The triumph of the single girl was in place by the late sixties and early seventies. Cosmopolitan, which reached a circulation of about two and a half million, was followed by Viva and Playgirl, while the hard-core propagandists of domesticity—Woman’s Day and Family Circle—held on only at the supermarket checkout stands (where they remain leading sellers). Debbie Reynolds, Doris Day, and Lucille Ball vanished into the canyons of Beverly Hills to make way for tough new heroines like Faye Dunaway and Angie Dickinson, and at last the single working girl burst into family viewing time in the engaging persona of Mary Tyler Moore.
Meanwhile, in the popular media, the full-time housewife had sunk to approximately the level of prestige once occupied by single women. She was more and more likely to be portrayed as the object of pity—an infantile neurotic who got through the day with the aid of “mother’s little helper” (tranquilizers) and three-hour doses of soap operas. Diary of a Mad Housewife showed her pacing in the confinement of her family; in A Woman Under the Influence, she breaks out—to a mental hospital. TV’s favorite housewife in the mid-seventies was Mary Hartman—who had a neurotic relationship with her daughter, an affair with a policeman, a dramatic mental breakdown—all the while remaining distracted by the details of housekeeping, like the “waxy yellow build-up” on the kitchen floor. Eventually the housewife’s reputation got so bad that even the Ladies’ Home Journal dropped her, preferring to be known henceforth as “LHJ,” and telling its advertisers:
LHJ stands for Ladies’ Home Journal.
And Ladies’ Home Journal stands for the woman who never stands still …
One moment, she’s off to the mountains for some skiing. The next moment, she’s off to the islands for some tennis. And in between, she’s a growing family [sic], an exciting career and creative way of life that’s hers and hers alone.38
American capitalism crossed the culture gap from LHJ to Cosmo, from the shopping mall to the discothèque, with barely a tremor of discomfort. The marketing men were, on the whole, delighted with the new singles lifestyle. First of all, in just a physical sense, the singles lifestyle meant more demand for the basic necessities like appliances and furniture. In a suburban home, four or more people might use one TV set; in a singles apartment, one person used one set. The director of market research for a major U.S.-based multinational corporation (who asked that neither he nor the corporation be identified) explained the marketing principle to us in a 1974 interview. Asked what he thought of the trend toward women delaying marriage and living alone, he said:
There’s nothing in this that business would be opposed to. People living alone need the same things as people living in families. The difference is there’s no sharing. So really this trend is good because it means you sell more products. The only trend in living arrangements that I think business does not look favorably on is this thing of communes, because here you have a number of people using the same products.§
In addition to expanding the market for familiar products like TVs, blenders, and vacuum cleaners, the singles lifestyle represented a new kind of market, centered on travel, liquor, music and sports equipment, clothing, and cosmetics. The theme was instant gratification. American families spent their best years saving—for the kids’ college education or for a larger house someday, or they channeled it into home improvements and durable goods. But there was nothing to stop the single from enjoying her (or his) money now. For example, an ad for Psychology Today magazine, directed at potential advertisers, shows what is supposed to be a typical reader: A young woman, sitting on her living room floor, wearing a scuba mask and flippers, holding ski poles, with a tennis racket tucked under one arm. The caption says, in bold lettering, “I love me.” “I’m not conceited,” the ad goes on:
I’m just a good friend to myself.
And I like to do what ever makes me feel good.
Me, myself and I used to sit around, putting things off until tomorrow.
Tomorrow we’ll buy new ski equipment, and look at the new compact cars. And pick up that new camera.
The only trouble is that tomorrow always turned into the next tomorrow.
And I never had a good time “today” …
[But now] I live my dreams today, not tomorrow.39
It had to happen. Ever since the first warm winds of “permissiveness” swept America in the twenties, something like this had been in the air. In the thirties, forties, and fifties women were told to “express themselves,” to follow their “instincts,” by all means to have fun. Then the experts and the admen told them that “fun” meant a house and babies, that it in fact meant hard work and sacrifice. Sooner or later someone had to discover that there was desperately little pleasure to be gotten out of new aluminum siding, or an expensive living room set that is kept under plastic until company comes. The media that reflected—and promoted—the new singles lifestyle spoke in a subversive whisper to a generation of young women: “Why wait? Why sacrifice? You don’t need any excuses to indulge yourself. It’s OK to have fun right now—for yourself.” No one denied that a woman should fulfill herself even though “fulfillment” might mean masochistic suffering. But if fulfillment meant casual sex and new cameras, instead of freckled kids and a lawn free of crab grass—what was wrong with that?
A clear-headed capitalist could only rejoice at the new self-indulgent mood of young women. The ideology of domesticity had sustained a market for single family homes, for large cars, heavy appliances, and fruit-flavored breakfast cereals. But it was now becoming clear that one sybaritic single could outconsume a family of four. Spending no longer had to be justified in terms of the house, the kids, the future. For example, an advertisement for ad space in Mademoiselle magazine in the mid-seventies showed a relaxed and elegant young woman above the headline “I could be happy with less, but I prefer being happy with more,” with the text:
Mademoiselle readers don’t live beyond their means. But they see no reason to live below them.
They are young women who have acquired a taste for the better things in life, and have earned the means to acquire them.
Mademoiselle has the highest index of readers of all young women’s magazines who own audio components …
And, as you might expect, the highest index of successfully employed young women.40
To keep up with the times, an intelligent corporation had only to rewrite its ad copy, scale down its products to singles’ size (e.g., the single-serving can of Campbell’s soup, the one-hamburger frying pan, the compact car instead of the station wagon, etc.) and if possible, acquire a subsidiary in the booming “leisure industry.”
Spread of the Singles Culture
There was no way to contain the new lifestyle to the singles ghettos of a few cosmopolitan cities. With its instrinsic “sex appeal” and, by the late sixties, plentiful corporate promotion, the singles lifestyle spread with amazing speed—to the married. Young newlyweds especially began to throw out the old Saturday Evening Post images of white picket fences and backyard swing sets for dreams fashioned out of the pages of Cosmo or Playboy. The majority of Cosmo’s readers were not really “Cosmo Girls,” who select their lovers to match their moods and astrological forecasts, but married women. And the men who read Playboy, Penthouse, and the slew of imitators who followed, were, on the whole, not playboys but hardworking husbands. By 1969, the new lifestyle had become so popular that the market for private homes, which had been expanding since the World War II, suddenly went soft.‖ Half the new housing starts that year were for apartments—not only for singles, but for the increasing number of marrieds who now had other ways to spend their money than on lawn mowers and wood paneling for the den. A 1967 “motivational research study” cited in Fortune, noted the trend toward “fun” spending:
… a new car or a Caribbean cruise can connote youth and vibrancy to a man. In 1966, $20 billion was spent by the U.S. public on nonbusiness and family travel; only $4 billion more went to housing.41
In fact, there was getti
ng to be less and less objective difference between the condition of marriage and singleness. Sometime in the late sixties, “living together” before or instead of marriage ceased to be a bohemian eccentricity and became a more or less thinkable alternative for millions of ordinary people. (The Ladies’ Home Journal, which in the early sixties had faced the etiquette problems posed by the single woman dinner guest, confronted in the seventies the difficult problem of making sleeping arrangements for a grown son’s or daughter’s “roommate.”) At the same time, the divorce rate began to reach record heights—from 9.2 per 1,000 married women in 1960 to 16.9 in 1970,42 eventually reaching the point where some 50 percent of marriages end in divorce. Marriage and singleness were no longer opposite conditions for women, requiring completely different ways of life, but “phases” marked off (in the language of the enormous literature that deals with psychological coping) by periods of “transition.”
Manufacturers of household goods made a quick adjustment to the new marital instability. For years they’d banked on the indissoluble all-American family, with its steady savings and gradual accretion of durable goods. But the new “marriage cycle”—marriage, divorce, second marriage, and so on—offered a dizzying multiplication of sales opportunites. “It used to be that we thought in terms of one big point where we ‘sold’ a couple,” the market research man we interviewed told us. “That was when they got married and started buying for their house. Later on, bit by bit, they would upgrade the items they had bought originally. But now we think more in terms of two big points. One when they first get married, and a scond one ten or fifteen years later when they get divorced and have to duplicate many of the things they’ve held in common—from furniture and appliances to record albums and houseplants.” Along these lines, in 1977 The New York Times reported that the housing industry was pinning its hopes for expansion on the country’s one million annual divorces: “Eventually, 80 percent of divorced people remarry, but in the meantime they need a place to stay.”43
The most dramatic indicator of the success of the “singles” lifestyle was the great “baby bust” of the sixties and seventies. Back in the post–World War II years of nationwide nest-building, the birth rate had risen like the curve of a pregnant belly. The Ladies’ Home Journal’s 1961 poll of young women age sixteen to twenty-one found that “most” wanted four children, and “many” wanted five. But even by then the trend was starting to reverse itself. The birth rate began to fall after 1957, plummeting with the nineteen sixties’ “youth rebellion” and reaching a nadir of “zero population growth” in the mid-seventies. Suburban schools were shut down. Manufacturers of infant formulas—like Nestlé—transplanted their promotional campaigns to the baby-rich countries of the Third World.a
The moral justification for childlessness was the “population explosion” discovered by demographers and futurists in the mid-sixties, but the real reason, for many young couples, was that children just didn’t fit into the lifestyle they had become accustomed to as singles. For every idealist, like the Mills College valedictorian of 1969, who declared, “Our days as a race on this planet are numbered … I AM TERRIBLY SADDENED BY THE FACT THAT THE MOST HUMANE THING FOR ME TO DO IS TO HAVE NO CHILDREN AT ALL,”44 there were now dozens of women who saw no reason to defend their childlessness in anything but personal terms. Gael Greene, of New York magazine, laid out the self-indulgent arguments against parenthood as early as 1963:
We [her husband and herself] treasure the freedom to pick up and disappear for a weekend or a month or even a year, to sleep odd hours, to breakfast at three A.M. or three P.M., to hang out the DO NOT DISTURB sign, to slam a door and be alone, or alone together, to indulge in foolish extravagances, to get out of bed at seven A.M. and go horseback riding in the park before work … to have champagne with dinner for no special reason at all, to tease and love anywhere, any hour, without a nagging guilt that a child is being neglected.45
Of course, most women were not weighing the possibility of a child against morning horseback rides and champagne dinners, but weighing a second or third child against a family vacation trip, a chance to go back to college, or just a stack of unpaid bills. The pill made the decision easier, as did the lack of day care for children and the declining number of grandmothers willing to make a second career of baby-sitting. The point is, whether you lived on the luxurious fringe of Central Park or simply on the fringe of solvency, children were becoming just an option—and not the most appealing option at that. “Children didn’t make much sense,” explained one young couple in The New York Times Magazine: “The population explosion, the high fees of orthodontists. And who wants to sit home and fill the vaporizer and sort the bibs? And why produce a child just to deliver it to some church basement every morning?” This particular couple nevertheless made the unusual decision to have a child, though observing ruefully: “… we get the impression that babies figure in the new scheme of things roughly the way ocelots and coatimundis did a few years ago—as rare domestic pets.”46
By the seventies, statements of outright hostility to babies, which would have had a ring of treason in the years of the Cold War and warm cribs, were beginning to sound like common sense. “Babies are a liability,” explained a political science professor in New York magazine. “A drag. And the notion that people will ever stop viewing them that way is ridiculous.”47 In 1973, “NON,” the National Organization for Non-parenthood, appeared on the scene with two thousand members, including actress Shirley MacLaine and philanthropist Stewart Mott, to combat what they described as the “pervasive pronatalism” of American society. “People do not deserve honor and respect simply for having a baby,” according to a psychiatrist who spoke at the 1975 NON convention. “Children are not that perfect—or likable, either.”48
Attitudes changed rapidly: the plump, jowly Gerber’s baby began to look, from a personal standpoint, like a highly uncertain investment; from an ultimate social standpoint, he or she was manifestly little more than pollution. The mother of three or four who, in the fifties, had looked “fulfulled,” was beginning to look like a felon.
After the baby had been thrown out, the next thing to go was the bath water of sexual masochism. Women began to speak up for their subjective sexual experience as a fact, not a neurosis. In the new atmosphere of sexual liberation, the theoretical ties that had bound vaginal orgasms to maternal instinct and marital fidelity began to fray like worn apron strings. The long-suppressed clitoris could be held back no longer. Masters and Johnson, who became the world’s leading experts in the new field of sex therapy performed the ritualistic act,b escorting the clitoris into the laboratory and observing it in action. They emerged convinced of its exhaustive powers (which now made the penis seem feeble by comparison) and gave their scientific imprimatur to a new era of female sexuality—in which pleasure could potentially be divorced from its last ties to marriage, babies, and even men themselves.
With the spread of the “singles lifestyle” in the sixties and seventies, the media rushed to celebrate the “liberation” of the American woman. The kitchen and the nursery no longer beckoned as the unique arena for female creativity. Babies were no longer the self-evident climax of adult life. Work was crowding out of the peripheries of women’s lives and into what had once been the peak years of reproductivity. And sex, once supposed to be the glue of perpetual matrimony, had become detached from any commitments—it was something a woman did for herself. Hip men and “sensitive” advertisers congratulated the sexy, self-supporting woman: “You’ve come a long way, Baby.”
But for women it was an ambiguous kind of liberation. After the old dependency came the new insecurity of shifting relationships, a competitive work world, unstable marriages—an insecurity from which no woman could count herself “safe” and settled. There was a sense of being adrift, but now there was no one to turn to. The old domestic ideology, buttressed by two centuries of psychomedical theory, was transparently useless, and the old experts were increasingly discredited.
The post-domestic era called for a new ethos, a new ideology, new rules for “right living.”
Popular Psychology and the Single Lifestyle
The corpse of domestic psychomedicine was barely cold before an entirely new school of experts made their dashing entrance on the scene. The proponents of the new popular psychology, or “pop psychology,” broke with Freud, with medical science, and ultimately with science itself. They made few claims to “data,” laboratory studies, or clinical experience. The new psychology would become, openly and without intellectual pretension, the mass ideology of the consumer society, the lore of the adman and the Market researcher, condensed into easy-to-read guidelines for daily living.
The new “marketplace psychology” was of course aimed at men and women—anyone who could pay the price of a group-therapy session or even a fifteen-dollar paperback. But its most revolutionary message was for women. The pop psychologists took the step that the neo-Freudians had drawn back from: they accepted permissiveness as a program of universal liberation—not only for infants, teen-agers and work-weary dads—but for women too. The new psychology was distinctly, and vociferously, antimasochistic. Suddenly the epidemic of “rejection of femininity” went the way of hysteria and other obsolete diseases. The new experts were concerned with a new and equally widespread syndrome: “femininity” itself. Women had been “brainwashed” (by their mothers, said the experts) to be passive and submissive. Taking a tip from Helen Gurley Brown, the experts now revealed that men weren’t interested in the old “stereotypes,” as they were now called. “Men don’t want relationships with frail baby-dolls,” announces the title page of an assertiveness training manual, “they want the excitement of a fully grown woman.”49 And trusted popular writers like Dr. Joyce Brothers brought the message back from the frontiers of urban experimentation to the backwoods of middle American marriage: the time had come even for wives to “put themselves first.”50
For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of the Experts Advice to Women Page 34