Bachelor Girl (27 page)

If the plans called for her to arrive at the appointed place alone, there were comparable instructions. According to
Footloose and Fancy Free,
“If a woman arranges to meet a man in a central spot, a hotel or a restaurant, for example…[and] she is the first to arrive…she should ask to be seated at a table. It is perfectly alright to order a cocktail or coffee while waiting…the man pays for it when he arrives.”

But life was rarely that simple. Men came over. They often invited themselves or just showed up. And as much as no one wished to acknowledge the idea, men stayed over.

“My kids have the idea that nobody before 1960 had recreational sex,” said Martha, a secretary turned travel agent, now sixty-four. “Oh, you tried harder in those days to push it back. You went to theater and made excuses after, tried not to have him see you home, or he came in and you tried to cut it off and it was
so
awkward…. Eventually, though, you’re twenty-three, you’re not married, and you’re human. As they say, do the math.”

Part of the math involves a consideration of the unpublicized figures. Between 1944 and 1955 there was an 80 percent increase in the number of white babies put up for adoption and an unspecified but noted rise in what were known as “homes for wayward girls,” especially on the East Coast. While it’s impossible to calculate the number of illegal abortions performed, coroner’s and doctor’s reports indicate that between eight hundred and one thousand women died each year from these procedures.

Other signs of sex in the culture were harder to miss. By the late fifties
there was an increasingly visible sexual demimonde. As one
New York Tribune
columnist described it: “Movie stars who are idolized by millions jump in and out of bed on the front pages of daily newspapers. Celebrities and socialites return from trips to the Caribbean with ‘traveling companions.’ A celebrated romance finally culminates in a wedding and five months later a ‘premature’ 11-pound baby is born.” And less celebrated young women became the subjects of stories typically entitled (this from the
Daily News
): “Bachelor Girls: Their Lives and Loves.”

The bachelor girls in question were usually models or Rockettes; starlets, including Tina Louise; debutantes; the serious young career women “who work in the budding communications field;” and sometimes shockingly “open” rising stars. Like “Queen of the Bachelor Girls” Kim Novak. In two columns, she was pictured with four different men, including one South American dictator and a “Negro” entertainer (Sammy Davis, Jr.). She was also pictured all alone, sitting back in a chair, eyes closed, her bare feet up so that a reader had to remark both at her casual mien and her flaming red pedicure.

Bachelor girls like Kim, it was solemnly reported, “play by their own rules.”

For example, good for three columns, they dated married men. “Sure, I mean, course we do,” one BG told an eager reporter. “If only for the convenience! They don’t stay. They don’t make a fuss. In some ways it’s the ideal date.” One “Swedish girl” interviewed for the husbands series told the
News
that “other girls laugh at me because I don’t understand why they would go with a husband. They can’t see that it is a problem.” The Americans defended themselves. They were not immoral but “regular” women “making the most of a difficult situation”—not meeting the right men, perhaps not yet ready to—and, as another put it, “We are not evil. We are tired of sitting home on the weekends…. What does it mean to be immoral? We are just living the lives we have and we happen not to have husbands…. I do not think that for this reason we are going to hell.”

Surprisingly, the author of one 1959 story sided with them. Sort of. “Today in the midst of the rootless, unmarried groups that gravitate to a large city, a girl finds that it is often ‘square’ to be good. Besides, she her
self isn’t quite sure anymore what is good and bad, and neither is anyone else…. there is not a dropping off of morality. Just a shift in emphasis.”

Others disagreed entirely. In 1959, the Juvenile Aid Bureau, a social agency that had previously dealt largely with runaways, was charged with “easing the flow of incoming girls to New York City.” As one bureau official explained, “We spot a girl getting off a bus or a train and wandering the streets. We question her.” Under an obscure piece of municipal legislation called “the Girl Terms Act,” they could further “hold her until her family can be queried. If there is no family, or, as is often the case, the family does not want the juvenile back, and if the girl has no immediate relations in New York to claim her, we will send her back to the point of embarkation on her ticket.” In 1959 the JAB reported returning 350-plus suspicious-looking girls (that meant oddly dressed girls, slutty-looking girls; those too young and those not white).

Everyone acknowledged that most of these girls would find their way back in. At best they’d get clerical jobs they’d quickly lose, becoming rootless “wandering types.” Or they’d become prostitutes and drug addicts. Worse, they might become bohemians.

ON THE BEAT

The Beat generation is one of those mythical twentieth-century constructs that we associate with a loose conglomerate of crazy brilliant men. Jack Kerouac and his male muse, Neal Cassady; Allen Ginsberg, of course, and William Burroughs—and all the lesser luminaries who floated into and out of their lives, novels, and poems from their days at Columbia University, circa 1945 through the 1960s. But floating around in the background, handing out invitations to poetry readings, discussing art and writing, were a lot of intriguing young women—Hettie Cohen Jones, Joyce Glassman Johnson, Elise Cowen, and poet Diane diPrima, among many uncelebrated others.

These never quite became household names, but many of the onetime Beat girls went on to become writers and artists, just like the men. And
some turned out to be chroniclers. It’s these women who later wrote the best memoirs of Beat life in New York City and San Francisco. And as much as these stories and the memoirs—
How I Became Hettie Jones; Minor Characters; Beat Girl
—re-create the joy ride of Beat life, they are also historical documents of what it was to be young and single in the 1950s and to have blatantly ignored the rules. Many, like Joyce Johnson, began life as middle-class girls, from “decent” families who lived in Upper West Side apartments that had grand pianos, shelves filled with the “great” books, and well-kept furniture. In
Minor Characters,
her 1983 memoir, Johnson writes better than anyone, ever, about the female double life, the one that started for her at age thirteen, with furtive trips into the Village, and continued as she moved out of her parents’ house at twenty-one, radically taking her own place.

“Everyone knew in the 1950s why a girl from a nice family left home,” she writes. “The meaning of her theft of herself from her parents was clear to all—as well as what she’d be up to in that room of her own…On 116th Street, the superintendent knew it…. He spread the word among neighbors that the Glassmans’ daughter was ‘bad.’ His imagination rendered me pregnant.”

Actually, what she did was to live there (and in many other places), to hang around with important male artists who spoke mostly to each other, and to work. She supported her boyfriend, Jack Kerouac, when he was around, as well as anyone else currently in the Jack entourage. It’s what the girls did. Every morning, long before the men were up, with their hangovers and artistic visions, supportive Beat girls left the confines of the Village, took a train, and, as Johnson writes, “emerg[ed] into the daylight at Fiftieth Street [where] I’d feel I’d been swept up into an enormous secretarial army advancing inexorably upon Madison Avenue…as part of this army, I typed, read manuscripts, answered the phone, ate egg-salad sandwiches in the downstairs luncheonette (I’d learned very quickly how to locate the cheapest item on a menu).”

Her own books and stories were published, although no one, including her, made much about it. The Beat girls who became famous did so for extreme and daring acts, like Elise Cowen’s. Joyce’s beloved and dearest
friend, she threw herself through her parents’ living room window, a suicide at twenty-eight.

At about the same time, Rona Jaffe published her best-selling novel
The Best of Everything,
the classic three-girls-come-to-the-city story, and forerunner of the Jackie Susann blockbusters. Her mother grieved. It was 1958, and a career put such a damper on a possible marriage! Then the book was turned into a film with Hope Lange as the aspiring editor and model Suzy Parker as the second of her roommates; Joan Crawford even put in an appearance as the bitch spinster boss who keeps them overtime at the keyboards. It was a huge hit. But “poor Rona!” as a family friend said to her mother. “With the film sale…all that money, now she’ll
never
get married.”

A popular magazine feature during these years—adapted as a late newsreel short subject—was the photo essay I think of as “Girl Comes to the City.” Panel by panel, we watch the new girl arrive and get settled. She meets her roommates, gets a job, fights for a stool at the pushy luncheonette counter, and accepts that she will not find a seat on the subway. These features always included a shot of the girl in a bathrobe, hair twisted up in a towel, as she prepared for a date. No one has ever looked so excited while painting her toenails.

In other shots of her at a desk, or stopped on the street, waiting to cross, she looks sad. Months have passed and she’s learned a few things—about married men, wolves, loneliness—and she wonders perhaps if she shouldn’t just pick herself up and go home. Then the last panel. Girl in the tiny shared living room, staring out at the skyline or, more realistically, at fire escapes and squat brown water tanks. The scene is so hypnotic that she has the essential epiphany: There is so much here to see and to learn that to return home, where she’s seen and learned all there is to know, would be a kind of death.

I’m sure some looked at these pictorials and saw a titillating but pointless risk. Others saw a travel poster on which a special message had been engraved for them in invisible ink. It said, “Come join us!”

THE SECOND COMING OF THE SINGLE GIRL

Images of the 1960s have been so long in circulation that someone born in 1984 could easily assemble his or her own timeline or montage: JFK and Jackie; the Zapruder film; Martin Luther King and Malcolm X; Vietnam (with asides for the Beatles, the Apollo missions, LSD), and, depending on one’s mood that day, conclude with Woodstock and microminis, or Kent State and My Lai.

In most schematics, single womanhood as a significant phenomenon does not make the charts alongside the antiwar crusade or the blossoming of the counterculture. It bubbled along throughout the sixties as a bright and sexy trend, a magazine story or pictorial that could also be played as maudlin or scary. As a serious, permanent social fact, it would emerge with the women’s movement of the early 1970s. And the early women’s movement was the last and, as many, many frightened people viewed it, the least serious of the uprisings. Who was being hurt, exactly? Was the phrase “white middle-class woman” next to the word “oppressed” an oxymoron?

One “then girl” explained: “Nobody took you seriously if you were married and presumed to be a housewife—you were just another married speck. What were your problems—and who cared? If you were single, even if you were wearing bright yellow vinyl boots like I was, you were still just a girl who was going to become a housewife. No great tragedy…. As someone who might have a complicated political or social situation—forget it. You were invisible.”

By the mid-1970s, however, single women would emerge as among the most economically and socially significant of all the onetime shadow population groups. Being single, like being openly gay, would finally lose any lingering taint of ugly character weakness, any hint of pathology, and come to seem an entirely viable way to live—what someone back in 1925 had first called a “lifestyle.”

Traces of this new single appear as if on cue in 1960. First, the 1960 census reported that 9.3 million households, about 18 out of every 100,
were headed by solo women. (And the dramatic rise—more than a million since 1950—was genuine; it did not reflect the fact that there were simply more households overall.) More women, it seemed, earned their own money, and because there was more readily available housing, they did not have to live with relatives if they chose not to. True, most of these women were safely identified as widows, but close to 2 million were divorcées, 900,000 were separated from their husbands, and most shocking of all, 1.4 million of these women had never wed. “Who Needs a Man Around the House?” asked the
New York Mirror Magazine
in spring 1960. Beneath the enormous headline we see a Grace Kelly blonde, stretching as she gets out of bed wearing a negligé. We next see her pictured seated serenely with coffee and newspaper, and in another frame she is casually repairing a broken cabinet all by herself. It’s threatening, but for safety’s sake, a cat has been included in one photo and a caption reassures readers that she used this pet as an “outlet” for expressing affection.

By the early sixties, marriage as a national ideal, an enforceable teenaged daydream, had lost some of its hypnotic force. The number of divorces nationwide had doubled in the ten years since 1952. Thousands of housewives, already identified as “miserable” and “suffering,” were sending rescue notes to magazines, begging advice.
Ladies’ Home Journal
launched the famed, long-running feature “Can This Marriage Be Saved?”
The Feminine Mystique
came out in 1963. “Togetherness,” that byword of 1950s normalcy, began to sound ominous. Among the most popular films of 1962 was
Days of Wine and Roses,
starring Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick as a couple free-falling into mutually supportive alcoholism. The film seems microscopically focused on alcohol abuse, complete with a Twelve Step savior who appears at the end, to explain Important Facts about The Issue. But it may also be seen as a portrait of midcentury marriage as claustrophobic nightmare—“togetherness” as the theme for a monster movie. Here, in a small apartment, live a devoted modern couple who have dutifully excluded their closest relatives. In their isolation, their willingness to get or do
anything
for each other without question, they slowly poison each other.

By far the most controversial element of an evolving single conscious
ness was the introduction in 1960 of the Pill. All over the country, college-aged girls, “nice” girls from “fine” schools, began taking it en masse and saying radical things about sex—or so it seemed to a population unaccustomed to this open public discussion. More alarming still, they sounded very blasé about the things they said. These young women “assume that [sex] is a possible and probable part of a single girl’s experience,” wrote young reporter Gloria Steinem in
Esquire
in 1962. As one graduate student told her, “Lovemaking can be good outside marriage and bad in marriage just as easily as the other way around. Sex is neutral, like money. It’s the way you use it that counts.” One national magazine polled four hundred college students on “chastity.” The findings: Nearly “all respondents…virginal or no more…said…sexual behavior is something you have to decide by yourself.”

Many young college women used their training in logic to support this newly constructed morality. One of Steinem’s subjects had affairs out of marriage because, in her considered view, women were meant for lots of sex. As she reasoned, females were the only mammals capable of orgasm during times they were unable to conceive, therefore orgasm must have served some other purpose, namely pleasure. Another argued: “I’m not preaching against the institution of marriage by having affairs beforehand and I’m not going to produce illegitimate children for society to take care of. People who have no share in the consequences should have no share in the decision.” A companion of hers solemnly concluded, “With one hundred percent birth control you are not running the risk of hurting anyone by your behavior and therefore it is not immoral.” Others were more practical: “If I’d known, I might have postponed my wedding and had pre-marital relations instead.” (One campus student board declared that by 1984 “women will be 100% unchaste.”)

Within two years of its introduction, at least 750,000 American women were on the Pill and an estimated 500 more began taking it every day.
The Complete Book of Birth Control,
published by the Planned Parenthood Federation, reported on who they were and went on at some length. I quote it briefly: “More education and better income…tend to shift the responsibility for birth control to the wife. Informal studies indicate the
same shift among unmarried girls.” Unlike the diaphragm, the Pill could be prescribed for a number of nonsexual causes—menstrual irregularities, control of ovarian cysts—and thus there were convenient excuses for anyone to take it.

Gloria Steinem, starting here to sound like Gloria Steinem, wrote that “the development of a new autonomous girl is important and in numbers quite new…. She expects to find her identity neither totally without mennor totally through them…She has work she wants to do and she can…marry later than average, and have affairs if she wishes, but she can also marry without giving up her work.”

This new female “type”—still, of course, years from reality—so excited authors and sociologists that they began to examine the possible specimen right away. What many saw was a normal girl, a future wife who had, amidst this onrush of divorce, become cynical, a wary spectator at what Phyllis Rosenteur in
The Single Woman
(1961) called the “quickie in-and-out affairs that often masquerade these days as marriage.” She called her the “intuitive woman” and charted her development in this way:

The following year, researchers at Stanford announced that women with deep insight into established male/female roles were less likely to make an early “uninformed” marriage.
Science Digest
reported that a University of Michigan study of twenty-five hundred singles had found unwed women to be happier overall than their male counterparts—no matter the
persistent belief that men idealized their bachelor years and left them reluctantly. With the exception of divorced women, who were uniquely stigmatized, researchers concluded, “the single woman who lives alone…[was] not usually a frustrated old maid. And among those who live alone, women are not the weaker sex. Generally, single women…experience less discomfort than single men…. They are more active in the working through of the problems they face and appear stronger than single men in meeting the challenge of their position.”

Helen Gurley Brown, newly appointed editor of a revivified
Cosmopolitan,
hated that language—“discomfort,” the “challenge” of one’s sadly “compromised” position, or the word
frustrated
as it applied to anyone single. She had just married for the first time at thirty-seven. And, using her own slang (“mouseburger,” for example, meant a quiet, spinsterish girl) and dousing it with exclamation points, she’d published the best-selling
Sex and the Single Girl
(1962). Here we meet a new variation of the single girl, this one a tornado of competence—pretty, slim, but also smart, “up” on the news, well-read, and given to sewing and cooking while at the same time cramming in some art history or Russian literature. She worked hard at a job in the arts and lived by herself in a sleek, sexy apartment. She was enormously popular but seemingly choosy, selective; very hard to get.

As Helen Brown says of her own single days, “The phone just rang incessantly. It was terribly annoying if you were trying to get something done. There were nights, I tell you, when I just carried the phone over and
put it into the freezer
.”

She’ll go on to tell you of the radical impact she made with this vision of a single aristocrat. (“It was the first time anyone suggested that being single was not the same thing as having a social disease!!”) But even though this girl “lived by her wits…sharpened…honed…coping with people trying to marry her off,” she was still an elaborately decked-out slab of bait. Brown devoted whole chapters to mascara, clothing, and bizarre seductive technique (“any unusual jewelry is a come on, but it should be beautiful or you’ll look
too Ubangi
!”). Just as nineteenth-century girls had been encouraged into smashes, their affectionate behavior good practice for the marital arts, so this new single girl was honing herself to be a unique
modern wife or, in the spirit of Helen Brown, a delectable, frothy, and fabulous wife!

Still, all silliness aside, Brown was advocating a time-out for self-improvement before marriage. Gloria Steinem’s autonomous girl calmly went out, or so it was said, and had sex. And the vision of all those cabinet-repairing amazon divorcées! Put together, the new sixties singles began to sound slightly alarming.

Esquire
in particular became obsessed with a female uprising. There were long essays on ball-busting new types, for example, the “American Witch,” a spoiled, selfish bitch who deliberately failed to share male enthusiasm for football and did not leap at commands for food. One parable told of a distant time when little Caroline Kennedy, grown and now president, oversaw a program that allowed every American woman to grow a penis. Men, psychological eunuchs, took refuge in bars.

Others objected along more familiar lines. Author Pearl Buck, returning to the States after years abroad, wrote that of all changes “the new ethics of sex” was most amazing, “so abrupt, so far reaching that we are all dazed by it.” But she believed that an insufficient few had stopped to consider the consequences—the many unwanted children that would still, even with the new “technology,” result in “rows and rows of tiny unattended cribs.”

Several professors from universities such as Stanford, Princeton, and Tufts foresaw in these loosened sexual constraints a dissolving national morality. If women, like men, could engage in whatever sexual practice they chose, when they chose, in short, without any external controls, they were more likely to develop a reckless spontaneity in other of their actions. From a letter to the
New York Times
: “Women, like some men, now find it fashionable to behave and conduct themselves in whatever way they choose, in consideration only of their own feelings. Too bad if there are children.” To quote one Harvard psychologist, “This sudden emphasis on individual choice, a morality of one, is…dangerous.”

Occasionally one heard a measured voice. Sylvia Porter, in her
New York Post
column, “Your Dollar,” took on the new female single as a social development that required a practical, not moralistic, response. She called on manufacturers to package smaller meals and scale products down to suit
the family of one. The housing industry, she believed, would need “to develop centrally located…inexpensive, small apartments.” As she reported, “According to a census spokesman…there will be more and more [single women] as the years go on.”

In fairness, one professor who’d expressed concern about a relative female morality also urged caution in too quickly judging women. Considering female freedom, he had found at least one “salutary” side effect. “A woman free to find fulfillment in marriage
and
work” was far more likely to “be self-motivated. Autonomous…
This
is the kind of woman who makes the ideal teacher.”

It was, after all, still 1962 or 1963. Most of the single women inspiring such terrorized discourse were still in fact teachers, secretaries, or something else safely within the canon of female careers. A 1960s board game for girls, “What Shall I Be: The Exciting Game of Career Girls,” laid out the possibilities. Along with teacher and secretary one could work toward “stewardess,” “model,” “nurse,” trying to avoid two old-maid-ish cards known as the Duds, either a fat middle-aged actress with runny makeup or else an unmistakable spinster.