“THE SINGLE WOMAN, far from being a creature to be pitied and patronized, is emerging as the newest glamour girl of our times . . . She is engaging because she lives by her wits. She supports herself. She has had to sharpen her personality and mental resources to a glitter in order to survive in a competitive world and the sharpening looks good. Economically, she is a dream. She is not a parasite, a dependent, a scrounger, a sponger or a bum. She is a giver, not a taker, a winner and not a loser.”20
In 1962, a forty-year-old named Helen Gurley Brown published these words in her slim, sensational bestseller Sex and the Single Girl. Brown, who went on to edit Cosmopolitan for more than three decades, had humble origins. She spent her early childhood in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas, but moved to Los Angeles at age ten after her father died. She was raised by her mother; her family was poor, and her sister had polio. Brown, who supported them, developed a firsthand appreciation for the struggles and aspirations of working women in her generation. She attended a small business college, found clerical work in a talent agency, and shifted into advertising when she was hired as a secretary. She gradually moved up the ranks, becoming one of the industry’s most accomplished copywriters before branching out into journalism.
Sex and the Single Girl, which came out a year before Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, was the kind of feminist tract that scandalized and alienated a great many feminists. For it was written not against what Friedan famously called “the problem with no name”—inequality of the sexes, generated through discrimination at home, in the courts, in politics, and in the workforce—but for women who felt oppressed by the overwhelming social pressure to settle down early, forgoing years of experimentation, growth, and pleasure to get a marriage license for a domestic life that they might not need or want. Brown insisted that young women should enjoy their best years without a husband. “A single woman’s biggest problem is coping with the people who are trying to marry her off!” she argued, while marriage should be “insurance for the worst years of your life.”
Brown’s book was “not a study on how to get married but how to stay single—in superlative style.”21 She offered her own life as Exhibit A. Sex and the Single Girl opens with Brown’s account of how, by delaying marriage until age thirty-seven, she wound up with a smart and sexy husband who worked in the movie business, two Mercedes in the driveway, and a big house overlooking the Pacific Ocean. It was not easy to maintain her autonomy, Brown admitted. During her twenties and early thirties she watched her contemporaries rush into wedlock, often settling for men whose flaws were readily apparent. “Although many’s the time I was sure I would die alone in my spinster’s bed, I could never bring myself to marry just to get married.” Instead, she worked doggedly to advance in her career. She developed a fierce aggression and a unique style that she was willing to “get out in the open.” None of this, according to Brown, required great beauty, wealth, or a high-voltage personality. It simply demanded guts, conviction, and the fortitude to live alone.
Brown did mean alone. “Roommates,” she insisted, “are for sorority girls. You need an apartment alone even if it’s over a garage.” The benefits of going solo were innumerable. With a home of one’s own, a single woman could have time and space to cultivate her self without the social pressure of family or friends. She could work late without worrying anyone, “furnish her mind” through reading, change her appearance as she saw fit. Most of all, she gained privacy, and with that the freedom to experience a more adventurous, libidinous life. The single girl “has a better sex life than most of her married friends,” Brown claimed (albeit without providing any evidence). “She need never be bored with one man per lifetime. Her choice of partners is endless and they seek her.”22
The private apartment, writes the literature scholar Sharon Marcus, became a powerful symbol of the new urban culture during the 1960s because it “offered the single girl an eroticized arena in which to exercise her creativity and promote her own creative comforts.”23 But few single women expected to maintain this arena for long. Brown, after all, proposed living alone not as a means to subverting marriage but rather as a means to improving it. “Serving time as a single woman,” she counseled, “can give you the foundation for a better marriage if you finally go that route.” It could also prepare a modern woman for the possibility that, even if she married, she would one day find herself on her own again, since “a man can leave a woman at fifty (though it may cost him some dough) as surely as you can leave dishes in the sink.”24
Indeed, when Brown wrote Sex and the Single Girl, a nascent cultural movement was pushing men to do precisely this, promoting a new bachelor lifestyle that repudiated marriage and family altogether. The movement had an outlet in Playboy magazine, an iconic leader in Hugh Hefner, its publisher and editor, and a totem in the bunny ears that signaled men’s endorsement of a new way of living. “I don’t want my editors marrying anyone and getting a lot of foolish notions in their heads about ‘togetherness,’ home, family, and all that jazz,” said Hefner. His magazine did everything possible to discourage readers from getting those notions, too.
Playboy condemned conventional domestic life but embraced a new kind of masculine domesticity. “Throughout the 1950s and 1960s,” writes Bill Osgerby in the Journal of Design History, “Playboy spotlighted a series of luxurious ‘Playboy Pads’—both actual buildings and fantasy blueprints—tailored to the outlook and tastes of the hip ‘man about town.’” In The Hearts of Men, Barbara Ehrenreich argues that the magazine’s ideological project involved “reclaiming the indoors as a realm for masculine pleasure.” Its not so subtle message to readers: Abandon, all ye who open these pages, your suburban home, your station wagon, your controlling wife. Return to the great city. Get a place of your own and fill it with modern luxuries: fine liquor, modern art, hip clothing, a stereo, leather furniture, a king-size bed, and the greatest pleasure of all—beautiful, available women.25
“Playboy loved women,” Ehrenreich writes. “Large-breasted, long-legged young women, anyway—and it hated wives.” Marilyn Monroe graced the cover of its first issue, which also included an attack on alimony and a story about “Miss Gold Digger of 1953.” Hundreds, eventually thousands of women posed nude for its centerfold spreads and photo features. Producers of high-end men’s products bought ad space so that their brands would be associated with the lifestyle Hefner advocated.
Real women were welcome in a playboy’s private home, particularly if they were the “fun-loving,” nubile, liberated kind that the magazine celebrated. Hefner surrounded himself with “bunnies,” first in a Chicago apartment and eventually in the famous Los Angeles mansion, and he took on several lovers at a time. His policy was always straightforward: Women could visit, spend a night or many more. But they shouldn’t get too comfortable, seek emotional commitment, or expect him to settle down. His bed may have been open, but in the end it was his alone.
NOT THAT HE HAD TO MAKE IT. By the 1970s both sexes benefitted from the dramatic expansion of the service economy, including home cleaning, child care, elder care, food delivery, even laundry. Drawing on data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the sociologist Susan Thistle has shown that, since the 1970s, “the conversion of women’s domestic tasks into work done for pay has . . . been the area of greatest job growth.” There’s a simple reason for this: Record numbers of women have been moving into the paid labor market. In 1950, about one in three of all adult women participated in the civilian labor market; by 1980, more than one half did.26
Women with more education entered the workplace at an even faster rate. Employment for those who had completed some college went from 51 percent to 67 percent during the 1970s, and from 61 percent to 74 percent among those who had earned a college degree. As these women left their invisible jobs as uncompensated domestic workers they generated new demand for other people, mainly women, who could replace them. The personal services industry has grown ever since.
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br /> Although women’s wages lagged behind men’s (and still do), their rapid entry into the paid labor market made it far easier for them to achieve independence than ever before. The average age of first marriage, which rose slowly during the 1960s, jumped considerably in the 1970s, from twenty-one to twenty-two for women and from twenty-three to twenty-five for men. Adults didn’t only delay marriage during the tumultuous decade, they also terminated it at unprecedented rates. In 1970, about 700,000 American couples divorced, a high figure compared to the 393,000 divorces in 1960 and the 385,000 in 1950. But 1980 was unprecedented, with roughly 1.2 million divorces. Demographers calculated that the divorce rate had jumped 50 percent during the 1970s, and they marveled at the startling fact that 25 percent of all marriages that took place in 1970 had been terminated by 1977.27
The nation had experienced a divorce revolution, and the transformation wasn’t due solely to women’s increased participation in the labor market. It was also fueled by an emerging moral code that placed one’s obligation to care for the self on par with, if not above, one’s commitment to family. “Beginning in the 1950s,” argues Barbara Dafoe Whitehead in The Divorce Culture, Americans “became more acutely conscious of their responsibility to attend to their own individual needs and interests . . . People began to judge the strength and ‘health’ of family bonds according to their capacity to promote individual fulfillment and personal growth,” rather than on more traditional measures, such as income, security, or class mobility.28 Scholars in Europe identified a similar shift. The British sociologist Anthony Giddens argues that once women achieved economic independence, couples began to seek “pure relationships,” which are “free floating” and not anchored in traditional financial or social constraints. The modern marriage, he writes, “becomes more and more a relationship initiated for, and kept going for as long as, it delivers emotional satisfaction to be derived from close contact with another.”29 When it fails to do so, as marriage often does during hard times, individuals feel an obligation to justify sustaining it, because divorce is a readily available option. By the 1970s, more people began to act as if their quest for personal happiness—whether as a playboy, a liberated woman, or simply a “single”—trumped all other obligations. During that decade, writes David Sarasohn, “the freedom to hop from one relationship to the next was as essential as anything in the Bill of Rights.”30 Finding a place of one’s own was the best way to achieve it.
During the 1960s and ’70s the housing market aided the search for autonomy, with inventory expanding much faster than the population, particularly in central cities, where middle-class families were fleeing.31 The urban crisis, as it came to be known, proved itself an opportunity for unmarried adults seeking their own apartments in metropolitan settings. In most big cities, middle-class individuals could easily find affordable rental units, and as they clustered together in places of their own they forged neighborhood cultures organized around single life: Lincoln Park in Chicago. The Marina District in San Francisco. West Hollywood in Los Angeles. Belltown in Seattle. These weren’t bohemias or gay enclaves, but places for urban professionals, the young and never married as well as divorcees. They were full of apartment buildings, both new and newly renovated, to meet the needs of an increasingly individuated marketplace. Solo living was suddenly in vogue.
Consider how many people were doing it. In 1960, about 7 million Americans lived alone, but by the end of the decade more than 4 million others had joined them, making for some 11 million one-person households in the United States. During the 1970s the ranks rose faster and higher than ever before, topping 18 million in 1980.32 The increase was particularly sharp in cities. In Manhattan, for instance, the proportion of residential units with just one resident went from 35 percent in 1960 to 46 percent in 1980, and the proportional rise was even greater in Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, Seattle, and San Francisco. The numbers of people living alone has continued to increase since the 1970s. It rose slowly during the 1980s and 1990s, then soared in the 2000s. Today more than 5 million Americans under thirty-five have places of their own.
MANY OF THE YOUNG ADULTS who live alone were brought up to do so. Not explicitly, since all children share their home with a family or adults of some sort, and schools do not promote living alone as a goal. But today an unprecedented number of children around the world develop the capacity and desire to live independently through another, historically novel experience: growing up in a room of one’s own.
Traditionally, most children in the same family shared a room with each other, if not with their parents. This was true, of course, for the children of immigrant families who lived in urban tenements, and of African American children whose families packed into apartments after migrating to the northern states. But, until recently, it was also true of native-born white middle-class families, and even of some affluent ones. According to the U.S. Census, in 1960 the average family household had 2.4 children and 0.7 bedrooms per child. Since then, American families have become smaller and homes have grown larger. By 1980 the average household had 2 children and 1 bedroom per child, and in 2000 it had 1.9 children and 1.1 bedrooms per child—meaning it is common for American kids to have not only their own room, but perhaps even some claim on another one. Indeed, the size of a typical American home more than doubled between 1950 and 2000, rising from 983 square feet to more than 2,200.33 Today in many middle-class communities parents feel negligent if they don’t provide a private bedroom for each of their children. Adults who love living in city centers will leave for the suburbs so they can give their children private space. Once a luxury, in recent years it has become an entitlement of middle-class life.
Whether in cities or suburbs, today’s children also spend an unprecedented amount of time home alone, preparing their own snacks or meals and planning their own leisure time, because it’s increasingly common for both of their parents to spend their weekdays at work. According to “Latchkey Kids,” a report by the William Gladden Foundation, by 2005 somewhere between 10 million and 15 million American children under age sixteen were regularly taking care of themselves after school or during summer vacations. “More children today have less adult supervision than ever before in American history,” the report claims, and many “begin their self-care at about age eight.”34
The rise of latchkey kids and private rooms within the home is an international phenomenon. In Europe, the dramatic decline in fertility rates over the past fifty years has transformed the experience of domestic space. Between 1960 and 2000, the average number of people per household fell from 3.1 to 2.3 in England, from 3.1 to 2.4 in France, from 3.8 to 2.6 in Germany, from 3.6 to 2.6 in Italy, and from 2.8 to 2.1 in Denmark. The trends are similar in Canada, where between 1960 and 2005 the average household size dropped from 4 to 2.5; in Japan, where from 1975 to 2005 it went from 3.3 in to 2.5; and in the United States, where it plummeted from nearly 5 in 1900 to 3 in 1950 and 2.6 in 2000.35 In nearly all of these nations, the shrinking family has coincided with the extraordinary physical growth of the house and the apartment. By the late twentieth century, people throughout the developed world could be together at home with their family, but also alone.
Today, of course, we no longer need private rooms to separate into individual environments. Entire families can sit together, and even share a meal, while each member is immersed in an iPhone or a laptop rather than in conversation with those nearby. But the availability of a domestic private sphere for each person in a middle-class residence changed the norms of family interaction long before the advent of social media. In her comparative study of child-rearing practices among different class groups in the United States, sociologist Annette Lareau noticed that in the typical middle-class family, each child has his or her own room, and “except for times when they share meals (this happens only once every few days), parents and children are rarely all together in the same room.” Instead, family life is organized around the needs and interests of each individual
, parents and children included. The children do not belong to the same sports teams, play the same instruments, or hang out with the same friends, so the family develops a schedule that allows each one to be dropped off and picked up on his or her own. The parents do everything to promote “the individual development of each child,” and in the process the children “learn to think of themselves as special and as entitled.” But they also grow hostile toward and competitive with their siblings. For although the middle-class children rarely engage in face-to-face interaction with each other, Lareau observes, “references to ‘hating’ a family member are common and elicit no special reaction.”36 Things are calmer when everyone keeps to himself.
In an influential 1958 essay, the psychologist and pediatrician Donald Winnicott argued, paradoxically, that “the capacity to be alone is based on the experience of being alone in the presence of someone, and that without a sufficiency of this experience the capacity to be alone cannot develop.” Specifically, Winnicott was referring to the infant and mother relationship, and to the developmental process through which a young child learns to feel secure on his or her own and self-contained when with others, because the reliable presence of the mother conveys the sense that the environment is benign and allows for healthy attachments. This process may well still be important, but children who grew up in the decades after Winnicott published his essay have had more opportunities to cultivate an ability to be alone—and not only because so many had private bedrooms.
Going Solo Page 5
