Short Takes

``Grow Where You're Planted" reads a poster on her teenage bedroom wall. Despite her ambivalence and self-doubt, she resists this advice with all her strength. Her mother, critical and distant, is remembered vividly only for her prohibitions -- do not sing in the house -- and her orders -- get up and do your chores. But her father loves her and roots for her, although he, following North Dakota tradition, does not give out praise. Recognizing that her father has been on her side all along is the soft center of ``The Horizontal World." A quiet, withholding man, he resembles his fellows. ``Growing up, I believed I was surrounded by the most austere, pragmatic, hardworking people. But now I know that we were hopeless romantics when it came to land -- the worst sort of high-stakes gamblers, betting the farm and all of our lives every day when we went out into the fields." This epiphany, scratched out of the dry earth, is hard won.

College Girls: Bluestockings, Sex Kittens, and Co-eds, Then and Now
By Lynn Peril
Norton, 352 pp., $16.95

For most of the 19th century in America, women's fundamental intellectual inferiority was an accepted fact, and any woman who wanted to receive an education was misguided, uppity, or insane. Early education for women focused on domestic economy. Toward the end of the century, when Smith, Wellesley, the Harvard Annex, Bryn Mawr, and Barnard were founded, women were finally allowed to study Greek, Latin, and higher mathematics.