Ivy Days by Susan Allen Toth

First published: 1984

Type of work: Memoir

Time of work: 1957-1963

Locale: Ames, Iowa; Northampton and Boston, Massachusetts; England; and Berkeley, California

Principal Personages:

• Susan Allen Toth, a student at Smith College
• Chris Morgan, her friend and a rival student at the woman’s college
• Mrs. Kurtz, Toth’s art professor, whom she admired
• Mr. Abernathy, Toth’s English professor, with whom she was infatuated
• Mrs. Stevens, the housemother of Toth’s dormitory
• Mr. Sheik, a professor whose criticism discouraged Toth from writing

Form and Content

Ivy Days: Making My Way Out East is a wry first-person narrative that examines the impact on an innocent Iowan of attending Smith College, an elite woman’s college in Northampton, Massachusetts. Toth scrutinizes the difficulties and doubts, largely unexamined at the time, that she faced as a scholarship student in highly competitive Lawrence House, where she lived while attending Smith from 1957 to 1961. An unsophisticated young woman from Ames, Iowa, a small town in a rural setting not far from Des Moines, she longed to see and experience the East that she had read about in American literature. Instead, the awe that she felt at the wealth and confidence of the Easterners she met was tempered by her own isolation and claustrophobia.

The introductory section of the book, “Ivy Days,” is written from Toth’s viewpoint twenty-five years later as a divorced single parent and a college professor herself. This strategy, also used in Toth’s earlier memoir Blooming: A Small-Town Girlhood (1981), sets the pattern for the chapters that follow: Each is preceded by a brief italicized vignette featuring Toth’s experiences and opinions long after college.

“Out East,” the first chapter, depicts the process of cracking the unfamiliar codes of clothing styles and the Honor System, speculating about the wild students who attended parties in New York, and enduring nude pictures to determine posture flaws. Her homesickness for her mother, widowed when Toth was seven, nearly overwhelmed her. In fact, her first semester was so difficult that she describes returning to Smith after Christmas vacation as one of the most difficult things she ever did. Gradually, however, she began to feel at home. Chapter 2, “Learning to Live with Women,” examines the pressures of living in small, enclosed spaces; describes beginning to care passionately about food; and laments the way in which the residents of Lawrence House hid their thoughts and feelings from one another. In “Intellectual Butterfly,” the third chapter, her flirtation with various majors and eventual switch from a history to an English major branded her an intellectual butterfly, a designation she eventually accepted with some pride because of the exhilaration that she continues to feel when using the habits of mind that were the lasting gifts of an education at Smith. “In the Swim” describes the blind dates, mixers, and college weekends that Toth blundered through at Smith. She depicts herself as lonely and longing for warmth, but frightened and confused by sex. “Summa” deals with the agonizing academic pressure that Toth felt in her last two years at Smith, especially from her friend and classmate Chris Morgan but also from other students and even from her professors. Her senior year was dominated by her rivalry with Chris and by the expectation that she would be one of a handful of young women to graduate summa cum laude. Failing to do so was a crushing blow.

“Up, Up, and Away,” the final chapter, describes Toth’s forays beyond Smith, including a summer working in Boston that fell far short of her expectations and a return to Boston five years later during which she lost and miraculously found her thousand-dollar engagement ring in a bin of bargain purses, evading the chance to confront the facts of her failing marriage. While still at Smith she spent a wonderful summer in England, which began a romance she describes at length in My Love Affair with England (1992). Ivy Days ends by portraying Toth’s experiences in graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley, where she came to terms with how driven she was and decided to marry and begin what she thought of as real life.

Context

Ivy Days continued the account of Susan Allen Toth’s life begun in Blooming and resumed in a collection of essays on middle age, How to Prepare for Your High-School Reunion (1988). It solidified Toth’s reputation as an amusing, insightful essayist. Ivy Days has influenced women’s studies by helping to extend the range of subject matters, tones, genres, and degrees of accessibility considered appropriate to women’s writing. By demonstrating that one rather unremarkable woman’s experience and character have compelling interest, Ivy Days has encouraged other women to value their own everyday experiences and to write more personally themselves.

Toth’s honest, personal tone has fostered a powerful sense of connection between herself and her readers, many of whom think of her as a close friend, just as Toth herself once thought of Clarissa and Lovelace in Samuel Richardson’s novel Clarissa (1747-1748) as her friends. Some readers believe that Toth tells their own stories as no one else could (though others question whether anyone could have been quite as innocent as she claims to have been). Interest in Ivy Days is not limited to people who moved from the Midwest to the East or who attended Ivy League colleges in the 1950’s. Toth’s description of the stresses of forging a social life and grappling with questions about career choices and marriage have a much wider appeal. Toth’s book encourages a reassessment of the costs of intense academic competition, but it also invites generous forgiveness of women’s own past selves.

Although the genre of memoir has often been considered minor, even inconsequential, the achievement of Ivy Days has helped to legitimize memoir and to validate a woman’s life as deserving scrutiny. It helps to fill a gap in literature much devoted to men coming of age but not providing enough honest accounts of women doing so. The accessibility of Toth’s straightforward prose style is a welcome antidote to the prolixity, jargon, and doctrinaire quality of some personal narratives. Toth is genuine and candid, giving the impression that she has little need to fictionalize her past experiences or lie to protect herself. Her warmth, wit, quiet tone, and clarity make Ivy Days a useful model for other women writers.

Bibliography

Benstock, Shari, ed. The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women’s Autobiographical Writings. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988. This collection of essays provides theoretical frameworks for interpreting Ivy Days. Its first section presents six essays on theories of autobiography, and the final six essays examine various forms of women’s autobiographical writings across three centuries.

Booklist. LXXX, May 15, 1984, p. 1279.

Culley, Margo, ed. American Women’s Autobiography: Fea(s)ts of Memory. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992. This collection provides historical context for understanding the tradition out of which Ivy Days comes. The essays, which are arranged chronologically by subject, reflect trends in the theory and criticism of autobiography from the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. They trace the roots of American women’s autobiography, analyzing the stories of slaves, suffragists, and homesteaders, as well as narratives by Gertrude Stein, Mary McCarthy, and Dorothy Day.

Heilbrun, Carolyn G. Writing a Woman’s Life. New York: W. W. Norton, 1988. This short book argues for new ways to interpret women’s lives. Heilbrun urges women to reject the limitations imposed by patriarchal society not only on what can be discussed in biographies and autobiographies but also on what women can do. Like Ivy Days, this book addresses the issues of identifying the buried self, admitting and achieving ambitions, and sustaining friendships among women.

Kirkus Reviews. LII, April 15, 1984, p. 412.

Library Journal. CIX, May 15, 1984, p. 978.

The New York Times Book Review. LXXXIX, June 17, 1984, p. 31.

Personal Narratives Group, Joy Webster Barbre, et al., eds. Interpreting Women’s Lives: Feminist Theory and Personal Narratives. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989. International in scope, this collection surveys the contexts and forms of the life stories of women, ranging from a Victorian maidservant and a Prussian aristocrat to abortion activists in Fargo, North Dakota, in the 1980’s. It also investigates the relationship between narrators, who tell their own stories, and the people who interpret the narratives. Its authors include anthropologists, historians, and specialists in women’s studies.

Publishers Weekly. CCXXV, March 30, 1984, p. 47.

Sarton, May. Journal of a Solitude. New York: W. W. Norton, 1973. One of the precursors of Ivy Days, this memoir is cited by Carolyn Heilbrun as a turning point in women’s autobiography because of its honest anger. Like Toth, Sarton chronicles the events of a woman’s everyday life and does not shy away from describing her own pain.

The Wall Street Journal. CCIV, August 20, 1984, p. 13.

Washington Post. June 30, 1984, p. C4.