by Betsy Israel
One magazine columnist, writing in 1907, put it this way: “In the great cities, thousands of our young women” live in a “swarm of singularity.”
But there was an identifiable strain of “new girl” who appeared at the turn of the century, an intense, dramatic type who’d consistently reappear in years to come: the bohemian. Typically our bohemian was a high school or college dropout who had tried but could not live within the strictures of the bourgeois society she had only narrowly escaped. She often told reporters, whether she’d been asked or not, that she possessed a “real” self, a poetic artistic self that had been stifled in her previous existence. But now, surrounded by other like souls, in a unique and freeing place, she, or this self, or something new and amazing would emerge. Generally speaking, she was hoping for signs of artistic talent or the ability to attract a monied husband who would elicit and encourage her inchoate artistry. One twenty-year-old told the Saturday Evening Post in 1905, “It is wonderful to be able to walk along the street, singing…. There are men who admire that impulsive daring.”
The bohemian had a less deeply poetic, slightly less intense, kind of younger cousin. That was the Bachelor Girl. “The B.G.,” as she was known, had come to the city not so much to escape, but to work and send money home. Which she did. But she also developed a taste for rushing after work or whenever possible to Greenwich Village, at that time the city’s premiere “artistically inclined place of residence.” (I quote from “Why I Am a Bachelor Girl,” The Independent, 1908.)
By 1910, the Village had settled as an Italian and German enclave, surrounded by the baronial brownstones of Washington Square and Fifth Avenue and pockets of very poor blacks and Irish. For the committed or aspiring bohemian, the setting was perfect—filled with cafés, tearooms, spaghetti parlors, and the unlikeliest and therefore the most interesting people in New York just lounging about. It was still almost a secret. Before 1918, no subway stops connected Greenwich Village to the rest of the city, and one had to practice at navigating its tiny disjointed streets. Many houses, painted pink or blue, had no numbers. Asking directions was useless. Most inhabitants couldn’t quite explain it. Didn’t know. Didn’t feel like it. They spoke, one visitor told the New York Times, “in an iambic pentameter, as a bad word play or joke.”
Wandering the Village, bohemian and bachelor girls could, to borrow from their own overly dramatic phrasebook, create themselves anew. Margaret Ferguson, of Ruth Suckow’s 1934 novel, The Folks, makes a wonderful case study of this transformation. We meet her as a girl, the older, misunderstood “dark” daughter of a prosperous Iowa farm family. Not as pretty as her sister, often overlooked, she comes to believe there is “a wonderful shining special fate for her” and that she will find it in New York City. If she didn’t take the dare and leave, she would likely wander into a more ordinary female fate, “getting older and older, a spinster daughter like Fannie Allison, who had taught the third grade every year since anyone could remember… and lived with her brother and his wife and took care of his children.”
Margaret moves to the Village and takes a candlelit cellar apartment that has a green door. At a party a few nights later a strange man sprinkles a few drops of gin on her forehead and she is rechristened Margot.
For real characters, there were many similar declarations of freedom. Taking a walk without interrogation or scrutiny. Entering a restaurant, sitting down, and not feeling the urge to rush out. One might sit for hours in a teahouse, one of those dimly lit and narrow rooms that were always decorated with mismatched furniture and too many dark oil paintings. One might even talk to a man seated nearby and not, for the moment, think: What would Mother say?
Of course, one knew what Mother would say. In the age of the bachelor girls and, worse, bohemians, distraught mothers quickly became as acute a national stereotype, appearing in cartoons and illustrations holding another sibling back from the door, or bent over war-room tables covered with maps of Greenwich Village. This was the start of a war, all right, a protracted generation conflict that would grow more serious and heartbreaking as years passed. In the meantime, there were others more immediately upset by these unnerving young women.
As working gals had inspired absurd terror theories—Will she forgo having children and become a slut?—so these newest strays attracted fresh, outrageous condemnation. Much of this criticism was aimed at upper-class feminist or “womanist” types, but it trickled down to the bachelor girl. In his tirades against “race suicide,” Teddy Roosevelt now looked directly at the unmarried white woman, even if she was only eighteen, and called her trouble. There were more immigrants. There were more inexplicably single women—bohemians—and so, as he saw it, more than mere laws were in order. (There had already been plenty of legal assistance. Contraception and abortion had been outlawed and between 1889 and 1906, state legislatures passed more than one hundred restrictive divorce laws.) White women of all sorts would have to cooperate!
The true bohemian, like the radical spinster before her, ignored the fuss. The bachelor girl, however, paid attention. There are guilty acknowledgments of this “race suicide” concept throughout my collection of press clippings “re: Bachelor Girl, c. 1908–1914.” In stories such as “The Lives and Loves of a Bachelor Miss,” “Date with a Bachelor Girl,” and “Today’s Modern Bachelor Girl—Her Hopes, Dreams, Her Chances in Life,” we hear about one’s “essential responsibilities,” about the “sacred” duties ahead, and more than once about knowing “when the party is over.” In the articles “The Bachelor Girl, As Told by One Who Knows,” “Bachelor Girls of Today and Yesterday,” and “I Am a Bachelor Girl,” the phrases “later on in my life, proper,” and “when I am settled down,” appear three times. Five times in all we hear the phrase “when I am the mother of” followed by the phrase “sweet babes” or “tender babes” or “six or seven babes.”
But no matter how often she pledged to defend her future fertility, the bachelor/working/single girl was just as likely to take delight in describing her life as it was at the moment—and especially as the terms “bohemian” (serious, artistic) and “bachelor girl” (worker bee out for fun) began slowly to blur.
We’ll call them, along with everyone else, B-girls.
Many wore their hair short, after the girl/boy heroine of Trilby, George Du Maurier’s 1894 novel. Virginia Woolf called the type “cropheads,” the name she’d given Dora Carrington after the young artist chopped off and banged her hair. Some girls went in for a Chinese plait, but the primary fashion influence was Trilby. Trilby had inspired an early rush of icon merchandising (Trilby hats, dresses, waffles), and everyone knew her story: Parisian orphan who boarded with a ragpicker and his wife and lived la vie bohème without affectation. She dressed in burlap sacks, and wore sandals on what were, by any standard, huge female feet. (She also had a large, pliable mouth.) For money, she ironed clothing and modeled nude for male artists without a hint of shame. At night she smoked, dressed like a man, and paraded the Quartier Latin, where she was queen of the cancan. (Of course she’s taken down—made to feel guilty about her “ways” by the respectable man she deeply loves. He drops her straight into a bog of depression and self-hatred that makes her perfect fodder for the devil, presented here in the form of a music teacher named Svengali.)
Young B-girls expanded on their visions of Trilby. They were reported to wear only “sheaths” or “smocks” and to eat with their hands. In the dark. Often a B-girl had the lights put out as necessary economy, and lived by red candles offset by gauzy veils. There was other folklore about her lifestyle, as one writer put it, “a maze of weird and witching elements.” Bathrooms, whether in the hallway or the flat itself, had no doors. Mice were welcome guests and fed at table, which happened to be the floor. Everyone smoked. According to one story in the original Life, the B-girls at times “unconsciously interpret[ed]… the eating rituals of [one]… tribe of Southern Africa… this conclusion is further supported by the post-prandial decision to paint their bodies with
white and blue stripes and then to dance.” (The context of this short piece, wedged between two popular-science stories, makes it hard to say whether the speaker was joking.)
Reporters were out in full on the B-girl beat—the preflapper demimonde that stood to sink our great civilization. One cigarette-holding girl flung open the door (there apparently was a door) and met the press by exclaiming, “Welcome to liberty hall! Here we do exactly as we please!” She told all about her purple robe—no lilac for her but a purple pure. She spoke vaguely about a Communist lecture and then asked everyone to please take off their shoes.
“[Their] room[s],” noted one disgusted male correspondent, “[are] a mass of delightful contrivances whereby her gown inhabits the window seat and her frying pan the bookcase…. They eat off the ironing board, roaring with laughter about having only cheese to feast upon.” More serious stories tried to see past the “nursery antics” and into the inevitable repercussions.
Let’s consider the arguments of one Juliet Wilbor Tompkins, who like many writers on the somber subject of race suicide and later, “sexology,” used three names in her byline. (It informed the reader that the author was married but independent minded; it further indicated that she had a “career,” not a job.) In Why Women Don’t Marry (1907), she tries to categorize for the reader every possible explanation, outside of sheer perversity, for failing to wed.
Sometimes they are young women of means, who find complete satisfaction in dogs and horses, or in travels and learning or bridge or nature-study. But more often you will find that they are workers… earnest young social workers… editors… energetic souls… [many] living in an eight-by-ten room, cooking [their] own chocolate over the gas, and studying avidly… full of pity for the shut-in woman…. And they are very happy in the middle twenties… with their battle cry of freedom! To their ignorance, life offers an enchanting array of possibilities. They see ahead of them a dozen paths and have but contemptuous pity for the woman of the past who knew one dull highway.
Others pointed out how many female characters in novels killed themselves rather than admit to failure at bohemian life, that is, the failure of all that presumed artistic talent or any men whatsoever to emerge. They were only bachelor girls, after all. Wrote a male reporter in Munsey’s (1906):
The plain fact is that the bachelor and… bohemian girl [are] merely single women of small means living in the city in order that [they] may work…. As for her chances [with men] she may become a little harder to suit, but, on the whole, even that is doubtful. That she stays in her single state is largely due to the fact that possible men are just as scarce in the domain of the bachelor girl as in the life of the domestic.
But as bachelor girl Olga Stanley wrote back in 1896: “Probably the thing which first appeals to us is our absolute freedom, the ability to plan our time as we will… bound by no restrictions, except those imposed upon us by a due regard for proprieties.” As for those who called “her existence ‘pathetic,’” what was more pathetic than waiting to find out whether “Tom, Dick or Harry or whoever he may be turns out to be a good husband?” Of course she’d take a husband, “forego the delights of female bachelorhood,” if an excellent opportunity arose. Until then, however, she and her many unwed sisters would emit “a sigh of thankfulness… and draw nearer the fire, and resting our toes on the fender, lean back in our easy chair and congratulate ourselves upon our good fortune.”
CHAPTER THREE
Thin and Raging Things: New (New) Women, Gibson Goddesses, Flapping Ad Darlings, and the All-New Spinster in Fur
Am I a boy? Yes I am…Not.
—NELL BRINKLEY, CARTOONIST, BOSTON AMERICAN, 1913
Don’t worry girls! Corsets have gone! The American girl is independent!…a thinker who will not follow slavishly the ordinances of the past!
—COLLEEN MOORE, SILENT-FILM STAR, 1920
On the street, you do not recognize old maids and spinsters anymore. You cannot pick them out. But you will be conscious of an increasing number of women who are alert, handsomely dressed, of spirited car riage. That is the picture of today’s unmarried woman. You may be very sure she has a fur coat.
—PROFESSIONAL WOMAN, HARPER’S, 1929
I AM (NEW) WOMAN, WATCH ME SMOKE
It is tricky to reconstruct a group photo of the New Woman. A few visual details float into focus—shirtwaists, suffrage banners, serious-looking girls with their arms around each other—but much of the picture has faded. Over time, the precise meaning of “new woman,” like that of the contemporaneous term “free love,” has become impossibly blurry.
So let’s clarify and state that the new woman, an essential character in the history of single female life, belonged to a group of women considered “individualized” (roughly translated, self-aware and unconventional) that the press began to cover at the start of the twentieth century. At the time, everyone was reporting on single phenomena—the bohemian, the numerous varieties of working girl—and “new woman” sometimes served as an umbrella designation for every newly uncovered independent life-form. (“No one who is not absolutely an old woman,” remarked humorist George Ade, “is safe from being considered a new woman.”) But the true new woman, a term derived from Henry James and his irreverent moderns Daisy Miller and Isabel Archer, was very much a distinct singular entity. Unlike the average bohemian or bachelor girl, the new woman possessed a leftist intellectual pedigree. Her attitudes and beliefs were descended from the elite early feminists—the singly blessed spinsters of the Civil War era and the later reformers who’d helped found or been among the first to attend the women’s colleges.
Our early-twentieth-century new women went to college, and some even managed to argue their way into traditionally all-male graduate schools. Some were suffragists (ette, they believed, was a cute, belittling suffix) known for their impromptu speeches and some for their acts of political agitation—hunger strikes, for example, or handcuffing themselves to the fence outside the White House. Some were “womanists,” precursors to feminists whose ideology stressed women’s social and moral duties as opposed purely to women’s rights. Others had unlikely careers—choreographer, economist, journalist, politician, pilot—while still others advocated dress reform, abortion, and contraceptive rights, or simply smoked defiantly in public, a punishable offense after 1908, the year the federal government banned women from smoking. Some new women—Margaret Sanger, writer and economist Charlotte Perkins Gilman, writer Louise Bryant, reporter Ida Tarbell—became living monuments to what many called the “new possibilities.”
But the new woman was most famous for her refusal or, rather, polite disinclination, to marry. (And when new women did marry, the unions were almost always unconventional. Margaret Sanger, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Jane Addams, Edna St. Vincent Millay—all had marriages that involved living apart, sometimes continents apart, “with an understanding.” There were public and tolerated affairs; in some cases they divorced and husbands took custody of the children.)
The press continued to recycle the prevailing view of matrimony: that no woman was qualified to do anything else but wed. In The Ladies’ Home Journal, 1900, we learn that “to women, the business world looks to be a great mysterious whirl of which she can understand nothing…. To attempt… comprehension is to strain unnecessarily.” In a 1904 survey, Good Housekeeping asked five thousand men to list the qualities they required in a potential bride and then those features that “repelled” them. The winning prerequisites were an “attractive manner,” “Christian tendency,” “modesty,” and “womanliness,” while “career mindedness,” “an argumentative nature,” “the urge to smoke,” and “physical imperfection” doomed an increasingly large percentage of the population to a new old-maidhood.
But I doubt that many in the ranks of new womanhood took subscriptions to Good Housekeeping. Author Susanne Wilcox, writing in The Independent in 1909, explained, “The desire to participate in what men call the ‘game of life’ has fastened itself upon many moder
n women, and their appetites are whetted for more abundant and diverting interests than the mere humdrum of household duties.”
A male peer writing in the same publication in the same year noted, “The average young American woman, especially if college-bred, now leads a life of mental unfolding and progression abreast with young men… many occupations have been thrown open to her…. If she does not find a congenial mate, she avails herself of these opportunities and finds much satisfaction.”
Here were the true perpetrators of Teddy Roosevelt’s alleged “race suicide.” Between the years 1880 and 1913, the U.S. marriage rate hit its lowest point in the country’s history, and an unprecedented drop in the birthrate followed. It further seemed that many who’d already married were determined to get out. In 1870 there had been just 1.5 divorces per 1,000 marriages; by 1890, that figure had doubled, and by 1910, it had risen to 5.5 per 1,000, the majority of petitions filed by women with at least a high school education.
A researcher studying the 1902 edition of Who’s Who isolated the women honorees (977 of a total of 11,000 entries) and investigated details of their personal lives. He found that 45 percent of these prominent women had married but that 53.3 percent of them—for the time an enormous number—said they would never marry, viewing it as a “profound disincentive” to serious work. Many new women wrote essays and editorials in response, pointing out that the majority of white middle-class women eventually married (which they did—80 percent in 1910). But the notion of the best and the brightest refusing to marry and reproduce, preferring instead to conduct scientific research, attend conferences, smoke and/or chain themselves to fences, had taken hold.