The Sing-A-Long Gang – "Mimi the College Widow" (1961)

She laid the cornerstone of knowledge

In fact, the whole damn college

She’s Mimi the college widow!

The previous 2 or 3 lines featured a song from the 1932 Marx Brothers’ movie, Horse Feathers.

When I first saw Horse Feathers many years ago, I was puzzled when an attractive female character was described as “the college widow.”  I had no idea what that term meant – and since there was no internet back then, I couldn’t Google it.

Now I can . . . so I did.

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“College widow” turns out to be an obsolete term that was used to describe an older woman who dated college boys.  (“Dated”?)

Here’s an excerpt from a 2015 Paris Review article about college widows: 

Once a byword for a predatory vamp, the college widow is an extinct American species.

I’ve read various definitions of the college-widow meme, which appears regularly in books and films from the first half of the twentieth century, and was de rigueur in any discussion of campus life.  In some cases, these characters were portrayed as literal widows – young women who’d known the marriage bed and were hungry for young collegiate flesh.  But more often, the term seems to have applied to a [local woman] who dated men in successive senior classes, and were subsequently “widowed” with each passing graduation. . . .

In the Marx Brothers classic Horse Feathers – many a modern viewer’s only exposure to the trope – the college widow is just sort of there, without explanation. (But then, it is a Marx Brothers movie.)  Horse Feathers was in fact a parody of the play (and subsequent 1927 film) The College Widow, about a college president’s daughter – played by Drew Barrymore’s grandmother, Dolores Costello – who seduces rival schools’ football stars at her father’s behest.  It’s as creepy as it sounds.

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I have no idea who wrote “Mimi the College Widow,” or when it was written.  

It was apparently still being sung by college students in the 1950s because the lyrics appear in a couple of collections of college songs.

In 1961, a group who called themselves The Sing-A-Long Gang – about whom I know zippy – released their version of “Mimi the College Widow” on an LP titled Sing-A-Long Party Songs.

Click here to listen to that recording of “Mimi the College Widow.”