by Betsy Israel
Her own books and stories were published, although no one, including her, made much about it. The Beat girls who became famous did so for extreme and daring acts, like Elise Cowen’s. Joyce’s beloved and dearest friend, she threw herself through her parents’ living room window, a suicide at twenty-eight.
* * *
At about the same time, Rona Jaffe published her best-selling novel The Best of Everything, the classic three-girls-come-to-the-city story, and forerunner of the Jackie Susann blockbusters. Her mother grieved. It was 1958, and a career put such a damper on a possible marriage! Then the book was turned into a film with Hope Lange as the aspiring editor and model Suzy Parker as the second of her roommates; Joan Crawford even put in an appearance as the bitch spinster boss who keeps them overtime at the keyboards. It was a huge hit. But “poor Rona!” as a family friend said to her mother. “With the film sale… all that money, now she’ll never get married.”
A popular magazine feature during these years—adapted as a late newsreel short subject—was the photo essay I think of as “Girl Comes to the City.” Panel by panel, we watch the new girl arrive and get settled. She meets her roommates, gets a job, fights for a stool at the pushy luncheonette counter, and accepts that she will not find a seat on the subway. These features always included a shot of the girl in a bathrobe, hair twisted up in a towel, as she prepared for a date. No one has ever looked so excited while painting her toenails.
In other shots of her at a desk, or stopped on the street, waiting to cross, she looks sad. Months have passed and she’s learned a few things—about married men, wolves, loneliness—and she wonders perhaps if she shouldn’t just pick herself up and go home. Then the last panel. Girl in the tiny shared living room, staring out at the skyline or, more realistically, at fire escapes and squat brown water tanks. The scene is so hypnotic that she has the essential epiphany: There is so much here to see and to learn that to return home, where she’s seen and learned all there is to know, would be a kind of death.
I’m sure some looked at these pictorials and saw a titillating but pointless risk. Others saw a travel poster on which a special message had been engraved for them in invisible ink. It said, “Come join us!”
CHAPTER SIX
The Swinging Single: Career Girls, The Autonomous Girl, The Pill Popper, and The Lone Female in Danger
I used to pick out the people who lived alone—on the subway, the street. Every time they had these glassy eyes, like nothing’s living in ’em. Dead.
—NATALIE WOOD TO STEVE MCQUEEN, LOVE WITH THE PROPER STRANGER, 1963
Whatever your age, your single state is nothing to be ashamed of. Let the girls who marry at 18 or 20 defend their position. They’re the ones who are missing out.
—REBECCA E. GREER, WHY ISN’T A NICE GIRL LIKE YOU MARRIED? 1969
We have a message for the men here today: FUCK OFF FUCK YOU. You have caused enough grief humiliation for centuries… Leave your lie-wives and girlie-friends. Give us back the names we came with. Go!
—A BROCHURE I FOUND IN A PARK, SPRING 1970
THE SECOND COMING OF THE SINGLE GIRL
Images of the 1960s have been so long in circulation that someone born in 1984 could easily assemble his or her own timeline or montage: JFK and Jackie; the Zapruder film; Martin Luther King and Malcolm X; Vietnam (with asides for the Beatles, the Apollo missions, LSD), and, depending on one’s mood that day, conclude with Woodstock and microminis, or Kent State and My Lai.
In most schematics, single womanhood as a significant phenomenon does not make the charts alongside the antiwar crusade or the blossoming of the counterculture. It bubbled along throughout the sixties as a bright and sexy trend, a magazine story or pictorial that could also be played as maudlin or scary. As a serious, permanent social fact, it would emerge with the women’s movement of the early 1970s. And the early women’s movement was the last and, as many, many frightened people viewed it, the least serious of the uprisings. Who was being hurt, exactly? Was the phrase “white middle-class woman” next to the word “oppressed” an oxymoron?
One “then girl” explained: “Nobody took you seriously if you were married and presumed to be a housewife—you were just another married speck. What were your problems—and who cared? If you were single, even if you were wearing bright yellow vinyl boots like I was, you were still just a girl who was going to become a housewife. No great tragedy…. As someone who might have a complicated political or social situation—forget it. You were invisible.”
By the mid-1970s, however, single women would emerge as among the most economically and socially significant of all the onetime shadow population groups. Being single, like being openly gay, would finally lose any lingering taint of ugly character weakness, any hint of pathology, and come to seem an entirely viable way to live—what someone back in 1925 had first called a “lifestyle.”
Traces of this new single appear as if on cue in 1960. First, the 1960 census reported that 9.3 million households, about 18 out of every 100, were headed by solo women. (And the dramatic rise—more than a million since 1950—was genuine; it did not reflect the fact that there were simply more households overall.) More women, it seemed, earned their own money, and because there was more readily available housing, they did not have to live with relatives if they chose not to. True, most of these women were safely identified as widows, but close to 2 million were divorcées, 900,000 were separated from their husbands, and most shocking of all, 1.4 million of these women had never wed. “Who Needs a Man Around the House?” asked the New York Mirror Magazine in spring 1960. Beneath the enormous headline we see a Grace Kelly blonde, stretching as she gets out of bed wearing a negligé. We next see her pictured seated serenely with coffee and newspaper, and in another frame she is casually repairing a broken cabinet all by herself. It’s threatening, but for safety’s sake, a cat has been included in one photo and a caption reassures readers that she used this pet as an “outlet” for expressing affection.
By the early sixties, marriage as a national ideal, an enforceable teenaged daydream, had lost some of its hypnotic force. The number of divorces nationwide had doubled in the ten years since 1952. Thousands of housewives, already identified as “miserable” and “suffering,” were sending rescue notes to magazines, begging advice. Ladies’ Home Journal launched the famed, long-running feature “Can This Marriage Be Saved?” The Feminine Mystique came out in 1963. “Togetherness,” that byword of 1950s normalcy, began to sound ominous. Among the most popular films of 1962 was Days of Wine and Roses, starring Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick as a couple free-falling into mutually supportive alcoholism. The film seems microscopically focused on alcohol abuse, complete with a Twelve Step savior who appears at the end, to explain Important Facts about The Issue. But it may also be seen as a portrait of midcentury marriage as claustrophobic nightmare—“togetherness” as the theme for a monster movie. Here, in a small apartment, live a devoted modern couple who have dutifully excluded their closest relatives. In their isolation, their willingness to get or do anything for each other without question, they slowly poison each other.
By far the most controversial element of an evolving single consciousness was the introduction in 1960 of the Pill. All over the country, college-aged girls, “nice” girls from “fine” schools, began taking it en masse and saying radical things about sex—or so it seemed to a population unaccustomed to this open public discussion. More alarming still, they sounded very blasé about the things they said. These young women “assume that [sex] is a possible and probable part of a single girl’s experience,” wrote young reporter Gloria Steinem in Esquire in 1962. As one graduate student told her, “Lovemaking can be good outside marriage and bad in marriage just as easily as the other way around. Sex is neutral, like money. It’s the way you use it that counts.” One national magazine polled four hundred college students on “chastity.” The findings: Nearly “all respondents… virginal or no more… said… sexual behavior is something you have to dec
ide by yourself.”
Many young college women used their training in logic to support this newly constructed morality. One of Steinem’s subjects had affairs out of marriage because, in her considered view, women were meant for lots of sex. As she reasoned, females were the only mammals capable of orgasm during times they were unable to conceive, therefore orgasm must have served some other purpose, namely pleasure. Another argued: “I’m not preaching against the institution of marriage by having affairs beforehand and I’m not going to produce illegitimate children for society to take care of. People who have no share in the consequences should have no share in the decision.” A companion of hers solemnly concluded, “With one hundred percent birth control you are not running the risk of hurting anyone by your behavior and therefore it is not immoral.” Others were more practical: “If I’d known, I might have postponed my wedding and had pre-marital relations instead.” (One campus student board declared that by 1984 “women will be 100% unchaste.”)
Within two years of its introduction, at least 750,000 American women were on the Pill and an estimated 500 more began taking it every day. The Complete Book of Birth Control, published by the Planned Parenthood Federation, reported on who they were and went on at some length. I quote it briefly: “More education and better income… tend to shift the responsibility for birth control to the wife. Informal studies indicate the same shift among unmarried girls.” Unlike the diaphragm, the Pill could be prescribed for a number of nonsexual causes—menstrual irregularities, control of ovarian cysts—and thus there were convenient excuses for anyone to take it.
Gloria Steinem, starting here to sound like Gloria Steinem, wrote that “the development of a new autonomous girl is important and in numbers quite new…. She expects to find her identity neither totally without mennor totally through them… She has work she wants to do and she can… marry later than average, and have affairs if she wishes, but she can also marry without giving up her work.”
This new female “type”—still, of course, years from reality—so excited authors and sociologists that they began to examine the possible specimen right away. What many saw was a normal girl, a future wife who had, amidst this onrush of divorce, become cynical, a wary spectator at what Phyllis Rosenteur in The Single Woman (1961) called the “quickie in-and-out affairs that often masquerade these days as marriage.” She called her the “intuitive woman” and charted her development in this way:
Out of childhood, into adolescence, a girl begins observing for herself, and what she sees and hears and feels runs counter to conditioning. Many become confused and, more than that, suspicious…. Nothing is accepted as blindly as before and some may even actively rebel against some of the rules. Others merely back away from both the “normal” path to marriage and the ranter’s route to stormy singleness; in some private corner of themselves, they plot an independent course, and then pursue it just as silently as people will permit.
The following year, researchers at Stanford announced that women with deep insight into established male/female roles were less likely to make an early “uninformed” marriage. Science Digest reported that a University of Michigan study of twenty-five hundred singles had found unwed women to be happier overall than their male counterparts—no matter the persistent belief that men idealized their bachelor years and left them reluctantly. With the exception of divorced women, who were uniquely stigmatized, researchers concluded, “the single woman who lives alone… [was] not usually a frustrated old maid. And among those who live alone, women are not the weaker sex. Generally, single women… experience less discomfort than single men…. They are more active in the working through of the problems they face and appear stronger than single men in meeting the challenge of their position.”
Helen Gurley Brown, newly appointed editor of a revivified Cosmopolitan, hated that language—“discomfort,” the “challenge” of one’s sadly “compromised” position, or the word frustrated as it applied to anyone single. She had just married for the first time at thirty-seven. And, using her own slang (“mouseburger,” for example, meant a quiet, spinsterish girl) and dousing it with exclamation points, she’d published the best-selling Sex and the Single Girl (1962). Here we meet a new variation of the single girl, this one a tornado of competence—pretty, slim, but also smart, “up” on the news, well-read, and given to sewing and cooking while at the same time cramming in some art history or Russian literature. She worked hard at a job in the arts and lived by herself in a sleek, sexy apartment. She was enormously popular but seemingly choosy, selective; very hard to get.
As Helen Brown says of her own single days, “The phone just rang incessantly. It was terribly annoying if you were trying to get something done. There were nights, I tell you, when I just carried the phone over and put it into the freezer.”
She’ll go on to tell you of the radical impact she made with this vision of a single aristocrat. (“It was the first time anyone suggested that being single was not the same thing as having a social disease!!”) But even though this girl “lived by her wits… sharpened… honed… coping with people trying to marry her off,” she was still an elaborately decked-out slab of bait. Brown devoted whole chapters to mascara, clothing, and bizarre seductive technique (“any unusual jewelry is a come on, but it should be beautiful or you’ll look too Ubangi!”). Just as nineteenth-century girls had been encouraged into smashes, their affectionate behavior good practice for the marital arts, so this new single girl was honing herself to be a unique modern wife or, in the spirit of Helen Brown, a delectable, frothy, and fabulous wife!
Still, all silliness aside, Brown was advocating a time-out for self-improvement before marriage. Gloria Steinem’s autonomous girl calmly went out, or so it was said, and had sex. And the vision of all those cabinet-repairing amazon divorcées! Put together, the new sixties singles began to sound slightly alarming.
Esquire in particular became obsessed with a female uprising. There were long essays on ball-busting new types, for example, the “American Witch,” a spoiled, selfish bitch who deliberately failed to share male enthusiasm for football and did not leap at commands for food. One parable told of a distant time when little Caroline Kennedy, grown and now president, oversaw a program that allowed every American woman to grow a penis. Men, psychological eunuchs, took refuge in bars.
Others objected along more familiar lines. Author Pearl Buck, returning to the States after years abroad, wrote that of all changes “the new ethics of sex” was most amazing, “so abrupt, so far reaching that we are all dazed by it.” But she believed that an insufficient few had stopped to consider the consequences—the many unwanted children that would still, even with the new “technology,” result in “rows and rows of tiny unattended cribs.”
Several professors from universities such as Stanford, Princeton, and Tufts foresaw in these loosened sexual constraints a dissolving national morality. If women, like men, could engage in whatever sexual practice they chose, when they chose, in short, without any external controls, they were more likely to develop a reckless spontaneity in other of their actions. From a letter to the New York Times: “Women, like some men, now find it fashionable to behave and conduct themselves in whatever way they choose, in consideration only of their own feelings. Too bad if there are children.” To quote one Harvard psychologist, “This sudden emphasis on individual choice, a morality of one, is… dangerous.”
Occasionally one heard a measured voice. Sylvia Porter, in her New York Post column, “Your Dollar,” took on the new female single as a social development that required a practical, not moralistic, response. She called on manufacturers to package smaller meals and scale products down to suit the family of one. The housing industry, she believed, would need “to develop centrally located… inexpensive, small apartments.” As she reported, “According to a census spokesman… there will be more and more [single women] as the years go on.”
In fairness, one professor who’d expressed concern about a relative femal
e morality also urged caution in too quickly judging women. Considering female freedom, he had found at least one “salutary” side effect. “A woman free to find fulfillment in marriage and work” was far more likely to “be self-motivated. Autonomous… This is the kind of woman who makes the ideal teacher.”
It was, after all, still 1962 or 1963. Most of the single women inspiring such terrorized discourse were still in fact teachers, secretaries, or something else safely within the canon of female careers. A 1960s board game for girls, “What Shall I Be: The Exciting Game of Career Girls,” laid out the possibilities. Along with teacher and secretary one could work toward “stewardess,” “model,” “nurse,” trying to avoid two old-maid-ish cards known as the Duds, either a fat middle-aged actress with runny makeup or else an unmistakable spinster.
Interestingly, the spinster as a type had floated back into the national discourse, this time as the subject of an obituary. So many millions of girls automatically married that the society for some time had lacked traditional spinsters. But lamenting the lost spinster—that toothless, brutally bunned stick in black—was actually a handy way of denouncing the new single. In cartoon panels and staged photos, our suddenly beloved spinster was juxtaposed not with the baby housewife who had replaced her, but with a Pill-taking stew or a wealthy single babe, a socialite with décolletage stretching down to her navel. In 1963 The New York Times Magazine ran a spinster eulogy that refined the identity of the primary “spinster killer,” who was none of the above—not the baby bride, the pill-taking girl, or the rapacious socialite. She was, rather, the average unmarried working girl who could easily beome any one of the above. She applied cosmetics, hair dye, and as one caption put it, “overnight, she’s a new girl, with a new look, a new personality, a new life.” Whatever direction it took, she was very unlikely to end up a traditional and suddenly beloved auntie spinster.
