…and got in trouble because her parents hadn’t given their permission to do so.

However, the rules that did have a good deal of impact on my day-to-day life as were the ones that regulated when male and female students could be alone together.

We could be together in public—in classrooms (which is where I met my husband), dining halls, the library, or outside, walking from building to building. Nevertheless, when I started college, men and women could only be together in private in a dorm room on Sunday afternoons or in the so-called “dating parlors” in the student union in the evening. After dinner, students would race across the quad to see who would get to the union in time to sign up for one of these precious rooms.

Even these limited opportunities for couples to be together in private were regulated—you had to keep the door to the rooms propped open by a wastepaper basket and keep “three feet on the floor.” (Yes, that was a written rule!)

Perhaps even more problematic, if you were female, was the regulation that female students had a curfew. If you planned on leaving your all-female dorm after dinner, (which was on the opposite side of the campus from the male dorms) you were supposed to sign out.  Then, when you came back to the dorm, you were supposed to sign in to show that you had returned for the night.

The doors to the women’s dormitories were locked at a certain time each night, which meant that you would therefore be “caught” if you were out past curfew (either because you would have to ring the bell and get the “house mother” to let you in, or if you tried to stay out all night, this would be revealed because you wouldn’t have signed back in.) For the life of me, I can’t remember what the punishment was if you failed to return on time––I think that it might have resulted in a letter to your parents and eventually being dismissed from the college if you achieved too many “demerits” for missing curfew. 

However, male students did not have curfews, their dorms were not locked, and they could stay out all night if they so chose.

Now, I don’t want to make it sound like we all mindlessly obeyed all these rules. For example, after several months of dutifully signing out and signing in and worrying about getting back in time for curfew, I remember when an older student told me that if I didn’t sign out, no would know I was out past curfew, and that I could always get someone who lived on the first floor to let me in.

Of course, once the nights got cold, and the classroom, library, and student union buildings were locked, there really wasn’t much reason to stay out past curfew—unless you were one of the brave souls who were willing to try to sneak into your boyfriend’s dorm room, or you were one of the fortunate students dating a senior who lived off campus.

Nevertheless, what I find amazing, is how accepting many of us initially were of these rules—including the explicit sexism of them. I don’t even remember thinking about how ironic the sexism was, given that in 1833, Oberlin had a very liberal reputation, based in part on the fact that it was the first college in the nation to permit women to attend college alongside men.

That liberal tradition, however, and the active participation of Oberlin students in the civil rights and anti war movements of the sixties, may have explained why Oberlin was also one of the first colleges in the nation to change its rules.

At the end of my freshman year, a group of female students held a co-ed “study-in” in a male dorm to protest the rules governing privacy and curfews, and by my junior year, the faculty had voted to end their responsibility to act in loco parentis. As a result, the curfews and restrictions about where and when students could be alone ended, and the first co-educational dorms were opened, getting the college featured in a front-page story in Life Magazine in 1970.

Nineteenth Century Coeducation:

Given my own experiences at Oberlin College, and the general history of gender roles in American society, I started my research into the lives of women students in the late nineteenth century expecting to find restrictive rules governing the lives of students, particularly female students. The information I found in the primary history of women’s experiences in co-educational institutions west of the Mississippi, Bright Epoch: Women and Coeducation in the American West (Andrea Radke-Moss, 2008), certainly fulfilled my expectations.

For example, in the five western coeducational institutions that Radke-Moss studied in detail, the regulations were even more restrictive than the rules I had faced at Oberlin. In all of the institutions, men and women were expected to sit separately in classrooms and assembly halls, and in most of them they were to take different entrances into campus classroom buildings. In some cases, women and men were even expected to go to the library at different times, and at Oregon Agricultural College and the University of Nebraska, men and women were not to speak to each other while on campus.

The regulations Radke-Moss discovered also limited the opportunities for campus-sanctioned social interaction between men and women. Except for chaperoned literary society meetings and the offices of the student newspapers, there didn’t appear to be any on-campus activities where men and women could socialize, and none of the colleges she studied permitted dances on campus until the 1890s.

However, much to my surprise, when I started to look into life of Berkeley students, I found a very different environment. There were virtually no formal rules governing student behavior in 1880-1881 (the year when my forthcoming book, Scholarly Pursuitsis set.) And there were ample examples of ways in which men and women freely interacted on campus.

[image error]

Berkeley 1880-81 Blue and Gold Yearbook

Except for the fact that women could only use the Harmon Gymnasium the two afternoons a week when the men were off marching around campus as part of the required military drills, the few examples of physical separation between the sexes on campus seemed to be informal. For example, while there is a photograph of a large lecture class showing women sitting separately from men in the 1890s, I found no evidence of regulations requiring this, and the 1880-81 Berkeley Blue and Gold Yearbook has two illustrations that showed men and women sitting together in a classroom and in the library.  (Even though these illustrations are humorous—as are all the illustrations in this yearbook––they nevertheless show that this sort of fraternization between men and women happened.)

Additionally, none of the memoirs or reminiscences of Berkeley student life during this period mentioned any prescription against men and women talking to each other on campus. In fact a lot of the satirical pieces in the yearbook recount lively interactions between men and women.

[image error]

Berkeley 1880-81 Blue and Gold Yearbook

There were also numerous extra-curricular campus activities that men and women participated in together, including the Durant and Neolaean literary societies, the Bible Club, the Philosophy Club, and several of the college glee clubs. This meant that practically every day of the week there was some excuse for men and women to spend time together outside the classroom. There was even a clubhouse dedicated to giving students a place to engage in these activities on campus, and I saw no mention that these meetings had to include a chaperone, although it was possible that was simply a given.

Strictly social activities were also permitted. Unlike the anti-dance policy that Radke-Moss found elsewhere, Berkeley held formal dances in the Harmon Gymnasium at least twice a year. One of these dances made the San Francisco papers because some of the male students became inebriated—supposedly having cadged alcohol from the band that was playing.

As for regulations regarding where students could live, and the imposition of special rules for women, I wasn’t surprised that Radke-Moss found rules very similar to the ones I lived under at Oberlin. For the five institutions she researched, the men and women’s dormitories were strictly segregated, with curfews for the women. For off campus housing, men were generally permitted to make their own arrangements, but women were either to board with respectable families or live in single-sex boardinghouses run by matrons, again, with strict curfews. The idea that women’s reputations required these rules was very much in evidence (although Radke-Moss found that students, like the students at Oberlin, often worked hard to figure out ways to circumvent these restrictions.

However, The University of California, at least in the 1870s and 1880s, appeared much less restrictive. First of all, except for a brief experiment in providing on campus housing in the form of eight cottages for male students, there were no university owned dormitories for students until the 1920s. This meant that all housing was off-campus, and as far as I could determine, there weren’t any written rules about off-campus housing.

For example, one of the female students at Berkeley in these years, May Shepard, lived in a boardinghouse run by her mother, who rented to both male and female students, including a Berkeley student who her daughter May subsequently married.  The university didn’t seem to have a problem with this, given that Mrs. Shepard rented one of the former “cottages,” from the university, despite the fact that she had both male and female students boarding with her.

In another case, a memoir by a student who attended Berkeley in the 1890s recounted how both male and females students rented rooms in his boardinghouse that was located a few blocks away from campus. This arrangement was not portrayed as at all unusual.

Conclusion: So, contrary to my expectations (or the experiences students in other late nineteenth century coeducational schools), the students at Berkeley faced many fewer attempts to regulate their social interactions and behavior than I had faced.

This wasn’t to say that these students, particularly the women, felt free to do as they pleased. In fact, I suspect the main reason there were so few formal rules was that, in this period, Berkeley was essentially a commuter school, with a large proportion of its students, especially the female students, living with their own families.

This meant that after classes were over, many of these students were under the authority of their own parents. And, even if they lived away from home (which was more common among the male students) and misbehaved (as there was ample evidence that many of the men did), the university didn’t have any mechanisms in place to do anything about that behavior since the students didn’t live in university controlled dorms or boardinghouses.

Interestingly, when the university did attempt to exert some authority over student behavior, for example, when the faculty temporarily banned fraternities in 1879, the parents reacted with a good deal of hostility––making it clear they felt the university had over-stepped its authority.

But in 1880, when my characters went off to Berkeley, the hand of the institution lay much more lightly on their lives than I expected. As you will see from Scholarly Pursuits, this lack of institutional control could, in fact, be problematic…for both male and female students––but that is an entirely different story.

Sources: Bright Epoch: Women and Coeducation in the American West (Andrea Radke-Moss, 2008); Berkeley, 1880-81 Blue and Gold Yearbook; The University of California: 1868-1968 (Verne Stadtman, 1970) 

Bloody Lessons is Free on Kindle and all other major ebookstores until February 5; and Scholarly Pursuits is now available for pre-order on Kindle and all other major ebookstores, and will be published in  ebook and print on March 5, 2019.

[image error]

[image error]

Scholarly Pursuits Now Available for Pre-order

[image error]“Something is rotten in the state of Berkeley”

–1881 Blue and Gold Yearbook, University of California: Berkeley

In Scholarly Pursuits, the sixth full-length novel in the USA Today best-selling Victorian San Francisco mystery series, Locke explores life on the University of California: Berkeley campus in 1881, where Laura and her friends face the remarkably modern problems of fraternity hazings, fraught romantic relationships, and fractious faculty politics. 

While Annie and Nate Dawson and friends and family in the O’Farrell Street boardinghouse await a blessed event, Laura Dawson finds herself investigating why a young Berkeley student dropped out of school in the fall of 1880.

No one, including her friend Seth Timmons, thinks this is a good idea, since she is juggling a full course load with a part-time job, but she can’t let the question of what happened to her friend go unanswered. Not when it means that other young women might be in danger.

This cozy historical mystery of romantic suspense is set in the period immediately after the fifth book in the series, Pilfered Promises, and two novellas, Kathleen Catches a Killer and Dandy Delivers.  However, it can be read as a stand-alone.

Available on Kindle  iTunes  Nook  Kobo

I have been working on this, the sixth full-length novel in my Victorian San Francisco Mystery series for a year, and I am very excited to announce it is now available for pre-order. When I started, all I knew was that I wanted to set this book in the University of California: Berkeley, where Laura Dawson and her friends were attending school. What I didn’t expect to find was how contemporary the issues were that students and faculty were facing in 1881. Later I will write a blog about these findings, but for now, hope you all are as excited about reading this book as I am about finding out what you think about it!  Meanwhile, have a great holiday!

M. Louisa Locke, December 20, 2018

Victorian SF Mystery and Caelestis Series News

[image error]Victorian San Francisco Novellas collection now Available

This collection brings together three novellas: Violet Vanquishes a Villain, Katherine Catches a Killer, and Dandy Delivers.These shorter works contain the light romance, humor, and suspense of the novels in her cozy Victorian San Francisco mystery series and are an excellent introduction to the gas-lit world of late 19th-century San Francisco.

Violet Vanquishes a Villain: In this novella set in August of 1880, Annie and Nate Dawson’s trip down the San Francisco peninsula to San Jose was supposed to be a pleasant romantic interlude and a chance for Annie to get to know Nate’s family better. When the visit takes a serious turn, Annie races to expose a criminal who could ruin a young man’s life, getting help from an unexpected quarter. The events in Violet Vanquishes a Villaincome right after Deadly Proof, the fourth book in Locke’s Victorian San Francisco mystery series.

Kathleen Catches a Killer: As 1880 comes to a close, the O’Farrell Street boardinghouse servant, Kathleen Hennessey, expects to spend a quiet week while her employers, amateur sleuths Annie and Nate Dawson, are off spending the Christmas holidays with Nate’s family. However, when she agrees to help out one of her friends, Kathleen discovers that a simple case of a servant being dismissed without notice has turned into a complicated and dangerous puzzle that she is determined to solve. The events in Kathleen Catches a Killer come right between those in Pilfered Promises and the third novella in this collection, Dandy Delivers.

Dandy Delivers: It’s January, 1881, and while the grown-ups in Annie and Nate Dawson’s San Francisco O’Farrell Street boardinghouse are busy with their own affairs, two boys and a dog find their own adventure. Ian Hennessey, a poor boy from South of Market, who is trying to shoulder a man’s responsibilities, gets in trouble, and his best friend, Jamie Hewitt, does what he can to help. But it is Jamie’s young Boston Terrier, Dandy, who saves the day.

Buy now for Kindle, and in all  major ebookstores. Print edition also available on Amazon.

**********
Changes in Availability of Paradisi Chronicles-Caelestis Series

This past year, the first book in my Caelestis Series trilogy (Between Mountain and Sea) has been permanently free, and this book and the other two books in the trilogy (Under Two Moons and Through Ddaera’s Touch) and the Caelestis Series Boxed Set, containing these three books and a bonus short story, have been available in all major ebook retailers. However, next week I will start putting these books into Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited program.

The good news is that these books will now be free to borrow for those of you who subscribe to the Kindle Unlimited program.

The bad news is that Between Mountain and Sea will no longer be permanently free and none of the books will be available through other retailers besides Amazon. I will still do frequent free and discount promotions of all these books––which I will announce in this newsletter.

I am making this announcement so that you have the chance to download Between Mountain and Sea or buy any of the other books while they are still widely available, a good opportunity to stock up on some science fiction reading for the winter holidays.

Between Mountain and Sea and Under Two Moons are now available as audiobooks now in a variety of stores, and the third book in the trilogy should be in an audiobook edition before Christmas.

And never fear, any new publications of books I write for the Paradisi Chronicles I will make widely available–at least for a short time.

**********

Meanwhile, I am hard at work finishing the first draft of the next full-length novel in the Victorian San Francisco Mystery series. Title is Scholarly Pursuit, it is set in University of California; Berkeley in 1881, which means it features Laura Dawson and her friends. I hope to have the book ready for pre-order around Christmas.

M. Louisa Locke