by Betsy Israel
Despite a birthrate like a third world country’s—and despite the fact that more eighteen-year-old girls got married some years than went to the prom—the perception spread that Young White Single Females had to be reined in. In the form of the helpful how-to “service” story, magazines revived one of the world’s older single propositions: to move single women in herds from dry areas (Washington, D.C., ranked worst overall; New York and Boston ran close seconds) to places where men were plentiful. In pieces that included maps, arrows, and literal directions, editors set out to pinpoint where on earth men were most heavily clustered.
Call it, after the movie, the song, the theory in general: Where the Boys Are.
According to the Census Bureau, UPI reported, women outnumbered men in every section of the country except in the wild “western” areas. Thus one typical newspaper headline read, “Go West Young Woman, if You Want to Wed!” The text continued, “Droves of bachelors are on the great open range begging to be roped and branded… in Wyoming and Nevada there are seven unmarried men for three single women… for the girl willing to migrate for marriage, the best trails lead west.”
In “Memo to the Girls,” Look undertook “a massive man-hunt missive,” noting, “there is a surplus of bachelors… but husband hunters should know where to look.” The winning locales were the same as those cited elsewhere, as if a consortium of media and governmental bureaus had conspired in a campaign to reinaugurate the mail-order bride.
Life editors found two bachelor girls who’d moved themselves to Caspar, Wyoming, then had them, for the benefit of the photographers, throw an impromptu bachelor-girl party. Panel by panel, we follow the action: The girls make last-minute “on-the-spot” calls to boys. The girls prepare the beverages and then, the triumphal sequence, “the boys respond to the call.” Twelve men, big hefty guys, thirtyish and single, have all crowded into their living room. The caption read: “They bagged twelve!” But “bagging” out in Caspar didn’t require throwing a “do.” We also see the “lucky” Barbara Mills receive a “quadruple escort” just by walking through the business district. It was noted that had she lived in Montana, the number of escorts might have been up around nine.
GETTING THE GIRL BACK IN LINE
As in the nineteenth century, the plans for mass removal of single women to isolated areas did not catch on. Young women continued to move to New York and to Washington, and others—older women, especially—continued to express their concern. In 1956 Mademoiselle published a remarkably progressive piece, “What’s Wrong with Ambition?” intended to highlight the views of young women who’d gone off on their own and were loving it. But the most shocking, radical aspect of the “Ambition” story was the response it provoked—both in letters and in stories published in other magazines.
“They make me nervous,” said one married woman of girls cut loose in major cities. “I could shoot the first woman who went to work in a man’s job. My ambition is to please my husband in every womanly way.” Another outraged wife said, “These girls come back from a day in the outside world with something to talk about and what is that? Men. She’s been out all day with men. Other women’s husbands…. [she] is a threat to every self and family-centered homebody.” Another said that she’d “be content to liquidate [this] army of competitors who have forgotten the true functions, duties and gracious giving pleasures of the mature woman—creating for others, not for herself. There is something unnatural and frightening in this behaviour…. It is against order and I really think humanity.”
Training young women to capture husbands now underwent a vast CinemaScopic fifties-era renaissance.
In 1955 alone there were more than three hundred promarriage, antisingular tomes. From one foreword: “It would seem that some have come to view marriage in its current state as… disappointing for women, and especially those who have taken the higher degree.” As if it was 1910, the author concluded: “The lure of the city and its many pleasures will make of many potentially fine and worthy wives unnatural defeated spinsters… sick and lonely women.”
As always, commentators dragged the discussion back to education and the eternal topic—“what should we teach our women?” One home-economics professor from a college in Virginia wrote in the Reader’s Digest: “Unless there is a direct application to the home, or the conflicts and issues that will confront her in the home, in [dealing with] her husband or children, it is not valid education; it is unfair to the girl and confusing.”
One 1956 home-ec textbook provided a quick-study list of thirty-five tasks to perform before a husband returned from “his labors.” Here’s a small sampling of what the fifties singles studied:
1. Have dinner ready: Plan ahead, even the night before, to have a delicious meal—on time. This is a way of letting him know that you have been thinking about him and are concerned about his needs. Most are men are hungry when they come home!
2. Minimize the noise: At the time of his arrival, eliminate all noise of washer, dryer, dishwasher or vacuum. Try to encourage the children to be quiet. Have them properly dressed to give their greetings.
3. Make him comfortable. Have him lean back in a comfortable chair or suggest he lie down in the bedroom. Have a cool or warm drink ready for him. Arrange his pillow… speak in a low, soothing and pleasant voice.
Whatever her interests, the single girl picked up a magazine, went to the movies—got into a conversation with just about anyone—and heard about what single girls had heard about since 1860: how to catch a man and make him stay. For example, a February 1952 issue of Ladies’ Home Journal provided a “quick inventory for bachelor girls”: “What about your… hair, complexion, clothes? Are you a good talker, dancer, listener? Do you have a sense of humor? Hobby? Outside interests?… If anything is lacking you must go to the hairdresser, psychiatrist, whatever is needed. Only then are you prepared to face the world.”
These articles and books prescribed ways to achieve a kind of robotic period perfection, “a rigorous ideal that is… to be desired by any woman who cares about her future.” But in fact the physical attributes of 1950s “perfection” were intensely difficult to attain. The dictates of the female ideal were repeated and reprinted as if they were a paper doll’s mantra: “I am 5 feet 4 inches tall, 122 pounds, with brown hair, blue eyes, a 25½-inch waist, 34-inch bust, and 36-inch hips.” Famed anthropologist and frequent commentator Margaret Mead found it startling—and not necessarily “good”—that the average 1956 girl was fifteen pounds lighter than her counterpart thirty years before.
New products appeared to assist in her transformation, most dramatically, hair dye that one could use safely at home without burning the scalp or turning hair purple (both incidents documented in a 1922 diary). Shirley Polykoff, a female advertising executive who, along with Estée Lauder and PR magnate Eleanor Lambert, were the professional “exceptions” to every rule, brought hair dye into the average bathroom or, for many single girls, into the kitchen sink. Her idea was to convince women that by changing their hair color they could change themselves. Wives would become more interesting to their husbands. Single women, suddenly more assertive and more feminine, would attract more men. As one promotional piece explained this proposed alchemy:
By changing the color and hue of your hair, you can change your entire way of being. It frees you to behave and act in ways you would never have dreamed possible when you were your former self…. And you can do it in secret. People will notice you and think, “She seems different.” “And her hair!” “How did she get it to look so lovely?” “Is it a wig?” “Is it dyed?”
Paraphrasing a question her mother-in-law once asked in Yiddish, Polykoff put forth her own query: “Does she or doesn’t she?”
Playboy magazine, then in its mysogynistic glory days, was quick to point out that hair color didn’t matter, not for a wife of all people, and certainly not for that inherently slutty single girl. In the “Playboy Coloring Book,” a popular monthly feature, the reader was presented wi
th three single chicks he might place inside his make-believe bachelor pad.
The only instructions: “Make one blond. Make one a brunette. And make one a redhead. It doesn’t matter which.” In the Playboy schematic, what mattered was mammary glands—bosoms, bazooms, jugs; only class-A breasts could really alter the average woman. Although, even then, she’d be a joke. One popular Playboy cartoon at that time was, in fact, called The Bosom. Here was the story of a woman who measured 43-22-36. In each issue, the Bosom tried, despite mighty gravitational pull, to walk down the street.
Because so many people thought and often talked about blondness and breasts, even the most highly educated single found herself forced to consider the merits of Clairol and falsies or, more bluntly put, peroxide and “stuffing.” And she confronted an onslaught of beauty advertising—campaigns and strategies way beyond hair dye—that would have made a devoted flapper faint. In its 1956 issue on the American Woman, Life took great glee in itemizing the tricks and tools of the chase. That year alone American women had spent $1.3 billion on cosmetics and toiletries, $660 million on beauty treatments; $400 million on soap and electric grooming devices; $65 million on “reducing.” And that leaves out of the calculations all the clothes that were purchased to allure what Playboy called “the female’s permanent cash box. The hapless soon-to-be-broke American male.”
If some single women were repelled by this competition, others were matter-of-fact. Wrote one woman in the Life extravaganza: “If the race is to continue, we like to provide a second parent. So we go about the serious business of finding husbands in a serious manner, which allows no time for small luxuries like mercy toward competitors. Nature turns red in tooth and claw, every method is fair and rivals get no quarter.”
To say the least, this materialistic—and carnivorous—vision of the single world was disturbing. Columnist Anita Colby, a single working woman herself, wrote in 1956, “Emotionally we single women are at the greatest disadvantage of all women… we face a frightening world by ourselves…. Our enemies are loneliness and insecurity. Anxiety is a familiar houseguest.” But she had some encouragement to add. “Don’t go around feeling unfulfilled, jealous of your married friends, looking at every man you meet as ‘game.’ …You have a life of your own.”
As early as 1957, there were 11.5 million single women over eighteen in the United States, compared with 14.5 million single males. Not all of them were updated Eve Ardens—self-deprecating, not quite beautiful, resigned to it—nor were they pathetic Miss Lonelyhearts, the name, in fact, of a character in the 1954 Hitchcock film Rear Window. In this, a bored wheelchair-bound photographer casually watches, and names, his neighbors, following a whole courtyard of minidramas and intrigue, including of course one nasty murder. Miss Lonelyhearts, in a subplot of a subplot, is a single woman who appears in a lone window frame, pacing in boredom. At one point she pretends to throw a dinner party for two when she is all by herself. Another time she brings home a man who attacks her. She breaks down. She takes too many pills. But the average young woman, if she lived alone, was not necessarily “playing dinner” or playing with bottles of mil-town.
She was happily “astray.” Or at least surviving nicely. And she wrote home to say as much on expensive stationery that had on it the word “Miss.” One 1957 Science Digest survey of 6,750 single women, age twenty-five to fifty, reported, “We now seem to be in a nation with a certain group of females who do not look forward to getting married…. they keenly desire other experiences outside the normative marital pattern. They may not always understand why they feel as they seem to. Yet they nonetheless do.”
From another report, written at the University of Michigan: “Whatever secrets they’re not telling… we can now safely say that for certain of these girls, the search for a mate may take an entirely unpredictable path. They are waiting. Even if this, from any reasoned point of view, allows their options to give way.”
One popular holding pattern was to take up residency inside a parent-approved, high-rise nunnery. The YWCA offered small rooms for rent, these regarded as a bit déclassé, and even less glamorous were the barebones old-style boardinghouses. Most nervous first-time émigrés fantasized about the exclusive all-girls hotels on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, specifically the Barbizon, a serene Italianate landmark on Sixty-third Street that was to rooming houses what Smith and Wellesley were to colleges. As the familiar ads read, “Some of the world’s most successful women”—and that included Grace Kelly and Gene Tierney—“have been Barbizon Girls.”
The copywriters left out an essential word: briefly.
A nineteen-year-old resident explained to one of the many afternoon papers, for one of the many “Barbizon Life” stories: “It is the place where you go when you leave something—college; your immediate family; your old life. And for that it’s perfect—as long as you don’t stay too long.” (The oldest resident, usually juxtaposed in photos with a young freckled preppy type, was in her eighties. She was famous for playing the house pipe organ at the afternoon teas.)
In 1958 Gael Greene, then of the New York Post, wrote an extensive ten-part series devoted to her twenty-three-year-old life at the Barbizon, attempting to do for the high-rise residence hotels what Dorothy Richardson had done for shabby lodging quarters fifty years earlier. Like so many other recent graduates, Greene had come to the city “seeking something indefinable—something to do. A rent-paying job, romance, the alchemy that will transform an ordinary girl into an extraordinary woman.”
What she found at her first destination, the glamorous Barbizon, was an overheated planet of lonely women, spinning in an orbit that paralleled that of the city but did not overlap. As she wrote,
…a phone that does not ring. Tears of Homesickness. Gentle smiles of resignation… these are the marks—worn bravely and bravely concealed—by girls and young women alone. There are thousands in every corner of every city. They have no one habitat. Many live in cells—at the “exclusive Barbizon Hotel for Women,” at the Salvation Army’s Evangeline House, at the YWCA. I have lived among them. Each cell is an island. Each island is surrounded by depths of fear:
Fear of Failure
Fear of Spinsterhood
Fear of Sexual assault in a Subway station
And those unknown, inexplicable fears that dull the complexion and glaze the eye.
The day Greene arrives, one floor mate warns, “It’s not easy to make friends. Don’t think you’re going to meet just hundreds of boys or that you’ll meet the One.”
She doesn’t. She doesn’t really meet anyone, except Oscar the famous doorman, who gets her name wrong. She goes out for lone walks and contents herself with small gestures such as buying and polishing an improbably shiny red apple. She sits on her bed and brushes her hair or writes a letter. Her actions are in some form repeated in every small room around her, except in those where a drunken girl is crying or smashing glass objects. To escape the sound (they’ve learned from experience that going in results in one-sided four-hour conversations), residents leave the floor and wander off to do what Barbizon girls do when they haven’t scored a date on a Saturday night. They sit in a room filled with young women wearing nightgowns and watch television. Sometimes, after stations have gone off the air, Barbizon girls, Gael Greene among them, watch the network’s test pattern.
PLAYING IT SINGLE
On television during the mid-to late 1950s, single women showed up in the familiar guises. They were older widows saddened or made sarcastic by life; busybody aunts, maids, older sisters, teachers, or mistress-of-ceremonies types who sang and introduced guests or “gave testimonials,” meaning they held and caressed the sponsor’s product and spoke about it for up to a full five minutes. On commercials, single women were either invisible or ethereal, creatures disconnected from physical life. They never appeared in their apartments or houses or in their offices. We never saw their front steps, their kitchens, their cats. They were pictured only in fantasy scenarios—standing next to Chevrole
ts and gesturing, waving from magically flying Chevrolets, and dressed most often in evening gowns. The single woman had no place in a domestic scheme, unless she was a spinsterly grandmother or one of those ascendant female consumers, the teenager.
The single woman in 1950s television lived on the sitcom. Here, she almost always played a grown woman who behaved like a perky superannuated teenager. She lived at home, usually with a widowed parent, held a clerical job, and either matchmade crazily for everyone in the cast or became the subject of matchmaking by everyone in the cast. Consider three prime-time examples:
• My Little Margie. A precursor to Gidget, minus the surfing element and smirky cuteness. Margie, played by Gale Storm, whose name promised something slightly more dramatic, lives with her widowed father; although she is supposed to be twenty-one, she seems at times to be about twenty-seven and at others thirty-five. The plotlines can be reduced to two conflicts. First, Daddy can’t control his overgrown baby as much as he’d like, and, second, Margie can’t control Daddy. She doesn’t like his girlfriends and often tries deliberately to spoil his dates. Gidget with a Freudian undertow.
• Private Secretary. Here we meet single girl Susie McNamera, the top secretary to important talent agent Peter Sands. Naturally, Susie is in love with Peter but not fully aware of it as she organizes every facet of his existence, including the arrangement of his paper clips and assessing the merits, so sadly few, of his dates. Eventually, she realizes that she wants to marry Peter and plots with the receptionist to change her image. No one, including a resident expert at the Museum of TV and Radio, is too sure what happened next because the show went off the air suddenly.
