"When your heart goes pitter-patter
Just to meet her on the stairs,
When she smiles upon you..."
Just to meet her on the stairs,
When she smiles upon you kindly
Tho to speak you do not dare
When you jealously, when you jealously
Look upon a rival claim
That’s a crush, that’s a crush,
Yes, that’s a crush.”
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From Barnard’s 1911 “Crush Chorus” as part of the freshman show (yes, at an all women’s college). Credit to Lynn Peril’s wonderful nonfiction book College Girls: Blue Stockings, Sex Kittens, and Coeds, Then and Now.
From that book: “The ubiquity of campus crushes, and the tolerance with which they were accepted by both campus authorities and such a bulwark of middle-class morals and the Ladies Home Journal, may have been due in part to the long-accepted ideal of romantic friendships among women…Women filled in the empty emotional spaces in each others’ lives, even after marriage and motherhood. Thus, when young M. Carey Thomas wrote home from boarding school about a girl she was “smashed” on, her mother reacted not with fear or disgust but nostalgia: “I guess thy feeling for Libbie is quite natural. I used to have the same romantic love for my friends. It is a real pleasure.”
Research, lovelies, for my next novel—one wherein smashes, crushes, and spoons abound!
