by Betsy Israel
Prostitution:
Ned Buntline, G’hals of New York (New York: Dewitt and Davenport, 1850); Ruth Rosen, The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America, 1900–1918 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982); Kathy Peiss, “Charity Girls and City Pleasures,” in Pow ers of Desire, Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson, eds. (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983); George Ellington, Women of New York (New York: New York Books, 1869).
Periodicals:
Edgar Fawcett, “Woes of the New York Working Girl,” Arena (Dec. 1891); Lillian W. Betts, “Tenement-House Life and Recreation” (Outlook 61, Dec. 11, 1899); Mary Gay Humphreys, “The New York Working Girl,” (Scribner’s 20, Oct. 1896); Barbara Schreier, “Becoming American: Jewish Women Immigrants, 1880–1920,” History Today (Mar. 1994); Mark K. Maule, “What Is a Shop-Girl’s Life?” World’s Work (Sept. 1907); “A Salesgirl’s Story,” Independent (July 1902); “The Shopgirl,” Outlook (Feb. 1908); “After Business Hours, What?—Pleasure!” Ladies’ Home Journal (Feb. 1907); “What It Means to Be a Department Store Girl,” Ladies’ Home Journal (June 1913); “Glimpses at the Mind of a Waitress” (American Journal of Sociology 13, July, 1907); Belle Lindners Israel’s “The Way of the Girl” (Survey 22, July 3, 1909).
The early bohemian periodicals:
Mary Gay Humphreys, “Women Bachelors in New York,” Scribner’s (Aug. 1896) and “Women Bachelors in London” (Scribner’s, Aug. 1896) in which we learn “Women are everywhere; climbing down from omnibuses; coming up in processions from the under ground stations. They are hurrying along Fleet Street… Chelsea and South Kensing ton are peopled with petticoats…. This new figure has no place in fiction. That is why we know so little of her….”; “Feminine Bachelorism,” Scribner’s (Oct. 1896); Olga Stanley, “Some Reflections on the Life of a Bachelor Girl,” Outlook (Nov. 1896); Winifred Sothern, “The Truth About the Bachelor Girl,” Munsey’s (May, 1901); “The Matinee Girls,” Metropolitan (June 1900). For the origins of the Trilby character, see Lois Banner, American Beauty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).
Novels:
From The Folks (1934; Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992), the “Margaret” section: I. “The Hidden Time,” II. “Basement Apartment,” III. “And It Had a Green Door,” IV. “After the End of the Story.” Ruth McKenney, My Sister Eileen (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1938). Enormously popular novel turned play and musical film featuring two sisters who daringly take a basement apartment in the Village. Tragically, just after publication, Eileen, the pretty, adventurous sister, was killed in a car accident with her husband, Nathanael West, who was the author of Miss Lonelyhearts and other novels.
CHAPTER 3: THIN AND RAGING THINGS
Social crusaders:
Jane Addams, The Spirit of Youth and City Streets (New York: Macmillan, 1909), Twenty Years at Hull House (New York: Macmillan, 1910), and The Second Twenty Years at Hull House (New York: Macmillan, 1930). For more general information, Allen Davis, American Heroine: The Life and Legend of Jane Addams (London: Oxford University Press, 1973); the section on Hull House in Roy Lubove, The Professional Altruist: The Emergence of Social Work as a Career (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965); Karen J. Blair, The Club Woman as Feminist: True Womanhood Redefined, 1868–1914 (New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, 1980); William Dean Howells, The Minister’s Charge (Boston: Ticknor, 1887).
New women:
Judith Schwarz, The Radical Feminists of Heterodoxy (Lebanon, N.H.: New Victoria, 1982); Elaine Showalter, These Modern Women: Autobiographical Essays from the Twenties (Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1978); Lila Rose McCabe, The American Girl at College (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1893); June Sochen, The New Woman: Feminism in Greenwich Village, 1910–1920 (New York: Quadrangle, 1972); Leslie Fishbein, Rebels in Bohemia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982); Ellen Trimberger, “Feminism, Men and Modern Love: Greenwich Village, 1900–1925,” in Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson, eds., Powers of Desire (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983); Lewis A. Erenberg, Steppin’ Out: New York Nightlife and the Transformation of American Culture, 1890–1930 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981) provides an overview of attitudes among middle-class urban kids in the teens; Terry Miller, Greenwich Village and How It Got That Way (New York: Crown, 1990); Lillian Federman, Odd Girls and Twilight Ladies: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991); Lydia Kingsmill Commander, “An American Idea: Does the National Tendency Toward a Small Family Point to Race Suicide or Race Development?” The American Idea (1907; New York: Arno Press, 1972).
The tea-dancing modern girl, circa 1913:
Susanne Wilcox, “The Unrest of Modern Women,” Independent (July 8, 1909); “Why Educated Young Women Don’t Marry,” Independent (Nov. 25, 1909); Juliet Wilbor Tompkins, “Why Women Don’t Marry,” Cosmopolitan (Feb. 1907); “The Passing of the Home Daughter,” Independent (July 13, 1911); Margaret Deland, “The Change in the Feminine Ideal,” Atlantic Monthly (Mar. 1914); Ethel W. Mumford, “Where Is Your Daughter This Afternoon?” Harper’s (Jan. 17, 1914); “New Reflections on the Dancing Mania,” Current Opinion (Oct. 13, 1915); “Turkey Trot and Tango—A Disease or a Remedy? Current Opinion 55 (Sept. 1913); Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The New Generation of Women,” Current History (Aug. 18, 1923).
White slaving:
“Five White Slave Trade Investigations, McClure’s (May 1910); “The White Slave Films” Outlook (Jan. 17, 1914); “The White Slave Films: A Review,” Outlook (Feb. 14, 1914); John Stanley, “Traffic in Souls: The Horror of White Slavery,” San Francisco Chronicle (Oct. 21, 1990).
The Gibson girl:
Ann O’Hagen, “The Athletic Girl,” Munsey’s (Aug. 1901); Richard Harding Davis, “The Origin of a Type of the American Girl,” Quarterly Illustrator, vol. III (winter 1895); “Charles Dana Gibson, the Man and His Art,” Collier’s (Dec. 1902); Winifred Scott Moody, “Daisy Miller and the Gibson Girl,” Ladies’ Home Journal (Sept. 1904); “Gibson Girl Would Fit in Fine in the ’90s,” Roanoke Times and World News (Apr. 9, 1995).
The flapper and 1920s youth:
Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1995); Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrill Lynd, Middletown: A Study in Con temporary American Culture (New York, Harcourt, Brace & World, 1929) was cited routinely for decades as the preeminent microcosmic view of American middle-class society; Paula Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977); Anita Loos, A Girl Like I (New York: Viking, 1966); John Keats, You Might as Well Live: The Life and Times of Dorothy Parker (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970); Eric Partridge, A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, 7th ed. (New York: MacMillan, 1970); A Flapper’s Dictionary, as Compiled by One of Them (Pittsburgh: Imperial, 1922).
Periodicals:
George Ade, “Today’s Amazing Crop of 18-Year-Old Roues and 19-Year-Old Vamps,” American Magazine (March 1922); “Says Flapper Aids Church,” New York Times (Sept. 2, 1922); “An Interview with a Young Lady,” New Republic (Jan. 1925); “A Doctor’s Warning to Flappers,” Literary Digest (Oct. 1926); Judge William McAdoo, “Young Women and Crime,” Ladies’ Home Journal (Nov. 1927); Zelda Fitzgerald, “Eulogy on the Flapper,” Metropolitan (1929); Ruth Hooper, “Flapping Not Repented Of,” New York Times Book Review (July 16, 1926).
The new spinster:
We know the former flapper “new spinster”—her frustrations, joys, successes, snipey conversations with wives, and wardrobe changes—from articles published in magazines and newspapers. Primary information about her sex life—and she apparently had one—is found in Factors in the Sex Life of Twenty-two Hundred Women (1935, a privately funded study, Vassar College) and in Daniel Scott Smith, The Dating of the American Sexual Revolution, part of the collection The American Family in Social-Historical Perspective, Michael Gordon, ed. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1973). Also Ellen Rothman,
Hand and Hearts: The History of Courtship in America (New York: Basic Books, 1984); and portions of Beth L. Bailey’s highly enjoyable From Front Porch to Backseat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986); there are wonderfully frightening images of the late flapper down and out in two Jean Rhys novels: After Leaving Mr. MacKenzie (New York: Harper & Row, 1931) and Quartet (1928; New York: Vintage, 1974).
Periodicals:
Grace M. Johnson, “The New Old Maids” (Women Beautiful, May 1909); Elizabeth Jordan, “On Being a Spinster,” Saturday Evening Post (Apr. 1926); Dorothy Dunbar Bromley, “Feminist—New Style,” Harper’s (Oct. 1927); Lillian Bell, “Old Maids of the Last Generation and This,” Saturday Evening Post (Dec. 1926); “Feminism and Jane Smith,” Harper’s (June 1927); Lorine Pruette, “Should Men Be Protected?” Nation (Aug. 1927); Lillian Symes, “Still a Man’s Game: Reflections of a Slightly Tired Feminist,” Harper’s (May 1929) and “The New Masculinism,” Harper’s (June 1930); “And Now the Siren Eclipses the Flapper” New York Times Magazine (July 28, 1929); Margaret Culkin Ban ning, “The Plight of the Spinster,” Harper’s (June 1929); Mrs. Virginia Kirk, “A Tale of Not So Flaming Youth,” Literary Digest, no. 105 (Oct. 10, 1930).
CHAPTER 4: THE SUSPICIOUS SINGLE
Susan Ware, Holding Their Own: American Women in the 1930s (Boston, Twayne, 1982); Joan Hoff-Wilson and Marjorie Lightman, Without Precedent: The Life and Career of Eleanor Roosevelt (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1984); Anne Hirst, Get and Hold Your Man (New York: Kinsey, 1937); Don Congdon, ed., The Thirties: A Time to Remember (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1962); Ben L. Reitman, Sister of the Road: The Autobiography of Box-Car Bertha (New York: Sheridan House, 1937); Susan M. Hartmann, The Homefront and Beyond: American Women in the 1940s (Boston, Twayne, 1982); Karen Anderson, Wartime Women: Sex Roles, Family Relations and the Status of Women During World War II (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981); Sherna Berger Gluck, Rosie the Riveter Revisited: Women, the War and Social Change (Boston: Meridien, 1987) includes oral histories of women in all areas of the war industries; Maureen Honey, Creating Rosie the Riveter: Class, Gender, and Propaganda During World War II (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984); Ferdinand Lundberg and Marynia Farnham, Modern Woman: The Lost Sex (New York: Harper & Row, 1947); Elizabeth Hawes, Anything but Love: A Complete Digest of the Rules for Feminine Behaviour from Birth to Death, Given Out in Print, On Film, and Over the Air, Read, Seen, Listened to Monthly by Some 340,000,000 American Women (New York: Rinehart, 1948).
Periodicals:
Mabel Barbee Lee, “The Dilemma of the Educated Woman,” Atlantic (Dec. 1930); Genevieve Parkhurst, “Is Feminism Dead?” Harper’s (1935); “Anxious Ladies: To Be Wed) or Not to Be,” Mademoiselle (1938); Juliet Farnham, “How to Meet Men and Marry,” book excerpt, McCall’s (1943); “Somebody’s After Your Man!” Good House keeping (Aug., 1945); “In Marriage, It’s a Man’s Market!” New York Times Magazine (June 17, 1945); “Your Chances of Getting Married,” Good Housekeeping (Oct. 1946); “U.S. Marriage Rate Zooms to All-Time High,” Science Digest (Oct. 1947); “How Feminine Are You to Men?” Women’s Home Companion (May 1946); “No Date Is No Dis grace,” Women’s Home Companion (Nov. 1946); George Lawton, “Proof That She Is the Stronger Sex,” New York Times Magazine (Dec. 12, 1948); “The Unwilling Virgins,” Es quire (May 1949); “The High Cost of Dating,” Ladies’ Home Journal (Sept. 1949).
Advice/conduct guides:
Steven Hart and Lucy Brown, How to Get Your Man and Hold Him (New York: Dover, 1944); Cora Carle, How to Get a Husband (New York: Hedgehog Press, 1949); Jean and Gene Berger, Win Your Man and Keep Him (Chicago: Windsor Press, 1948); Judson T. and Mary G. Landis, Building a Successful Marriage (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1948).
On the emergence of bobby-soxers, see This Fabulous Century: 1940–50 (New York: Time-Life, 1969).
CHAPTER 5: THE SECRET SINGLE
Alfred Kinsey, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (Philadelphia: Saunders, 1953); David Reisman, The Lonely Crowd, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964); C. Wright Mills, White Collar: The American Middle Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1951); Mirra Komarovsky, Women in the Modern World: Their Education and Dilemmas (Boston: Little, Brown, 1953); Lawrence and Mary Frank, How to Be a Woman (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1954); Norman Hamilton, How to Woo and Keep Your Man (New York: William Fredericks, 1955); Robert O. Blood, Anticipating Your Marriage, the classic marriage text (New York: Free Press, 1957); Nicholas Drake, The Fifties in VOGUE (New York: Henry Holt, 1987); Rona Jaffe, The Best of Every thing (1958; New York: Avon, 1976); Joyce Johnson, Minor Characters: A Young Woman’s Coming of Age in the Beat Generation (New York: Washington Square, 1983); Herman Wouk, Marjorie Morningstar (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1955); Winnie Dienes, Young, White and Miserable: Growing Up in the 1950s (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992); J. D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey (Boston: Little, Brown, 1961).
Periodicals:
“What You Should Know About Women, Even if You’re a Woman,” Collier’s (Nov. 1951); “No Right Age for a Girl to Marry,” New York Times (Oct. 19, 1952); Patty DeRoulf, “Must Bachelor Girls Be Immoral?” Coronet (Feb. 9, 1952); “Her First Date,” Look, (Dec. 1953); Juliet Tree, “When a Girl Lives Alone,” Good Housekeeping (Mar. 1953); “Life Calls on Seven Spinsters,” Life (June 8, 1953), in which Life went out and found spinsters as it might earlier have found the Dionne quints (seven sisters, thirty-eight to fifty-one, all wait on Dad and dress alike—quirky Mousketeer sensibility or psychopathology?); “How to Be Marriageable,” Ladies’ Home Journal (Mar. 1954); James A. Skardon, “Room, Board and Romance,” a series on new coed board inghouses in San Francisco, New York Herald Tribune (Oct. 20, 1954); “Is Marriage the Trap?” Mademoiselle (Dec. 1955); Anita Colby, “In Defense of the Single Woman,” Look (Nov. 29, 1955); “The Date Line,” Good Housekeeping (Oct. 1956); “Some Persons Should Stay Single,” Science Digest (May 1956); Life Magazine Special Issue on “The American Woman,” Life (Dec. 24, 1956); Polly Weaver, “What’s Wrong with Ambition?” Mademoiselle (Sept. 1956); “Will Success Spoil American Women?” New York Times Magazine (Nov. 10, 1957); Gael Greene, “Lone Women,” series, New York Post (Nov. 18–Dec. 1, 1957); Earl Ubell, “Pressure and Tension Beset the Lone Woman,” New York Herald Tribune (Dec. 6, 1957); James H. S. Brossard, “The Engagement Ring: A Changing Symbol” New York Times Magazine (July 14, 1958); Gloria Emerson, “The Lives of a New York Career Girl” Holiday (May 1958); “If You Don’t Go Steady, You’re Different,” Ladies’ Home Journal (Dec. 1959); “Bachelor Girls—They Play by Their Own Rules,” five-part series, New York Daily News (Apr. 1959).
Novels:
Gail Parent, Sheila Levine Is Dead and Living in New York; (New York: Putnam, 1972) Judith Rossner, Looking for Mr. Goodbar (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1975); Erica Jong, Fear of Flying (1973; New York: NAL, 1995); Mary Gordon, Final Payments (New York: Ballantine, 1978).
CHAPTER 6: THE SWINGING SINGLE
Books:
Helen Gurley Brown, Sex and the Single Girl (New York: Bernard Geiss/Random House, 1962); Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (1963; New York: Dell, 1973); Charles Abrams, The City Is the Frontier (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965); Joan Didion, Something Toward Bethlehem (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1968); Howard Bahr and Gerald Garrett, Women Alone: The Disaffiliation of Urban Females (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1976); Suzanne Gordon, Lonely in America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1976); Jean Baker Miller, Toward A New Psychology of Women (Boston: Beacon Books, 1979).
Periodicals:
Joan Didion, “The Great Reprieve,” Mademoiselle (June 1960); “Do Women Provoke Sex Attack?” Cosmopolitan (Mar. 1960); “The Non-Woman, A Manhattan Enigma, Cosmopolitan (Mar. 1960); Sylvia Porter, “Women Alone,” New York Post (Sept. 13, 1960); Carol Taylor, “East Side, West Side, They Flock to New York for Job, Dream, Dream Man,” New York World-Telegram (Jan. 3, 1960); “Go West Young Woman i
f You Wish to Wed,” New York Herald Tribune (May 10, 1961); Phyllis Rosenteur, “Unwed Woman a Likely Cynic,” (Newsweek, book excerpt, May 1962); Gloria Steinem, “The Moral Disarmament of Betty Co-ed,” Esquire (Sept. 1962); “How Nice to Be a Pretty Girl in Washington, D.C.,” Life (Mar. 23, 1962); Marion K. Sanders, “The Case of the Vanishing Spinster,” New York Times Magazine (Sept. 22, 1963); “Two Girls Murdered in E. 88th St. Flat,” New York Times, (Aug. 29, 1963); Nan Robertson, “Where the Boys Are Not: At the Barbizon,” New York Times (Oct. 19, 1963); on Kitty Genovese, Loudon Wainwright, “The Dying Girl That Nobody Helped,” Life (Apr. 10, 1964); Sylvia Porter, “Girls Without Jobs,” New York Post (Mar. 25, 1965); Nina McCain, “New York and the Single Girl!” New York World-Telegram (Dec. 14, 1965); “Cities and the Single Girl,” Newsweek (Nov. 15, 1965); “Students in the Free Sex Movement,” Time (Mar. 11, 1966); Judith Viorst and Dorothy Gilliam, “Washington and the Single Girl,” Washington Post (June 22, 1966); “Where the Singles Are!” Newsweek (Sept. 26, 1966); Douglas Sefton, “The Girl Ghetto: East Side, West Side, Gals Buoying It Up on Broads-way,” New York Daily News (May 10, 1967); “New Rules for the Singles Game,” Life (Aug. 18, 1967); “The Pleasures and Pain of the Single Life,” Time (Sept. 15, 1967); Jean Baer, “The Single Girl in the City,” New York Post (Sept. 21, 1968); Shelby Coffey III, “Single Style Yesterday and Today,”’ Washington Post (Jan. 14, 1968); Christina Mirk, “Mingle but Stay Single!” Sunday Daily News (Mar. 23, 1969); “The Politics of Sex: Who’s Come a Long Way, Baby?” Time. (Aug. 31, 1970); Jon Nordheimer, “Vacation and the Single Girl: Tireless Pursuit of a Dream,” New York Times (July 29, 1970); “A Very Nice Kind of Ski Bum,” Life pictorial on single girls, living together in Aspen (Mar. 8, 1971); “Gloria Steinem: A Liberated Woman Despite Beauty, Chic and Success” Newsweek (Aug. 16, 1971); see also “The Thinking Man’s Jean Shrimpton,” Time (Jan. 3, 1969); Judy Klemesrud, “Single Women Against a Dangerous City,” New York Times (Jan. 12, 1973); Grace Lichtenstein, “Slain Woman’s Neighbors Express Both Horror and Detachment,” New York Times (Oct. 25, 1973); Leslie Maitland, “The Singles Scene Has Sordid Side,” New York Times (Nov. 1, 1974); Susan Jacoby, “Forty-nine Million Singles Can’t All Be Right,” New York Times Magazine (Feb. 17, 1974); Gloria Emerson, “In a City of Crowds, So Many Lonely Women,” New York Times (Jan. 28, 1974); Wendy Shulman, “Singles Becoming More Stable Tenants,” New York Times (July 1974); Judy Klemesrud, “Bachelor’s Life: Things Aren’t Always Hunky-Dory in Paradise,” New York Times (May 3, 1974), “Margaret Mead Puts Single Life in Perspective,” New York Times (Jan. 25, 1974), and “They Tell How They Feel About Being Single Women,” New York Times (Dec. 1974); Robert J. Levin and Amy Levin, “Sexual Pleasure: The Surprising Preferences of 100,000 Women,” Redbook (Sept. 1975); “Men Bite Back,” New York Times (Aug. 1978), a response to Nan Robertson’s controversial essay “Single Women Over 30: Where Are the Men Worthy of Us?” (to quote from one typical male subject: “I am bored with women who claim all that liberation, self-realization, self-fulfillment pap and blame all the woes of women since Eve on me.”); John Kifner, “Hospital at Last Identifies Its Shopping Bag Lady,” New York Times (Jan. 10, 1979).
