The Girls on the Campus

In the early 1970s, Jack Olsen turned his journalistic eye from the corporate women of New York City to the college campuses of America. What he found was a generation in the middle of reinventing itself.

Fourteen young women speak here in their own words, without editorial interruption. They are students navigating the collision between the lives their parents imagined for them and the world they inherited: a counterculture in full bloom, with all the freedom, confusion, alcohol, drugs, and sexual experimentation that came with it. These are not cautionary tales, and they are not celebrations. They are honest accounts of what it felt like to come of age at one of the most turbulent moments in American history.