Area (2007) 39.3, 278–286 Area Vol. 39 No. 3, pp. 278– 286, 2007 ISSN 0004-0894 © The Author. Journal compilation © Royal Geographical Society (with The Institute of British Geographers) 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd (Re)constructing women: scaled portrayals of privilege and gender norms on campus Jen Gieseking Environmental Psychology, The Graduate Center, City University of New York, New York, NY 10016, USA Email: jgieseking@gmail.com Revised manuscript received 27 February 2007 How are privilege and/or particular gender norms for women spatially (re)produced over time and how are they challenged and changed? In interviews and mental mapping exercises with 32 students and graduates of an elite US women’s college from graduating classes spanning 1937 to 2006, women’s class and gender norms and expectations are found to have been produced, reproduced and reworked in their everyday experiences during college. Participants portray these norms through the scales of the body, institution and extra-institution in regards to the particular social and physical space of the campus. Participants’ experiences, as depicted in these scales, indicate that class norms remained stable over generational cohorts, but gender norms shifted drastically because the privilege found within and granted by the elite women’s college campus allowed for and prompted such changes. Transformations of women’s gender norms also correspond with changes in the larger social sphere with a particular split in how participants could enact their privilege to alter their gender norms before and after the late 1960s. Key words: United States, scale, mental mapping narratives, campus, class, gender, women’s colleges [Having a college friend get me a job on Capitol Hill] influenced . . . the rest of my professional development and it came from knowing this one woman, [pause] which many men probably tell stories of the old school tie. But I don’t know how often it happens with women. (Ginnie ’61) 1 [What socioeconomic class do you use to identify yourself?] Am I automatically upper-middle class if I went to Mount Holyoke? (Tina ’00) Introduction How are privilege and/or particular gender norms for women spatially (re)produced over time and how are they challenged and changed? Building from the work of feminist and critical geographers, particularly Geraldine Pratt (1998), Sallie Marston (2000) and Aansi Paasi (2004), this research seeks to answer these questions by examining the scaled (re)production of and challenges to expectations of class and gender norms on an elite college campus over seven generational cohorts. 2 Interviews were conducted with 32 alumnae who graduated from Mount Holyoke College, a highly selective women’s college in the United States, in the years spanning 1937 to 2006. 3 During the interviews participants answered a series of questions about their gender and sexual identity development in relation to their college experiences as they drew and labelled mental maps of the campus to accompany their narratives. Portrayals of the campus in interviews and maps indicated that gender and class norms are (re)produced and reworked through the women’s independent yet consistent portrayals of the specific scales of the body, institution and extra-institution in relation to the physical and social campus. The scale of the body depicts how participants were embodied within the campus and used their bodies