Even if you don’t follow the account yourself, if you’re a student with an Instagram at a historically women’s college, you’ve probably seen memes from the account @historicallywomens.c0m. In fact, for many students, this account makes up the bulk of their interactions with other historically women’s colleges. The account posts multiple times a day, facilitating interaction between students in the form of everything from petty arguments to offers of aid. As colleges transitioned to remote learning due to the COVID-19 pandemic and thousands of students coped with the campus closures, the account became a hub for offers and requests of support between students of various institutions. It has also helped connect prospective and incoming Class of 2024 students with current students and each other. While the memes posted by the account may help form students’ images of the colleges they do not attend, it is the interaction with students from those colleges that will stick in its users’ minds and that make historicallywomens.c0m such a special part of the historically women’s college social landscape. I spoke to the person who runs the account about the experience.
The following interview was originally conducted in February, 2020. Responses have been lightly edited for clarity.
Raina Okonogi-Neth: So first, I just want to get a little background. Could you explain who you are and what your account is?
Historicallywomens.c0m: Hi Raina! It’s really so nuts that I’m being interviewed by an actual college’s school newspaper to talk about an instagram meme page… I’m honored you wanted to speak to me. I use she/her/hers pronouns, and I run an instagram account called @historicallywomens.c0m, which features memes about the experience and culture of women’s colleges in the United States. I originally focused on the Seven Sisters colleges (Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Mount Holyoke, Smith Vassar, Radcliffe, and Wellesley), but after realizing that non-Seven Sisters resonated with my content, I’ve recently been trying to include other schools like Simmons, Mills, Agnes Scott, Spelman, Sweet Briar, among others! The profile page literally says “Just For Fun,” and so that is what I am going to say the account is about.
RON: One interesting aspect of your account is that you have a presence on the page but are also anonymous. Why does it feel important to be anonymous? Are there people in your life who know you run the page or is it a completely secret identity? Do unsuspecting people ever try and show you memes that you posted?
HW: I always knew I wanted to stay anonymous — otherwise the memes would appear blatantly biased. While I try to stay neutral, I do have this wealth of knowledge about my own institution and mostly run off of hearsay for other schools. Though everyone knows I came from only one institution, the mystery surrounding “which one??” sort of validates my content. If I post something that hates on a certain school it could serve as proof that I go there or that I don’t. You can’t really tell. There’s something exciting about posting anonymously, and it’s also why a lot of people who submit memes request to stay anonymous as well. My close friends know I run the account, and we talk about its contents from time to time. I sometimes go to them for advice!
RON: You’ve been posting on the account since 2017, and you now have over 5,000 [authors’ note: by April 2020, this has risen to 7,000] followers. I personally feel like I see your memes reposted to Instagram stories all the time. When you started the page, did you envision it getting as popular as it is now? Do you feel as though you have, for lack of a better word, clout among students at historically women’s colleges?
HW: 2017 is when I began to see memes about various college identities floating around Twitter, and I could never find any about the Seven Sisters. From what I have gathered, Seven Sisters rivalries and partnerships were more prominent in the twentieth century, during a time when most women didn’t go to college and many colleges were not co-ed. By the time I entered college I didn’t feel as though the schools interacted as a consortium, despite what pamphlets and random Odyssey articles tell you. I had ideas for memes and jokes specific to the women’s college experience and no real place to post them, so I just made an account one night. I didn’t tell anyone either. I just began posting. I come from a state where any given university’s culture and image is largely inspired by its surrounding college rivalries — each institution has a distinct personality and many students embrace their appointments. I wanted a place of my own to make quick jabs at the culture of my school and schools just like it. I honestly didn’t think it would get very popular because I didn’t think my school’s meme game was very strong (sorry…). But the times have changed and Generation Tik Tok has begun entering college and thus my account can flourish.
RON: One thing that you’ve been doing recently is using your platform to promote topics that aren’t memes. For Valentine’s Day, you’ve been using your story to post personal ads from students at historically women’s colleges. You also recently posted about Barnard’s policy of asking students who returned from China after January 19th to self-isolate as a precaution against COVID-19. How do you feel about having a platform with a sizable reach to students at historically women’s colleges? Especially using that platform to talk about serious topics when it ostensibly came from something very lighthearted?
HW: I do believe that memes are an easy way to discuss difficult topics. And I don’t mean that they make an unproductive joke out of serious issues, but rather they can dissect a problem by highlighting how absurd/ridiculous/upsetting said problem is that it’s almost laughable (at least the good ones do this). I don’t think I’ve shied away from memes that address controversial topics, and so my followers aren’t really surprised when every once in a while I post something non-meme related. Students from historically women’s colleges also know when to joke and when to buckle down and confront topics that harm their peers. I’ve found that we come to each other’s aid just as quickly as we come to pounce on a meme for being “incorrect.” As for the Valentine’s Day personals, it was an idea my friend and I had to revisit the history of the queer personal ad and engage students from different colleges — even though we like to fight about who is the best, we can still be in love!! I posted about Barnard’s treatment of self-isolating students because the students themselves involved asked for their story to be shared. Knowing that people outside of your immediate community are outraged on your behalf can be empowering. I thought it was a necessary moment for us all to show solidarity with Barnard students as well as investigate how other institutions are handling the outbreak. As for clout — I’ve had a handful of brands reach out and ask how much I charge for promotions and ad space and I just think that shit is so funny. If I ever post an ad, just know that I fully don’t expect my followers to genuinely care a smidge about what is being sold. Also, know that it means I need quick cash.
RON: Okay, I’m ready to talk about the memes themselves. About how much of a time commitment is it running the page?
HW: A few times a week, I’ll clear out my direct messages and begin to queue up submissions. I’m at a point where I’ll get around 5 submissions a day. I try to post once in the morning and once in the evening, and three times a day on the weekend. It’s as big of a time commitment as I want to make it. If I’m extra bored I’ll post a story with a question and filter through responses (and fights) to repost in the story, then make a highlight for it on the profile page. I usually get 100+ responses for those.
RON: Most of the memes you post make comparisons between the Seven Sisters. What trends do you notice in the way people stereotype the schools, and do you think there’s truth to them?
HW: To be quite honest, the Seven Sister alignments are not my favorite type of meme, but I post a lot of them because people submit a lot of them. And then once my followers see that this format is frequently posted, they begin to think of their own alignments and submit that. It’s a never-ending cycle. I try to alternate between the types of memes that get posted, but there’s just a lot of alignment submissions. Half the time I don’t even know what tv show/book/movie is being referenced, but I do know that someone out there is going to delight in opposing or defending their assignment, so I simply release those memes into the world. Here’s what I’ll say about stereotypes: The way people react to their assignments in the comments directly reflects how the next batch of memes are made. If a bunch of people from one school say, “It’s so true, we are the quirky one!” then some rando is going to remember that comment and make their own meme where said school is featured as “the quirky one.” The stereotypes are as true as you want them to be.
RON: Obviously people are very passionate about their schools and are often not happy about their school’s placements. When you posted the meme about “Little Women,” for example, people immediately began arguing about which school should be Jo. Would you say that people mostly keep the competition fun or do people sometimes cross a line?
HW: For the most part it really is harmless bickering. The “Little Women” meme was funny because it was pointed out by multiple different people that each person thinks they are Jo March because they are the protagonist in their own life just like Jo March is the protagonist of “Little Women.” No one wants to be the periphery sister because no one really sees themselves as a secondary character in the movie in their mind. The meme itself also started a trend where people would post alignments and leave out the main character, saying, “We’re all the main character.” None of us can handle being second if there’s the chance to be first, so we’ve just had to take out first place as an option. Very rarely do people cross a line but when they do I call it out. A handful of times people try to bring in college rankings as justifications for why they need to be some random ass character from a mediocre tv show, and I try to shut that down because I just don’t believe in the validity of college rankings. They bring to the surface insecurities about money, intelligence, ability, among other things. This isn’t senior year of high school, and your PSAT score doesn’t matter anymore. But I think followers of the page know by now that we don’t play like that here.
RON: Have you noticed any trends in the way students from certain schools react to the memes?
HW: In a nutshell: Smith students always make themselves the best character, Vassar always gets the annoying white boy, Barnard gets the mean yet cultured one, Wellesley is the smarty pants, Bryn Mawr almost never complains about their placement not matter how left-field it is, and Mount Holyoke frequently complains about theirs, but then says, “It’s kinda true though.” And of course everyone claims their school is the gayest. Which, by the way, kinda of bothers me because it reduces gay identity to a distinguishable performance as though queerness can be quantified. Historically women’s colleges have pretty LGBTQ-friendly campuses, maybe more so than your average co-ed institution, but we will never truly know which Seven Sister has the highest rate of queer students because we will always have queer folks in the closet. But that’s a conversation for another day lol.
RON: What do you see as the future of the meme page? Do you plan to continue to run it indefinitely? Will you pass the torch on to someone else?
HW: I’ve thought about passing it off or having a co-owner of the page, but I don’t know if I trust anyone to help me run it just yet. While the page is technically for everyone, it is still facilitated through my voice. I would feel weird seeing someone else do what I do. I can’t run it forever…
RON: This is just for fun, but do you have a favorite women’s college meme?
HW: My current favorite meme that I’ve made is the one with the annoying kid from the Polar Express, inspired by the “Do you guys wanna hear Sicko Mode or Mo Bamba” meme, repurposed to say, “Do you guys wanna hear Golden Hour or Pussy Is God?” I just feel like he looks like a bunch of people I go to school with. I also really love Starter Pack/Mood Board memes, but people don’t really submit those as often. I used to post a ton of those. They take more time to curate, but that’s what makes them so genius.
