Bachelor Girl (25 page)

Call it, after the movie, the song, the theory in general:
Where the Boys Are.

According to the Census Bureau, UPI reported, women outnumbered men in every section of the country except in the wild “western” areas. Thus one typical newspaper headline read, “Go West Young Woman, if You Want to Wed!” The text continued, “Droves of bachelors are on the great open range begging to be roped and branded…in Wyoming and Nevada there are seven unmarried men for three single women…for the girl willing to migrate for marriage, the best trails lead west.”

In “Memo to the Girls,”
Look
undertook “a massive man-hunt mis
sive,” noting, “there is a surplus of bachelors…but husband hunters should know where to look.” The winning locales were the same as those cited elsewhere, as if a consortium of media and governmental bureaus had conspired in a campaign to reinaugurate the mail-order bride.

Life
editors found two bachelor girls who’d moved themselves to Caspar, Wyoming, then had them, for the benefit of the photographers, throw an impromptu bachelor-girl party. Panel by panel, we follow the action: The girls make last-minute “on-the-spot” calls to boys. The girls prepare the beverages and then, the triumphal sequence, “the boys respond to the call.” Twelve men, big hefty guys, thirtyish and single, have all crowded into their living room. The caption read: “They bagged twelve!” But “bagging” out in Caspar didn’t require throwing a “do.” We also see the “lucky” Barbara Mills receive a “quadruple escort” just by walking through the business district. It was noted that had she lived in Montana, the number of escorts might have been up around nine.

GETTING THE GIRL BACK IN LINE

As in the nineteenth century, the plans for mass removal of single women to isolated areas did not catch on. Young women continued to move to New York and to Washington, and others—older women, especially—continued to express their concern. In 1956
Mademoiselle
published a remarkably progressive piece, “What’s Wrong with Ambition?” intended to highlight the views of young women who’d gone off on their own and were loving it. But the most shocking, radical aspect of the “Ambition” story was the response it provoked—both in letters and in stories published in other magazines.

“They make me nervous,” said one married woman of girls cut loose in major cities. “I could shoot the first woman who went to work in a man’s job. My ambition is to please my husband in every womanly way.” Another outraged wife said, “These girls come back from a day in the outside world with something to talk about and what is that? Men. She’s been out all day with men. Other women’s husbands…. [she] is a threat to every self and
family-centered homebody.” Another said that she’d “be content to liquidate [this] army of competitors who have forgotten the true functions, duties and gracious giving pleasures of the mature woman—creating for others, not for herself. There is something unnatural and frightening in this behaviour…. It is against order and I really think humanity.”

Training young women to capture husbands now underwent a vast CinemaScopic fifties-era renaissance.

In 1955 alone there were more than three hundred promarriage, antisingular tomes. From one foreword: “It would seem that some have come to view marriage in its current state as…disappointing for women, and especially those who have taken the higher degree.” As if it was 1910, the author concluded: “The lure of the city and its many pleasures will make of many potentially fine and worthy wives unnatural defeated spinsters…sick and lonely women.”

As always, commentators dragged the discussion back to education and the eternal topic—“what should we teach our women?” One home-economics professor from a college in Virginia wrote in the
Reader’s Digest
: “Unless there is a direct application to the home, or the conflicts and issues that will confront her in the home, in [dealing with] her husband or children, it is not valid education; it is unfair to the girl and confusing.”

One 1956 home-ec textbook provided a quick-study list of thirty-five tasks to perform before a husband returned from “his labors.” Here’s a small sampling of what the fifties singles studied:

Whatever her interests, the single girl picked up a magazine, went to the movies—got into a conversation with just about anyone—and heard about what single girls had heard about since 1860: how to catch a man and make him stay. For example, a February 1952 issue of
Ladies’ Home Journal
provided a “quick inventory for bachelor girls”: “What about your…hair, complexion, clothes? Are you a good talker, dancer, listener? Do you have a sense of humor? Hobby? Outside interests?…If anything is lacking you must go to the hairdresser, psychiatrist, whatever is needed. Only then are you prepared to face the world.”

These articles and books prescribed ways to achieve a kind of robotic period perfection, “a rigorous ideal that is…to be desired by any woman who cares about her future.” But in fact the physical attributes of 1950s “perfection” were intensely difficult to attain. The dictates of the female ideal were repeated and reprinted as if they were a paper doll’s mantra: “I am 5 feet 4 inches tall, 122 pounds, with brown hair, blue eyes, a 25
¹
/2-inch waist, 34-inch bust, and 36-inch hips.” Famed anthropologist and frequent commentator Margaret Mead found it startling—and not necessarily “good”—that the average 1956 girl was fifteen pounds lighter than her counterpart thirty years before.

New products appeared to assist in her transformation, most dramatically, hair dye that one could use safely at home without burning the scalp or turning hair purple (both incidents documented in a 1922 diary). Shirley Polykoff, a female advertising executive who, along with Estée Lauder and PR magnate Eleanor Lambert, were the professional “exceptions” to every rule, brought hair dye into the average bathroom or, for many single girls, into the kitchen sink. Her idea was to convince women that by changing their hair color they could change themselves. Wives would become more interesting to their husbands. Single women, suddenly
more assertive
and
more feminine, would attract more men. As one promotional piece explained this proposed alchemy:

Paraphrasing a question her mother-in-law once asked in Yiddish, Polykoff put forth her own query: “Does she or doesn’t she?”

Playboy
magazine, then in its mysogynistic glory days, was quick to point out that hair color didn’t matter, not for a wife of all people, and certainly not for that inherently slutty single girl. In the “Playboy Coloring Book,” a popular monthly feature, the reader was presented with three single chicks he might place inside his make-believe bachelor pad.

The only instructions: “Make one blond. Make one a brunette. And make one a redhead. It doesn’t matter which.” In the
Playboy
schematic, what mattered was mammary glands—bosoms, bazooms, jugs; only class-A breasts could really alter the average woman. Although, even then, she’d be a joke. One popular
Playboy
cartoon at that time was, in fact, called
The Bosom.
Here was the story of a woman who measured 43-22-36. In each issue, the Bosom tried, despite mighty gravitational pull, to walk down the street.

Because so many people thought and often talked about blondness and breasts, even the most highly educated single found herself forced to consider the merits of Clairol and falsies or, more bluntly put, peroxide and “stuffing.” And she confronted an onslaught of beauty advertising—campaigns and strategies way beyond hair dye—that would have made a devoted flapper faint. In its 1956 issue on the American Woman,
Life
took great glee in itemizing the tricks and tools of the chase. That year alone American women had spent $1.3 billion on cosmetics and toiletries, $660 million on beauty treatments; $400 million on soap and electric grooming
devices; $65 million on “reducing.” And that leaves out of the calculations all the clothes that were purchased to allure what
Playboy
called “the female’s permanent cash box. The hapless soon-to-be-broke American male.”

If some single women were repelled by this competition, others were matter-of-fact. Wrote one woman in the
Life
extravaganza: “If the race is to continue, we like to provide a second parent. So we go about the serious business of finding husbands in a serious manner, which allows no time for small luxuries like mercy toward competitors. Nature turns red in tooth and claw, every method is fair and rivals get no quarter.”

To say the least, this materialistic—and carnivorous—vision of the single world was disturbing. Columnist Anita Colby, a single working woman herself, wrote in 1956, “Emotionally we single women are at the greatest disadvantage of all women…we face a frightening world by ourselves…. Our enemies are loneliness and insecurity. Anxiety is a familiar houseguest.” But she had some encouragement to add. “Don’t go around feeling unfulfilled, jealous of your married friends, looking at every man you meet as ‘game.’…You have a life of your own.”

As early as 1957, there were 11.5 million single women over eighteen in the United States, compared with 14.5 million single males. Not all of them were updated Eve Ardens—self-deprecating, not quite beautiful, resigned to it—nor were they pathetic Miss Lonelyhearts, the name, in fact, of a character in the 1954 Hitchcock film
Rear Window.
In this, a bored wheelchair-bound photographer casually watches, and names, his neighbors, following a whole courtyard of minidramas and intrigue, including of course one nasty murder. Miss Lonelyhearts, in a subplot of a subplot, is a single woman who appears in a lone window frame, pacing in boredom. At one point she pretends to throw a dinner party for two when she is all by herself. Another time she brings home a man who attacks her. She breaks down. She takes too many pills. But the average young woman, if she lived alone, was not necessarily “playing dinner” or playing with bottles of mil-town.

She was happily “astray.” Or at least surviving nicely. And she wrote home to say as much on expensive stationery that had on it the word “Miss.” One 1957
Science Digest
survey of 6,750 single women, age twenty-
five to fifty, reported, “We now seem to be in a nation with a certain group of females who do not look forward to getting married…. they keenly desire other experiences outside the normative marital pattern. They may not always understand why they feel as they seem to. Yet they nonetheless do.”

From another report, written at the University of Michigan: “Whatever secrets they’re not telling…we can now safely say that for certain of these girls, the search for a mate may take an entirely unpredictable path. They are waiting. Even if this, from any reasoned point of view, allows their options to give way.”

One popular holding pattern was to take up residency inside a parent-approved, high-rise nunnery. The YWCA offered small rooms for rent, these regarded as a bit déclassé, and even less glamorous were the barebones old-style boardinghouses. Most nervous first-time émigrés fantasized about the exclusive all-girls hotels on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, specifically the Barbizon, a serene Italianate landmark on Sixty-third Street that was to rooming houses what Smith and Wellesley were to colleges. As the familiar ads read, “Some of the world’s most successful women”—and that included Grace Kelly and Gene Tierney—“have been Barbizon Girls.”

The copywriters left out an essential word: briefly.

A nineteen-year-old resident explained to one of the many afternoon papers, for one of the many “Barbizon Life” stories: “It is the place where you go when you leave something—college; your immediate family; your old life. And for that it’s perfect—as long as
you don’t stay too long.
” (The oldest resident, usually juxtaposed in photos with a young freckled preppy type, was in her eighties. She was famous for playing the house pipe organ at the afternoon teas.)

In 1958 Gael Greene, then of the
New York Post,
wrote an extensive ten-part series devoted to her twenty-three-year-old life at the Barbizon, attempting to do for the high-rise residence hotels what Dorothy Richardson had done for shabby lodging quarters fifty years earlier. Like so many other recent graduates, Greene had come to the city “seeking something indefinable—something to do. A rent-paying job, romance,
the alchemy that will transform an ordinary girl into an extraordinary woman.”

What she found at her first destination, the glamorous Barbizon, was an overheated planet of lonely women, spinning in an orbit that paralleled that of the city but did not overlap. As she wrote,