Her mother, Violet Rottenberg Cottler, having completed high school, was better educated than her father and an embittered, dissatisfied housewife. Showalter attributes her early attraction to feminism, in part, to the frustration of her mother's unproductive life.
In 1962 Showalter received her B.A. in English from Bryn Mawr College, which she attended against the wishes of her parents, who disapproved of their daughter's intellectual proclivities. At Bryn Mawr Showalter was president of the arts council, and received the highest grade in the English comprehensive examination given in her senior year, but, having rebelled against the snobbery and tight social control at Bryn Mawr in this period, she was also the member of her class with the highest number of "cuts." Sick of Bryn Mawr's excessive gentility (all undergraduates with "ethnic or regional accents," unless from the South, were required to take speech lessons), Showalter applied only to Brandeis University for graduate school in English, earning an M.A. in 1964. Her parents, violently opposed both to her graduate education and to her proposed marriage to non-Jewish English Showalter, cut off all financial support. She paid for her graduate education at Brandeis by acting as house mother and adviser in an undergraduate dormitory.
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