Authors: Betsy Israel
Tags: #Social Science, #Women's Studies, #History, #United States, #20th Century, #Media Studies
On weeknights residents filled the restaurants and movie theaters; on weekends, they filled the bars—Maxwell’s Plum, Mister Laffs, TGI Friday’s—a collection that stretched out along five crowded blocks of First Avenue. By midnight on Saturday, it seemed that someone had thrown a frat party without realizing a street fair was already under way.
Newsweek
called it “the body exchange.” Others likened it to a zoo, a “place made up of hands, hands, HANDS grabbing at you.” Or waiting on you. It became one of the city’s much-repeated mating tales that J. Walter Thompson employees actually competed for waiter and bartending jobs after hours. As one explained, “Where else am I going to meet chicks?”
The bar strip was also ground zero for journalists assigned to this generation’s singles beat. The standard device was to catch bits of conversations between couples who’d “connected,” as if on
The Dating Game,
and had invariably misheard each other’s names. The strategy, then, was to follow the strangers—one long-haired eyelinered female, one preppy male wearing bell-bottoms—as they moved in on each other and, if the reporter got lucky, left the bar together. But there were other scenes and other stories, and many girls could not stand the meat market that was the
Upper East Side. Some preferred Village bars or jazz clubs or the scenes at Max’s Kansas City, Cheetah’s, or the Electric Circus, where there was less date making than dancing and for the shy a lot of visual distraction—Warholian performance art; the first of the sparkly-ball light shows—also much potential single-girl sex. Sometimes right there.
“Wherever you went out in the 1960s, and I went, just went, wherever—it was very dark,” says Julie, now forty-nine, divorced, and the mother of two kids she adopted on her own.
It was the bars that were labeled “singles” bars that were the creepiest, I thought. Little red candles, all those guys with the open shirts and this glob of hair sticking out. People dressed alike. I liked places where there was more of a circus-y diffused scene…these bars really
were
meat markets…. I can remember at Maxwell’s, or one of them I got dragged to this one time, being afraid of going to the bathroom because I had inadvertently made eye contact with this manly-man kind of guy at the bar and I was afraid he would misinterpret my walking toward the bathroom as a cue…. It seemed so predatory.
WHERE HAVE OTHER SINGLES GONE?
At the time, of course, an enormous slab of the American single population was not in singles clubs of any kind, but still in college. Some would avoid the singles scene by getting married the day after graduation. But the MRS. degree had already begun its slow fade from the curriculum. “When I started school in 1965, we wore plaid skirts and had proper dates and had parietals,” says Sally Hoffe, a fifty-four-year-old lawyer, never wed and now a single parent. “By the time we left we were dressed in flowing scarves and ragged jeans and many of us had no makeup on except maybe a crescent moon on our forehead. We had thrown out hair dryers….Sex—we just had it. And unless you got pregnant or caught VD, the tone—at least with certain people anyway—the whole subject was casual as can be.”
In March 1966,
Time
devoted its Education section to a story on the younger “free sex movement,” what was largely a Berkeley phenomenon that had been around in some form since 1960. Printed below an extremely dark and blurry photo: “As they do at countless collegiate parties everywhere, the couples wriggled to the watusi and gyrated to the jerk, while recorded drums and saxophones resounded in the dimly lit apartment of a University of California student in Berkeley. Unlike most parties, however, the boys and girls were naked.”
“That sounds about right,” says Sally Hoffe.
Very Berkeley, but I’d be lying if I said in the Midwest I did not attend my share of like events…there was a lot of loosening-up of what you wore and
who
you
were
. Or who you thought you were that week…[but] not everyone participated. There were many girls who still had on the sensible Butterick sew-it-yourself shifts…. There were the wedding announcements and the “bride elect”! I always remember that phrase, bride-elect, the chosen. But what was it she chose?…My radicalization was to see this engagement ritual as a kind of sleepwalking…. Didthey really want to get married, or had they run out of ideas already?
At about this point in time it becomes more difficult to write about single women as a unified class. There were so many variations on the single state, so many stops along the singular spectrum. For example, in 1967 half of all women in their thirties were married mothers who remained at home full-time. But of these women, 17 percent were legally separated, or temporarily apart from their mates due to the Vietnam War. Thousands of women were already choosing to keep rather than give away out-of-wedlock babies—and to live with friends, sisters, boyfriends. The number of women who reported cohabiting or “having recently cohabited” was at about 550,000. Some single women lived in Upper East Side apartments or at the Y. But an equal number lived in communes or feminist collectives or in coed group housing. And many were developing unique new
views of singularity. A graphic artist and illustrator recalls life on “the commune of the Feminine Mystique, Brattleboro, Vermont”:
Everyone was equal and everyone was beautiful and cooked. Of all the memories of that time, I still see mostly the bowls and bowls of spaghetti. And I remember what they looked like the next morning, when I came down and, as one of two women, found them waiting for me…I was never really able to have roommates after that. If there was one night and things didn’t get put away, I became this insane despot…. I think it’s true about a lot of single women—theyhave their weird baggage. They’re pretty much always there, living alone, for a reason. And that reason is usually other people, no matter how many times they make the mistake again and again…. I think most of us end up where we want to be.
In Mary Gordon’s first novel,
Final Payments
(1977), we meet a young woman who’s devoted her entire adult life to caring for a pious father. Like a nun, she leaves the house for a walk just once a week; the rest of the time she organizes his papers, infuriating the local widows who desperately want the job. After his death, the widows seek their revenge, joining with the church leaders of this small Catholic community in trying to sell her off to some other old person in need of a secular nun. They manage to give her a hideous spinster haircut. But she is rescued by a trio of childhood friends who have watched over this stunted single life for years. One day they force her into the car, into the city, into a life of her own.
One asks if she wants to get married.
No, she doesn’t. “I want a terrific pair of high-heeled shoes…like Rosalind Russell…I want a very small apartment and I want people to refer to me as a bachelorette.”
“The term now is swinging single,” one of them tells her.
“And they call that progress,” she responds, knowing that they could have called it anything and called it an improvement.
SINGLE SLASHING
If singles were an increasingly diverse group, there was still one stereotype that reporters loved most of all—the “swinger”—that college grad with fake eyelashes and daiquiris or the faux hippies holding joints and daiquiris. By 1968, New York’s famed “singles ghetto” had been renamed the “girl ghetto.” And its residents came under unkind, often vicious, scrutiny. Tired of writing about bar etiquette, reporters began to meet subjects at their apartments to get the inside view, often the morning after a singles night out. Many of these apartments were in upscale buildings—three and a half rooms, the rent at about $225 per month, making a three-way share just affordable. No matter how lucky they might have felt, whatever it was they’d got away from, girls could never quite convey to male reporters just what it was they found so thrilling about their own interpretation of single life. That’s because reporters did not want to know.
These pieces (“Living It Up on Broadsway”) always began with an inventory of the girl’s appearance. She was usually dressed in a bathrobe or some kind of unflattering caftan or muumuu, one shoulder forward, so that it formed a bony shelf for messy hair. Mascara was always smudged and eyelashes glued together in tiny triangles. Here was the perfect way to survive articles you didn’t really want to write: Apply New Journalism techniques to an otherwise dreary scene. Stories told of freshly washed coffee mugs that “still had on them lipstick traces” and, once, brilliantly, a lipstick-stained school-size milk carton. They noted what was on the couch—a heart-shaped pillow, cat-shredded tasseled pillows, teddy bears—and what was under it (always a cache of cigarette butts, magazines, a shoe). These sorts of stories often included tours of the refrigerator, where some vegetable had metaphorically dried and shriveled. And they had a real time of it when it came to the medicine chest. Tranquilizers? Laxatives? And “depending on the carefulness of the housekeeping”…the Pill?
Occasionally, very occasionally, a woman wrote about the new single life for herself. The only prerequisite seems to have been that she find it, with six months’ retrospect, disappointing and scary. In 1966
The Washing
ton Post Magazine
ran an unusual parallel assessment of the city’s single life, from the point of view of a white writer, Judith Viorst, and a black writer, Dorothy Gilliam. The lead paragraphs:
Judith Viorst: Washington is full of single girls between 20 and 30 who are having a ball, cracking up from loneliness, being mistresses, living in deadly fear of rapists and purse snatchers, trying to decide which man to marry, or trying to face the dismal fact they never will.
Dorothy Gilliam: There are single Negro women all over Washington who live and breathe and laugh and weep and take tranquilizers and fret that there are too few men and too little culture. They aren’t poor or on welfare. Their lives are parallel to white working girls’ but with exceptions—exceptions that extend from the fact of their being Negro.
As the sixties wore on, the reporting moved from “realistic” to what may safely be called “hostile.” Writing about a bar in Washington, D.C., another
Post
reporter lightly described the patrons, then got down to it.
To walk into Wayne’s Luv is both an admission and an assertion. She is admitting to anyone who cares to notice that she has not been found attractive enough to have a date that night; and she is asserting that she is realistic enough not to worry with the mundane games of dating propriety that were encountered by an earlier set of singles. In a sense, she assumes a more active role of enticement, hoping in her own mind that somehow he will saunter out of the amber haze and notice and speak and want Her…. it beats the Great Grey Tube.
No stories ended without a reference to television. In Washington, D.C., clerks were stuck at home watching
Get Smart.
(Although Agent 99 had a fairly exciting single-girl life.) Secretaries in Chicago all had colds in the winter and nothing but
Gilligan’s Island, The Beverly Hillbillies,
and
Lost
in Space
reruns to keep them company. Some stuck in their mate-meeting high-rises might have tuned in to one of the popular doctor’s shows, many of which carried a special message for uppity single women. In a 1989 essay, academic Diana Meehan relates the sad fates of three single-girl guest stars on these 1960s hospital dramas. First, on the popular
Marcus Welby, M.D.,
Welby protegé Steven Kiley makes an advance on a nurse and she rejects him. Within hours she is thrown from her horse and paralyzed. On
Dr. Kildare,
a “No, thank you” to an internist seems to lead right away to a leukemia diagnosis. On the precursor to
E.R., Medical Center,
the one who says no, in the span of twenty minutes, contracts breast cancer.
During the early seventies, there was a popular Friday-night show called
Love, American Style.
According to
TV Guide,
more people were likely to see it in a given week than to experience anything like love of any genuine style in their lifetimes.
DAYS OF MACE
Back on August 28, 1963, a petty thief named Richard Robles broke into an Upper East Side apartment and killed the two young women who lived there. Years later, when such single killings had become commonplace,
New York Times
reporter Judy Klemesrud wrote with complete accuracy: “The brutal slaying of a young single girl…probably causes more shock and public horror than any other.”
But the “single girl murders” as they became known across the country that fall, were a shocking devastation. The perpetrator had chosen the address, 57 East Eighty-eighth Street, because he’d seen an open window, there was no doorman, and he thought no one was home. When he got through it, intending to steal jewelry or money, Janice Wylie, a blond twenty-one-year-old
Newsweek
researcher, ran in from the other room. Robles grabbed a kitchen knife and raped her. Emily Hoffert, a new roommate, entered the apartment, shrieking that she would remember his face, identify him—and something snapped. Robles began clubbing both girls with glass soda bottles, then for an hour slashed and stabbed them with knives.
The case is remembered now as the one that led to passage of the Miranda rights legislation; the wrong man, not properly questioned, spent years in jail before Robles was apprehended. But what remainded in consciousness, of course, was the girls. Emily had just started work as a teacher. Janice wanted to be an actress and looked so hopeful, ready to go!, in all her pictures. Her father, Max, a well-known adman and writer—who, with a third roommate, found the naked bodies—later committed suicide. (An ironic footnote: It was his brother, Philip Wylie, who wrote such misogynist tomes as
Generation of Vipers,
the World War II diatribe that accused those neurotic “Lost Sex” women of ruining men, killing them, destroying their souls.)