by Betsy Israel
According to much-quoted psychologist Stanley G. Hall, “The daughter refuses to do the things her mother did without question… higher education is at fault.” Charles W. Eliot, writing in the North American Review, agreed. “Girls are being prepared daily, by ‘superior education,’ to engage, not in child-bearing and house-work but in clerkships, telegraphy, newspaper-writing… and if they have their ‘rights’ they will be enabled to compete with men at the bar, in the pulpit, the Senate, the bench.” Because many an average new woman had read Chaucer, spoke French, and knew chemistry, she had developed, in Hall’s phrase, “unreasonable expectations” that led her to “abhor the limitations of married life.”
One can almost hear a new woman snort with laughter. Jane Addams once asked rhetorically: “[Is she] supposed to stay at home, to help her mother entertain?… Take a course in domestic science?… How… could any girl stay sane?”
The new women had an altruistic streak. They had come largely from the comfortable middle class—the truly rich upper-class girl did not go to college—and they genuinely hoped to “reclaim” or “uncover” the “individualistic possibilities” in every woman, educated or not. In 1912 Marie Jenny Howe, a nonpracticing Unitarian minister, founded Heterodoxy, the country’s first feminist (as opposed to strictly suffragist) group in Greenwich Village. As a nascent consciousness-raising group, it required of each member only that she “not be orthodox in her opinions.” It helped if she lived in the Village or at least in the city and could attend the argumentative all-night meetings. But Heterodoxites took their show on the road. They were the first to sponsor popular general-interest meetings about feminism, the first of them, in 1913, called “What Is Feminism?” or, as it was officially titled, “Breaking into the Human Race.” These were huge affairs for up to one thousand, and they featured prominent women from around the world addressing every issue imaginable. Here, according to an account, one could “glimpse the women of the future, big spirited, intellectually alert, devoid of the old ‘femininity.’”
The language of Heterodoxy briefly entered the national vocabulary, if only as a source of fun. Political cartoonists played for months with phrases such as the “free-willed, self-willed woman” and “the parasitism of the home woman.” Marie Jenny Howe’s declarations, too, were a source of much joking: “We declare to be ourselves, not just our little female selves, but our whole big human selves” or “we are feminists!” Feminism, as a term, did not exactly leap into everyday use. (The Oxford English Dictionary would not include it until 1933.) And that was to some extent because it had so quickly, so immediately, been turned into a joke. But it was also true that no one really believed in the prospect of a larger women’s movement. No one really believed much would change.
Even Ida Tarbell, the first woman “muckraker,” author of History of the Standard Oil Company (1904) and defiantly never wed (“it would fetter my freedom”), had her doubts. As she wrote, “In an urban setting, there are now simply more women outside, doing things. There is a sense of freedom, due to numbers of women…. But that doesn’t mean freedom.”
In a preview of what would be called “sexological” thinking, psychologist Stanley G. Hall summarized the “new” situation in far more draconian terms. The woman who “abhorred the limitations of domestic life” was not just unconventional, newly or blissfully “devoid of the old femininity.” She was “functionally castrated.”
SEX O’CLOCK IN AMERICA
To young single women who’d been born just as new womanhood coalesced—say, around 1895—the idea of a “new” woman quickly came to seem kind of old. Even if the woman in question was only thirty, to her younger counterparts she seemed aged due to the impression, even in casual conversation, that she was always giving a speech. Of course there were fights to fight, but as one young woman told Harper’s magazine, “the New Women don’t seem to see how there is… life to live!” This dated “new” character with her upstanding shirtwaist and erect posture made one observer think of “a funereal procession of one.” New womanhood seemed to be set to a dirge while the young(er) world was starting to move to popular songs.
This generational divide is reminiscent of the gap so painfully in evidence during the late 1980s and ’90s. It’s fair to say that second-wave feminists were so successful that the entire Western world changed heroically. But if you were a baby while it was changing, if you missed the big battles—and never experienced the old restrictions and unfairnesses—then how could basic freedoms generate a sense of wonder? Of gratitude? How could you be on your guard for hints of sexist regression?
A young woman, twenty-three, an artist’s model and aspiring dress designer, told Life magazine in 1923 the same thing someone twenty-three might have said eighty years later: “I think many of our women’s rights people expect that everyone is going to work for their ideas and causes, even though the battle’s already won as much as it will ever be…. They get very angry if they sense you have an interest in minor things, in how you dress, not in political talk. Or you are not interested in THEM and their struggle to free YOU and your friends. Why aren’t we all grateful?”
A symbolic battle had been declared against the tedious new woman—its rallying cry a slogan borrowed from a Life magazine cartoon showing a mother draped in a suffrage banner with a daughter in sporty clothes, holding a tennis racket. The mother is lecturing; the daughter smiles but shrieks to herself: “Oh, Mother dear, please I do need to leave to go please, please, SHADDUP!”
A backlash against the educated female had developed from within her own ranks.
In a first-person magazine confessional, “Why I Am an Old Maid” by “A Daughter of New England” (1911), we learn that “men instinctively avoid a woman who can discourse at length on sun spots.” More serious statistics seem to bear out this observation—or at least women’s belief in it.
Consider some figures from Bryn Mawr College. Between 1889 and 1908, the peak political years of new womanhood, only half of all graduates married. Of those who did, some 62 percent continued on to graduate school and nearly all the married new women continued, according to a university report, “to achieve in their chosen professions.” But that changed. Just a few years later an additional 10 percent of all graduates started to marry out of school and the number who continued in their careers simultaneously began to drop. Between the years 1910 and 1918, only 49 percent of married class members continued on to graduate school.
I’ll call it the age of the popular as opposed to the reformist new woman, a new woman without the glasses and the prim boater, and in its place a huge yellow hair bow. (And I mean huge, as if she were wearing two colorful party balloons joined at the nape of the neck and floating upward. In my grandfather’s Springfield, Ohio, high school yearbook, 1911, not one girl in forty-three is minus her gargantuan bow.)
This new girl, known once again as the bachelor girl or “the bachelorette,” had grown up, according to the Saturday Evening Post (1912) “permeated in the modern world.” During the years 1910 to 1913, six states voted in favor of a women’s suffrage amendment. Advertisements, popular novels, quick-change fashion trends—all had been present from the start of her conscious life. Our new bachelor girl wore looser-fitting skirts that allowed her to bicycle everywhere. Some had been on aeroplanes, and others boasted that they’d made cross-continental phone calls. With one million plus cars out on the roads, they’d all been out driving, even if they retained passenger status (there were no laws against women driving, just, initially at least, a reluctance to let them take control).
Much of the Jazz Age imagery we associate with the 1920s—driving, incessant dancing, loose-fitting clothes—actually took shape around 1913. One Boston American columnist described the popular new woman like this: “…the 1914 girl: You’ll recognize her. Just look for a slim creature who is not on closer inspection a boy in a dress, shaped like a pencil.”
One columnist for the St. Louis Mirror called the era “sex o’clock in
America.”
Both these comments were made while writing about the phenomenon known as the thé dansant, or the notorious afternoon tea dance at which gin stood in for the tea. Think of a very small racket—it’s crowded and everyone’s dancing to a modern gramophone that spins seventy-eight-r. p.m. records. (The tango, imported from Deauville, France, is the dance of the moment, in part because the General Federation of Women’s Clubs has banned it as immoral.) It’s all very casual. No one has sponsored the dance or sent invitations; like the floating urban clubs of the 1980s, it appears from place to place: in a bachelor’s apartment, in someone’s parlor—provided the parents are out, of course—or in the back room of a restaurant.
The tea dancers come from all over. There are college girls on break, working girls out on adventure, brides-to-be making their way through long engagements. There are many actressy characters who mix freely with the working girls and, as it’s always noted, a contingent of timid girls who look as if they’ve never been out and aren’t exactly sure where they’ve turned up. All of them play dress-up. Some use sashes to shorten their skirts or change the style altogether, attempting to create straight, narrow frocks that cut just above the knee. Using their ribbons, they tuck up long wavy hair to see how it might look cut bobbed and modern. Long, pointy shoes with buttoned straps radically reveal the ankle. Eventually, even the little sisters, the timid girls, show up in skinny dresses and Mother Goose shoes. Instead of hair bows, they wear shimmery bands that wrap around the forehead and sprout feathers.
And so tea dancing spreads from city to city, and the late afternoons grow very long. Adults, alone at dinner, slowly take notice.
“DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOUR DAUGHTER IS THIS AFTERNOON?” asked Harper’s in 1914, anticipating the famed 1970s TV query: “It’s ten o’clock. Do you know where your children are?”
One red-faced columnist in the Boston American explained precisely where they were: “Tea! Tea! What is this tea!? An excuse, a forum for young girls, many of them obviously of breeding and refinement, dancing cheek by jowl with [female] professionals whose repute is doubtful… and learning the insidious habits of the early cocktail.”
Belle Moskowitz, an impassioned old-school reformer and later a savvy operative in New York State politics, spoke out on drinking and dancing and the “corrosive” influence of these “other,” or lesser, working girls: “[Working] life cries out for rational recreation [but] what?… Girls do not of intention select bad places to go to…. [But] the girl whose temperament and disposition crave unnatural forms of excitement is nearly beyond the bounds of salvation…. she may affect the well being of others.”
One of several sudden reports on female criminal tendencies, The Cause and Cure of Crime (1914), declared, “Many girls are diseased. Physically and mentally contaminated.” The superintendent of one reform school declared, in support, “One bad girl can do more harm than fifty depraved boys… many are… abnormal or feeble-minded and should be held in custody for a long time or for life.”
Slowly, concern that morally corrupt girls were lurking around the thé dansant seemed to fuse with parents’ fears about the men who were forever lurking everywhere. And in this age of new womanhood (or “post” or “fun” new womanhood), when there were “simply more women outside doing things,” these fears were heightened by the sense that girls faced other, unexpected sources of contamination.
BEWARE THE WHITE SLAVER
For several years during the early teens, the nation was captivated by one villain: the White Slaver. He was that legendary fiend who kidnapped young white girls, drugged them with chloroform-drenched kerchiefs, stuck them with morphine needles, then sold them into prostitution. The slaver, usually a “hit man” for a criminal syndicate, preyed most often on new arrivals to the country, single girls just off the boat, the less English spoken the better. Slavers also worked Upstate New York and Pennsylvania towns, luring girls without prospects by promising—and sometimes actually pretending—to marry them, then at some point drugging them and turning them over to colleagues in New York City.
As one typical headline shrieked in 1913: 50,000 GIRLS DISAPPEAR YEARLY! The subhead: “Before the Chloroform, the plaintive cries: ‘Sir, please, I am a decent girl! Who earns her Wages.’”
One girl expanded on this familiar scenario in The Independent: “A girl is sitting there at the films. Or on a bench nearby a tree. They creep behind and… they force a cloth across your face, there goes the needle in your neck or your ankle or arm, and you go dead black for a time, only to wake up in hell. And no chance of getting back.”
As another girl interviewed for the same story put it: “They can take away your own life from you without killing you first.”
Quickly this new terror found its way into melodramatic plots. Especially onscreen. By World War I, movies had evolved from primitive hand-cranked “flickers” into longer films shown in makeshift neighborhood theaters. One of the first box-office hits in film history was called Traffic in Souls (1913), a white-slaving film that was thought to have no commercial prospects. It was seventy minutes—much too long for nickelodeons, which could handle only one-and two-reelers—and required a legitimate theater (where plays such as The House of Bondage and The Lure ran briefly before being shut down). More important, as one critic prematurely put it: “Who among us wants to witness a tale of unfortunates abducted, put to sale, forced to the sickening biddings of madam or whoremonger?”
The answer was just about everyone. Traffic in Souls grossed $450,000 after showing for a few weeks at twenty-eight theaters in New York City.
It is true that hundreds of young women were kidnapped, drugged, and then sold, usually into out-of-state brothels. And it’s true that several state and federal commissions eventually conducted mass investigations. But for a time the white slaver was foremost a mythic devil whose presence seems directly linked to that of the single working woman. Women who had sex outside of marriage, circa 1912, would most definitely have been part of the groupings loosely called “new woman” or “bohemian.” The average working woman may have “spooned” (“petted”), but she was likely to have remained a virgin. Despite that technical point, she was still out there, a girl without a husband, alone on the street. In other words, she was a walking sex target. Terms that had been at the edges of the vernacular since Bowery days suddenly began to reappear. A girl was said to be “flaunting it” or “showing what she’s got.” The white slaver represented, I think, an epic punishment for all those singles who were “flaunting it,” asking for it, seeming, whether they were or not, overtly sexual.
(A punishment theme turns up in many of the era’s popular-film titles: The Girl Who Didn’t Know, The Girl Who Didn’t Think, The Price She Paid. In one white-slaving film, Damaged Goods (1914), the action came to an abrupt halt about midway through, and a doctor appeared on screen to lecture about syphilis. This seemed an odd non sequitur. But in fact syphilis was a serious sexual threat, a much more common occurrence than white slaving, and there were few ways of discussing it publicly except as a cameo topic in a larger story of female sexual depravity.)
At the same time that white slavery was a vicious cautionary tale, it also served as a secretive sex fantasy. If it was a terrifying act to contemplate, it was also titillating. The language used to describe new women, working women, single women was often so hostile that the male anger behind it is palpable. A destructive or at least demeaning rape narrative was, for some, probably satisfying as a daydream or masturbatory scenario. For single women themselves, guilty or perhaps confused about their sexual impulses, the fantasy of a man rendering them helpless and submissive, with the evil details, the horrid fate left to imagine, well, it could have made the average workday pass a little faster.
That is not to be glib. White slaving was a real and extremely serious crime. The Rockefeller Commission and other smaller committees spent years patrolling docks, brothels, rackets and their upscale counterparts, cabarets, and while few people w
ere ultimately prosecuted, Congress passed the Mann Act, a law prohibiting the transport of underage women across state lines for the purpose of prostitution.
Still, the passage of the Mann Act would not become the lasting legacy of this episode. Nor would the vilification of men who preyed on defenseless young women. The primary message, unspoken but unmistakable, was to condemn women out on their own and also to scare them. The idea that you, as a girl alone, could be lifted from life and that nobody would notice became—and would remain—a significant element of single lore.
Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that the first beloved single-girl icon of the twentieth century was not the bachelor girl or the tea dancer or anyone new in between. She was someone who didn’t quite exist.
BEHOLD THE GIBSON GODDESS
The Gibson girl, a well-bred upper-class beauty, independent, athletic, and terrifically busy, appeared first as an illustrated character in a 1902 issue of Collier’s. She was named for her handsome, sociable, much reported-on creator, Charles Dana Gibson, an illustrator who had for years drawn variations of this all-American girl the way someone might doodle the same image over and over at school or work.
The finished product would become the official, polished trademark of new womanhood.
The Gibson girl was classically elegant and feminine—tall and thin, with small hands and feet, china-white skin, and a retroussé nose. But she was also strikingly athletic. Her shoulders were well proportioned. Her hair was piled high, creating the illusion of greater height, and loose strands around the face suggested that she’d just come in from riding or tennis or some other mildly strenuous sport at which she had displayed a calm mastery. She was windswept perfection. A Valkyrie holding a teacup.
