Student Life at the University of California, Berkeley During And After World War I: The Letters of Agnes Edwards Partin, 1917-1921

Three hundred letters by Agnes Edwards, a student at UC Berkeley, comprise this volume that covers the years 1917 to 1921. The letters, written faithfully to her parents once a week, encompass some important national themes: World War I, the Spanish influenza epidemic, and the first U.S. election in which women could vote. They reveal the crossroads that America was facing in those years, such as the horse and buggy vs. the automobile in civilian life, and horses and mules vs. airplanes and tanks in warfare. In communication, letter writing was being eroded by the telephone, and in entertainment, vaudeville was losing its audience to silent movies. Agnes lived every day at this crossroads. She was also deeply immersed in the “golden age of UC,” where there was a family spirit on campus. As evidence of this, Agnes describes the students’ frequent gatherings around the Campanile to sing “All Hail,” the university hymn. She discusses her courses, her studying until the wee hours, the scholarships she earned, and her aspirations to be elected Phi Beta Kappa. She tells of the creative stunt parties and pranks at Mrs. Allen’s boarding house and later at the Alpha Gamma Delta house, hikes and picnics in the Berkeley hills, and her partners on the dance floor. But Agnes was that rarest of all co-eds, the resident of a sorority house who was also entirely self-supporting. Most of the 300 letters contain at least one paragraph telling of her work in California Hall as secretary to the Dean of the Summer Session, Walter Morris Hart, and she frequently mentions her anxieties about the low pay. To supplement her income, she tutored a young Russian boy, worked as a T.A. in English 1X, and corrected blue books for two professors. Agnes’ eyewitness impressions of celebrities, such as U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, help to make this volume of letters interesting to historians, while her observations and detailed descriptions of her experiences constitute a valuable contribution to s

Grace E. Moremen, an independent scholar, writer, and editor, earned degrees from the University of Chicago and the University of California at Berkeley.