Main Tropes Index

A character type dating to at least the early 20th century (there is a 1915 silent film entitled The College Widow), but now a Forgotten Trope: 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 younger wife of a deceased faculty member or college president, but in any case she is barely older than the students she courts. 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 Wild Teen Party a week if not more, and during Prohibition it's all but a speakeasy.

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 Femme Fatale if not The Vamp, although she normally serves no master but her own libido.

A Forgotten Trope 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.

Examples:

Film

Thelma "Hot Toddy" Todd (Connie Bailey) in the 1932 Marx Brothers movie Horse Feathers.
Horse Feathers was in fact mostly a spoof of a 1927 film called simply The College Widow featuring Delores Costello as the title character, Jane Witherspoon. The daughter of a professor, Jane was technically a bit young to be considered a true college widow but filled the role anyway.
This itself was a remake of a 1915 silent film of the same name, in which Jane was played by Ethel Clayton.
Possibly playing on the 1915 film was a 1916 production called Dad's College Widow, but little is known about the story.

Literature

Hilda "Sharpie" Corners from Robert A Heinlein's novel The Number of the Beast 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 Given Heinlein's history of creating retro-flavored futures, this may be an instance of a deliberate use of an outdated trope to indicate that the book does not, as it initially seems, start Twenty Minutes Into The Future of our universe.