Bachelor Girl (5 page)

Yet there was a long tradition of communal living among single women. In Great Britain it dated to A.D. 385 and the founding of the Ursuline and Pauline orders, religious communes that were actually more like early social-work agencies. Lone girls from all over England arrived daily so desperate and grateful that, from the descriptions, it’s not hard to imagine them standing on the steps and shouting “Sanctuary!” These groups—and there were constantly new ones—quickly earned the title “bastard flocks,” for their loose approach to devotional life. Without quite meaning to, they had devised the only viable escape for unwed women stuck at home: an unquestionably proper religious setting in which girls could learn some
thing useful. In fact, to claim a religious calling—whether fantasized or cleverly invented—would become the means for many determined single women to break free. Florence Nightingale, for example, claimed that she’d had an epiphany as opposed to a rebellious fit and this calling, this quasi-religious mission, allowed her slowly to extricate herself from her controlling family.

But the conventual life was a hard one. The novitiates, or the new girls, spent a year working through strictly regimented days on the grounds. After that they were trained to perform charitable works for the poor. These works—nursing, child care, housecleaning, cooking—were physically draining and carried out in places so run-down, in weather so bad, few girls told their parents just what they did. (One communard, a nurse trainee, returned home, told her family what she did, and found that no one would come near for fear of disease.) But the rewards! A justifiable life outside the house! A job, a place, procured on her own! Most thrilling was the chance to be judged for one’s skills and bravery and not one’s ability to please a man.

Some communards were tremendously influential. Annie Macpherson, a young Scottish woman, established a fund to take in Arab street kids who’d been abandoned all over London. Working with a small team, she arranged for their safe transport and adoption by families in Canada. That’s how I describe her achievement. One of her male contemporaries saw it differently. Here was yet another woman blindly ignoring her responsibilities. Instead of marriage she was determined to “explain the world to swarthy students.”

She had her American counterparts. Single abolitionist Fanny Wright, along with her spinster sister, established an all-women commune on some uncleared land in Tennessee and called it Nashoba. Their goal was to educate freed slaves, but the effort was cut down by charges of free love and unfair labor practices; poor finances ultimately forced the school to close. As if in penance, Wright at thirty-six entered a loveless marriage.

But another sort of British commune, this one originally male, would have a serious and lasting impact on American spinsters. That was the set
tlement house, a social-work institute set down in the worst parts of major cities and, in America, run by corps of women, often college friends who then lived there together for the rest of their lives. Jane Addams, founder of Hull House in Chicago, and Lillian Wald of New York’s Henry Street Settlement are the most famous, and their “houses,” of course, are still in business. But there were many others that did the same—offered to poor women, and especially immigrant women, necessary services, whether medical referrals, English-language classes, or specific items such as blankets, food, and clothing.

And their sights were set higher. Senior staff trained young women “of promise” (meaning girls with a clean appearance, a serious demeanor, and a college diploma) and sought out others with political backgrounds. House leaders formed alliances with one another to construct what scholar Carroll Smith-Rosenberg calls “a delicate web of interlocking social justice organizations.” Over time, settlement leaders and their allies campaigned for child-labor legislation, women’s unionization, and the founding of the NAACP (despite all the justified charges of early white feminist, specifically suffragist, racism). And many settlement causes, suffrage for one, eventually became U.S. law. Some of their residents would later move into positions of power, especially during the 1930s, when Eleanor Roosevelt tapped them to run New Deal agencies that dealt with women.

As professionals, these women had a uniform, similar to that of academics: shirtwaists, high-collared white blouses that buttoned down the back and stood up stiffly, worn with long skirts, hair pulled back from the face in a bun. Spectacles, keys, crucifixes hung like necklaces. It was a presentation of self that read: I am serious, not girlish and frilly but so somber, so plain I can mean nothing to you sexually; I have a cause. This warrior wear may be viewed as the sartorial ancestor of the early dress-for-success professional gray-out.

Using their somber appearance, their impressive credentials, and their emphasis on feminine good works, the settlement women gained national respect. The causes they worked for did not have anything to do with the rights of women to live alone or in groups. But their group-house experi
ment, so exotic and yet so sensible, influenced thousands of girls to sign on. Thousands of parents and would-be fiancés dissolved in panic.

THE GIRL GROUP AS TERRORIST CELL

Suspicion of women living in groups shows up in the earliest of Western mythologies. In the Greek myths, we find the Graeae, three eerie spectral sisters, who lived in some indefinite realm beyond the space and time of the human world. The Graeae shared among them one eye, which they passed to one another at regular intervals. It was this eye that Perseus stole to use in his search for the Gorgons, a sister band of outcasts. The eye revealed the group and his special prey: Medusa, whose phallic snakey head he then chopped off and paraded as proof that the world was safe once more for men. (Medusa, of course, could turn any man to stone just by looking at him.)

Not so easily defeated were the Amazons, a ferocious band of warrior women who lived on a mysterious island, hidden from the world, where they practiced their “arts…. To draw the bow, to hurl the javelin.” According to Herodotus, each Amazon cut off a breast to make it easier for her to handle the weaponry. Eventually, Theseus, king of Athens, waged a severe, relentless battle and won their queen as his wife. Another select group of single women, the Muses, daughters of Zeus, watched over male lives. Each had the power to give to men specific artistic or intellectual gifts; they also possessed control over men’s imaginations, their ability to love and remember, although they could not directly affect a man’s destiny. That was left to the most feared female gang of all—the three Fates, those morbid shrouded beings who rolled out the string of life, stretched it, and raised the knife.

A mistrust of female communality turns some unexpected corners. Bronson Alcott summed up the patriarchal view when he said of Louisa, “She has involved herself with a group of women who are ridiculed and condescended to…. she [will be] tolerated as an eccentric…a faded woman…fit only for the fringes of family and social life.” But some early feminists objected, too. Mary Wollstonecraft, author of what would be
come the feminist constitution
On the Vindication of the Rights of Woman
(1792), worried that women together were forming “unnatural organizations,” behaving without regard to the outside world, and thus developing a “grossness,” too great a degree of “intimacy,” among one another that would make it impossible for them to function as adult women the world would take seriously. Writer Eliza Lynn Linton, circa 1875, referred to shared group houses, or any too-close female organization, as “the shrieking sisterhoods.”

The sound of women talking together—gossiping, chattering, even whispering—seems always to have evoked negative images, shrieking or otherwise. Nathaniel Hawthorne complained famously of the many hack women writers, “damned scribblers,” as he called them, whose dreadful blathering books outsold his own. He often added to his usual tirade the secret belief that they worked somehow together, having masterminded a female word machine. “They speak endlessly to one another in private letters and they keep diaries which they are only too pleased to have others read out loud.”
The Strand
magazine, in 1894, only hinting at satire, called for the reinstatement of the brank, or gossip’s bridle, a sixteenth-century device that was, until 1824, used to “silence the talkative shrew.” The brank or branks consisted of an iron framework that locked like a helmet onto a woman’s head. Attached to the front was a small metal flap, or “gag,” that was inserted into the woman’s mouth so that she could not move her tongue. The bridle had extra features. The sharp gag was positioned so that if our shrew spoke at all, her tongue would be slashed.

The paranoid belief that women, when gathered in groups, will plot gossip, using words as Amazons used their weapons, is a recurring theme throughout history.

A fascinating document of this dread is a little-known 1916 antiabortion film called
Where Are My Children?
In this story, a small-town district attorney prosecuting a doctor for performing a deadly abortion learns that the doctor has performed abortions on many single women the lawyer knows—in fact, he’s assisted married women and, as it turns out, most of the women in the town. It soon becomes clear that the local women have for years secretly helped one another to terminate pregnancies, passing the
doctor’s information around like contraband. One member of this underground network is the lawyer’s wife, who may have had an abortion and, like all others in her spy circle,
without telling her husband
. The thought of abortions was awful enough.
*
But worse almost was the thought of women plotting together to control their fertility. The lawyer, played by Tyrone Power, Sr., seems about to break down. To comfort himself, he declares that if women pose such “a danger to mankind,” they will be monitored. Male spies will be turned on the crazy female spies, and they will stop them! And their antisocial insanity.

Single women in particular were often written off as crazy. “Their talkativeness, violation of conventions of feminine speech, and insistence on self-expression…. [that] was the kind of behaviour…that led to their being labeled ‘mad,’” writes scholar Elaine Showalter. Although it was impossible to prove, it was often said that single women in the late nineteenth century made up more than half the population of mental institutions.

By the 1960s, when critic Elizabeth Janeway revisited female collectivity, incessant chattering and potential madness no longer seemed to be the issue. The problem, as she saw it, lay in the social distancing of “unwanted unloved tribe(s),” whether single women, homosexuals, or any excluded group. Stuck together in a quarantined state, group members began to “externalize” or project their self-hatred onto outsiders. And the same dynamic would often work inside the group itself. In this self-loathing and paranoia she foresaw the spread of internal anarchy and betrayal.

The Women,
George Cukor’s 1939 film version of the Clare Boothe Luce play, more enjoyably makes the same point. True, the characters technically are married, but we never see the husbands; the women act as though the men don’t exist and spend their days wandering from home to store to spa in a state of heavily subsidized singledom. With little to do, without connection to the larger world, they live to gossip and to plot against one another.
The Women,
both as play and film, turns verbal spar
ring into a spectator sport, a fur-draped “pardon
me
” teacup kind of wrestling match with destructive results. The idea of manless women turning on one another, proving that these women are vile and imbecilic, has endless appeal. Both Wendy Wasserstein and Julia Roberts have attempted to revive the play, and a campy new version debuted on Broadway in the fall of 2001.

LIVES OF THE LONE RANGERS

Let’s briefly examine the lives of three nineteenth-century single women—Louisa May Alcott, Clara Barton, and, with special emphasis, Florence Nightingale. They are all members of that traditional grade-school book-report list of famous women, the one that includes Eleanor Roosevelt, Madame Marie Curie, and Helen Keller, who was for years presented as the consummate female role model (deaf, dumb, and blind but through intensely hard work making the most of it). Each of these women had to wait miserably at home before starting her career at about age thirty. And all struggled for years with intense frustration, guilt, and heavy bouts of depression.

Florence Nightingale will live always on record as history’s greatest and bravest nurse, as well as one of history’s most effective medical reformers. But the brave “Lady of the Lamp,” unlikely heroine of the Crimean War and England’s most celebrated medical statistician, spent much of her life until age thirty-three battling her mother. Frances Nightingale was a rich, socially prominent woman who expected her daughters, Parthenope and the younger, more beautiful Florence (named for the city where she was born), to participate fully in the season’s activities—balls, concerts, visiting rounds—then to move on to the family’s winter estate and start up again. Florence loathed social life, the hours spent dressing and chatting and smiling, all of it engineered to culminate in her early marriage. Her only solace was in the lessons she had with her father, a Cambridge graduate who’d insisted on teaching both girls mathematics, Latin, Greek, and literature. At sixteen, Florence wrote in one of her many journals that she could happily spend
the next year seated with her father in the library. That, however, was impossible; her mother, Florence wrote, was intent on “raising female slaves” she could marry off for good profit.

As she continued: “I don’t agree at all that a ‘woman has no reason—and not caring for anyone else—for not marrying a good man who asks her,’ and I don’t think Providence does either…. Some have every reason for not marrying, and…for these, it is much better to educate the children who are already in the world and can’t be got out of it, rather than to bring more into it.”