Jim Kershner’s This day in history » On the Web: spokesman.com/topics/local-history

From our archives, 75 years ago

A group of Washington State College students called for a “mass protest” against the school’s “ultra-conservative, dictatorial” policies.

The Students’ Liberty Association called for a demonstration to take place at 11 a.m. the next day. Their handbill, circulated widely around campus, specified eight grievances, including “compulsory class attendance.”

The group claimed to represent every student at Pullman, but several student leaders said they had never heard of it.

From the femininity file: Dorothy Dix, the most popular advice columnist of the era, went on a tirade on the subject of “women looking like men.”

She blamed Hollywood for dressing movie stars in slacks and giving them short hairdos. She expressed the hope that Hollywood would soon stage a “return to femininity.”

“Girls are to be girls again, instead of hoodlums,” wrote Dix. “Women are to be women, instead of some unclassified freak of the neuter gender. … We have seen the Garbo bob sweep across the country like wildfire and leave its disfiguring blight upon females of every age and facial contour, thereby turning them from mere ordinary-looking human beings into hideousities.”