Student Marriage by Huntington Sharp
Item
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Title
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Student Marriage by Huntington Sharp
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Creator
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Huntington Sharp
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Description
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This article was originally published in Cornell University’s literary magazine, The Columns, and was reprinted in Columbia’s daily student publication, The Columbia Spectator, in the “Others Say” column. The article was written by Huntington Sharp, who was the managing editor of The Columns at Cornell. In this piece, Sharp identifies the problem of “greater promiscuity” among Cornell’s students and explores the question of what physical relations should look like between men and women on campus, evincing the perennial fear of college students having too much sex. Sharp goes on to argue that “young men'' should be sufficiently educated about sexual development so that they can advance from the “sadism of boyhood, through onanism, homosexuality, and narcissism of adolescence, to a normal heterosexual maturity…” Sharp, who exclusively addresses his male peers, credits this chain of development to the prominent psychoanalyst Carl Jung, whose collected works were published and widely circulated in English in the 1920s, influencing a new kind of thinking about sex as it relates to the psyche. This statement also demonstrates Sharp’s complete rejection of homosexuality and points to the pervasiveness of a larger social homophobia that refuses to accommodate or even fathom the possibility of homosexual relations on campus. Sharp proceeds to declare that marriage among undergraduates is the solution and “compromise” between abstinence and promiscuity, arguing that students should strive to build healthy marital partnerships in order to control their physical desires and find meaningful satisfaction in laying the foundations for a traditional family life, an opinion that reflects conservative social mores among students in the 1920s, despite exposure and receptiveness to new developments in scholarship surrounding human sexuality. The Columbia Spectator’s republication of this article from a Cornell student paper indicates that sexual relations among students was a common issue on campuses across New York State.
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Publisher
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The Columbia Spectator and The Columns (Cornell University)
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Date
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November 20, 1928
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Source
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Columbia Spectator Archive/Spectator Publishing Company
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Rights
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Used with the written consent and approval of the Columbia University Archives, Spectator Publishing Company, and the Cornell Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections.
Student Marriage