Bachelor Girl (42 page)

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Some early feminists pointed out that the numbers needed interpretation. Women lived longer because, never soldiers or bar brawlers, they often kept their bodies intact past age thirty. They didn’t leave home as often as men, meaning that when census inspectors called, they were in. There also now simply
seemed
to be more women, because so many formerly hidden middle-class women were out on the streets.

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It’s interesting that Sinclair Lewis, the man, seems to have had a personal change of heart about career women when his own wife, former journalist Dorothy Thompson, became exasperated with marriage and his drinking and went off to cover World War II. He left her in 1937, claiming that her work had destroyed their relationship. “American women are like that,” he concluded, “killers of talent.”

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Some of the best recorded sex in all thirties literature can be found not in the sexologized males of the period but in Mary McCarthy, particularly in the interwoven short stories
The Company She Keeps
. On a long train ride after leaving her husband, a sophisticated, educated young woman, a self-styled radical and intellectual, finds herself with no one to talk to and so chats morosely with a red-cheeked Midwestern type, probably a salesman. They get violently drunk, then for hours on end perform every imaginable sex act in his berth. In the aftermath, he declares that he will leave his wife or take her for his permanent mistress. She claims to have been blacked out through most of it and, recalling the rest, would like to jump from the train. In the end, ignoring his entreaties, she decides to collect it as an experience, knowing the purple love bites and hand marks still visible on her buttocks will go soon enough, and she will be once more her sophisticated self.

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“Togetherness” grew from the work of famed sociologist Talcott Parsons who, along with other academics, wrote long tracts on “modern personality” as it related to the structure of families. As that translated, the modern family unit had to shed the old-fashioned day-to-day contact with the extended family. “No home is big enough for two families,” Parsons wrote. “Particularly of two different generations, with opposite theories on child training.” As one magazine put it in 1954, “The modern family, as a singular unit, pools brains, looks, activities and thinks like an army platoon and competes against other platoons in the neighborhood.” Single women, through with school, momentarily adrift in life, were sometimes invited back to stay a while with the platoon. But like traditional spinsters, they were often given specific tasks to carry out in exchange for board.

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Time
put Joan Baez on its cover in 1962, featuring not a picture of Joan but a painting, a dark Modigliani-esque blur (her features are so crooked she seems as if she might fall apart). Details from the story: “She walks straight to the microphone and begins to sing. No patter. No show business. She usually wears a sweater and skirt or a simple dress…. She is 21 and palpably nubile. But there is little sex in that clear flow of sound…it has in it reminders of black women wailing in the night…. She is a lovely girl who has always attracted numerous boys. But her wardrobe would not fill a hatbox.”

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No matter how radical you were, it was hard to get a break. Feminist Kate Millet, author, bisexual, artist, and one of the few women to have it out publicly with Norman Mailer, was promoting a book. Her mother, who approved of her daughter’s work, or at least some of it, nevertheless had to express herself defiantly in 1971: “Kate is really missing the boat if she appears on the
Mike Douglas Show
without washing her hair.”

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A random excerpt from one recent bridal publication on the subject of a “budget-conscious but still gloriously Luxe event.” We learn, for example, that a 750-milliliter bottle of Moët et Chandon Brut Imperial costs $45.50, if you know where to shop; 100 guest invitations, depending on paper weight and calligraphic style, cost a minimum of $1,000, although that’s conservative and does not take into account, in some stores, the envelopes and reply cards. The catering for 150 guests, as estimated by three much-in-demand New York caterers: $25,000; tux rental: $170; bridal gown, $1,800–$2,500, although there’s a lot of latitude here; some go as high as $3,500. Then flowers. All we learn is that the floral package—bouquets, arrangements, boutonnieres—starts at $1,000 for “a small wedding party.” Pictures, unless you have a talented and friendly relative, will run $4,500–$5,000 and the his ’n’ her 18-karat-gold rings will cost upward of $800. Finally, the cake, or what were formerly cakes and now look like little Busby Berkeley sets with twirling staircases lined by cherubs and angels instead of girls with harps, begin at $5,000.

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Some single women headed west—by themselves. The Oregon Land Donation Act of 1850 was originally intended to entice spinsters and younger women to come west and marry homesteaders. Changes to the law during the next decade allowed several hundred women to stake land claims of their own.

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There were a few categories of spinster exemption. For example, if a woman had lived a privileged life on the stage or been a famous painter’s model or dancer, she would be presumed to possess a stage trunk full of romantic stories forever putting her out of the banal spinster category. The other “out” was the widow-manqué, the spinster who had been engaged to a brave soldier, dead in battle, his picture forever on her bureau. An excellent widow-manqué can be found in Jane, one of the two spinstered Sawyer sisters in
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm
, who lost her great love to the Civil War. Although Jane had “never left Riverboro in all the years that lay between and [had] grown into…[a] spare New England spinster…underneath was still the faint echo of that wild heartbeat of girlhood.” Her sister, in comparison, was hard, unyielding, and nasty. And occasionally a spinster character might redeem herself by marrying late, miraculously shedding her dusty paper chains. A great twentieth-century example is Miss Parthenia Ann Hawks of the musical
Show Boat
(1926), who’d lived “a barren spinster’s life” before her marriage to Cap’n Andy.

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The corollary of the single woman who refused to bear healthy white children was her married contemporary who sought ways to abort unwanted children. During the mid-nineteenth century, in the decades just before the abortion outlaw, a common image in the American press was “the Aborting Matron,” a piggy, self-satisfied wife downing poison or else portrayed as demonically possessed.

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The majority of applicants turned back at Ellis Island were unable to prove that they had waiting relatives. Either that, or they had physical problems (usually eye trouble) and/or mental disorders. Being female and single—and especially if there were no waiting relatives—was at times as incriminating as rheumy eyes. Many, many lone female travelers were sent back.

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The most famous ghettoizing process was under way at the phone company. Telephone operator had been a respectable job, meaning a male job, until corporate expansion created several tiers of more challenging positions. By as early as 1902, the Bell Telephone System employed 37,000 female switchboard operators. Their rationale: Women had “more calming” voices and were “more patient.”

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Historian Eleanor Flexner notes that it took four pages of small type to list all the male occupations women took over during the war. Without the influence of World War II–style propaganda, women of all ages had trained to build armaments, to repair furnaces, while a very large corps of nurses traveled, often driving ambulances, between battle sites. Many continued their work, putting themselves at enormous risk throughout the flu pandemic of 1918.

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The saddest new-dependency story belongs to blond thirties screen idol Jean Harlow, who was shoved into the film business by an insensitive, piggy mother and a lecherous stepfather. Never satisfied she’d done enough for them, they pushed her harder, and spent a great deal of her money. Eventually she broke free of them but had only a few years on her own. She died at twenty-six of a botched abortion.

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Most American medical schools placed a 5 percent quota on female admissions, 1915–1945; Columbia and Harvard law schools still excluded women applicants until 1937, as did the New York City Bar Association.