Line #27 Main/CollegeWidow


1	[[quoteright:300:[[Film/TheCollegeWidow1927 https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/college_widow_0.jpg]]]]
2	[[caption-width-right:300:''One college widow\
3	Forty widowers'']]
4
5	->''"In my day a college widow stood for something... in fact, she stood for plenty!"''
6	-->-- '''Groucho Marx''', ''Film/HorseFeathers''
7
8	A character type dating to at least the early 20th century (there is a 1915 silent film entitled ''The College Widow''), but now a ForgottenTrope: a single woman living in a college town who attracts, encourages and enjoys the attention of the young men from the local school. Often she is the [[TrophyWife younger wife]] of a deceased faculty member or college president, but in any case she is barely older than the students she courts. (Which is not to say that older examples don't exist; see, for example, Dean Wormer's wife in ''Film/AnimalHouse''.) As a genuine widow, she came upon a healthy taste (and talent) for sexual relations ''legitimately'', but her youth left her with her wifely desires still burning hot; she thus turns to the school's handy supply of strapping young men to fill them. Her house, just off the campus, is usually the home to at least one WildTeenParty a week if not more, and during Prohibition it's all but a speakeasy.
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10	In an era when most colleges and universities were male-only, she was usually the only outlet for a healthy young man's sexual urges short of the nearest brothel, and often far less expensive. Naturally, other local citizens viewed her as being a singlehanded danger to the moral rectitude of hundreds if not thousands of impressionable young men. Usually seen as a FemmeFatale if not TheVamp, although she normally serves no master but her own libido.
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12	A ForgottenTrope since at least the 1960s, if not decades earlier. With the advent of co-education, this character type died a quick death as accusations of sexual iniquity quickly shifted to female college students (then, subsequently, male college students, as well).
13
14	Compare LikesOlderWomen, when a character has a preference for much older potential partners, and its SubTrope, StacysMom, when teenagers/young adults regard a middle-aged individual as hot. SubTrope of TheSmurfettePrinciple, the general tendency for there only being a token woman in an otherwise all-male cast.
15	----
16	!!Examples:
17
18	[[AC:Films -- Live-Action]]
19	* ''Film/AnimalHouse'': Marion Wormer, the dean's wife. Although her husband is still living, he doesn't pay too much attention to her (preferring instead to use her as arm candy), and she finds him stuffy and boring. So she turns to the frat boys and their WackyFratboyHijinks successfully.
20	* ''Film/BullDurham'': Annie Savoy is a glamorous, worldly-wise older single woman in Durham who regularly seduces promising rookies from the Bulls team.
21	%% * Possibly playing on the 1915 film was a 1916 production called ''Film/DadsCollegeWidow,'' but little is known about the story.
22	* ''Film/HorseFeathers'' (Creator/MarxBrothers): Thelma "Hot Toddy" Todd (Connie Bailey). [[spoiler:It turns out that she's at least partially a spy for a rival college, using the men she dates to get information that will help the other college's football team win.]]
23	* ''Film/SpringDreams'': Tamiko likes to bed younger college students, and a lot of them, like "10, 20, 50 men." Her very proper Japanese family is deeply embarrassed.
24	* ''Film/TeaAndSympathy'': The coach's wife isn't exactly a widow, it's just that her husband doesn't pay much attention to her. This is why she turns her attention to the young man whom his more 'hearty' classmates mistakenly think is gay.
25	* ''Film/{{A Yank at Oxford}}'': Vivien Leigh plays a variation seeing that she's not really a widow, just the neglected wife of a much older husband.
26	* ''Film/{{Youngblood\|1986}}'': Miss [=McGill=] owns a boarding house and seduces and then sleeps with the players who board with her.
27
28	[[AC:Literature]]
29	* ''Literature/TheAmericanCredo'': "That middle-aged widows are very fond of college boys." (#651; New #858)
30	* ''Literature/TheNumberOfTheBeast'' (Creator/RobertAHeinlein): Hilda "Sharpie" Corners is explicitly described as a college widow (although she protests that all of her paramours were age-appropriate). Given Heinlein's history of creating retro-flavored futures, this may be an instance of a deliberate use of an outdated trope to indicate that the book does not, as it initially seems, start TwentyMinutesIntoTheFuture of ''our'' universe.
31	* ''Literature/TheStand'': Rita Blakemoor's husband died two years before the story begins, thus she's the first eligible woman Larry meets.
32
33	[[AC:Live-Action TV]]
34	* ''{{Series/Bones}}'': In [[Recap/BonesS4E24TheBeaverInTheOtter "The Beaver in the Otter"]], the VictimOfTheWeek, an underachieving college student, had been carrying on an affair with the college President's wife. Reading between the lines, it seems that she regularly finds young college boys to have affairs with behind her husband's back.
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36	[[AC:Theatre]]
37	* ''Theatre/{{Allegro}}'': Beulah always tags along when her sister goes to the campus to visit her boyfriend Charlie. Because she's single, there's more than one boy who would kill to go on a date with her.
38	* ''Theatre/TheCollegeWidow1904'': By virtue of being the college president's daughter, Jane is the only woman on Atwater's campus. Despite the play being the TropeMaker, she's a {{downplayed}} example because she doesn't encourage attention from the whole student population but is asked by her father to charm one particular high-school graduate into attending Atwater College. Therefore, she only focuses on him. It might seem to be the TropeNamer if it weren't for the fact that the expression "college widow" already existed since the nineteenth century but it's definitely the TropeMaker.
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40	[[AC:Video Games]]
41	* ''VideoGame/TheSpellcastingSeries'': In ''Spellcasting 201: The Sorcerer's Appliance'', Hillary Tickingclock becomes when Otto dies. However this has no noticeable impact on her mood or sex drive, as she's always had extramarital affairs with the students. She'll gladly sleep with Ernie [[RefugeInAudacity while wearing her mourning clothes]], for that extra touch of class.

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