by Betsy Israel
An antivalentine to the single women of America, sexology propounded that sex was good, wondrous, life-affirming—if it was the right kind of sex. That meant married sex, as performed in the missionary position, either for the purpose of procreation—that most erotic aspect of female sexuality—or to make marriage stronger, more “companionate.” Women who were awkward, embarrassed, or for whatever reason uninterested, were diagnosed as cold or, a new and frightening word, frigid. Single women, who were presumed to miss out on intercourse entirely, were thus automatically considered frigid.
As far back as 1910, when “race suicide” was a familiar and threatening term, bookstores had been stocked with antisingular tracts condemning the “social worker” or “New Woman.” They had titles like Antipathy and Coldness in Women and The Poison of Prudery. Now sexology made the point specific to the flapper and the new spinster and any other variation of single working women. What Should We Do with Our Daughters?, a 1921 compendium of expert commentary, featured many viewpoints, although most may be summarized by one Dr. Ely Van de Warker, who declared, “The effort of women to invade all the higher forms of labor is a force battling with the established order of sexual relations.”
From another doctor: “Discovering… her innate feminine charm in the selling of dry goods [treating it] as a more alluring expression of her female self than that of the homely status of wife and mother, the girl exposes the grave crisis of the modern age…. This bounding into the world represents a futile struggle against nature… it touches on disease.”
The experts were very precise about the origins, symptoms, and lasting effects of this disease. There were several different strains among unmarried women.
First, there was the “war working woman,” the woman who’d bravely pitched in during the Great War and was thus also referred to as “a warrior maid.” More commonly she was called an intersexual, a single woman who because of her odd experience somehow had fused with a male inner soul and who, though she appeared female, acted like a man. Charlotte Haldane, writer and antifeminist, viewed this “specimen” as a “significant enemy of motherhood.” As she explained, “The development through the experience of war work [led to] the phenomenon of the war working woman,” also the “more or less unsexed or undersexed specimen.”
Next came the so-called “mannish lesbian” or “mannish woman” who took things further by dressing the part. (The definition of “lesbian” as we know it still had not settled and the term was often used to describe a woman who dressed like a man.) In medical journals and many popular articles—the word warning often appeared in the headline—these women were referred to as subnormal or inverts. Inversion, as described by Havelock Ellis, the father of sexology, matched precisely the traits ascribed to the new woman/flapper/new spinster:
Not only is there frequently a pronounced taste for smoking cigarettes… but a… toleration for cigars. There is also a dislike of needlework, and domestic occupations while there is some capacity for athletics… brusque energetic movements… direct speech… [and] an attitude towards men, free from any suggestion of shyness… these will often suggest the underlying psychic abnormality to a keen observer.
Ultimately in the late 1920s, lesbianism began to take on its modern denotation: two women in a romantic and sexual pairing. No longer was the word used as a universal term gathering together schoolgirl smashes, the living situations of women in settlement houses, and heterosexual women who suffered subnormality and inversion. Lesbianism was, in sexological terms, about as bad as it got. As early as 1902, the Pacific Medical Journal had declared that “female boarding schools and colleges are great breeding grounds of artificial [acquired] homosexuality…. If carried into life, such learned perversities would lead to permanently skewed relations with men.” By 1925, the situation was much worse. Commented a woman sexologist that year: “Such a fate is so contrary to the fullness of female human development little can be said to express its horror.”
Statistics on lesbians, as so defined, are difficult to find, but one can find a bizarre number of estimates concerning frigidity. In 1925 leading sexologists estimated that 40 to 50 percent of all women were frigid, the highest numbers to be found among the more educated classes. According to experienced sexologist Weith Knudson, there were five categories of frigidity. Twenty percent of all women had turned out to be “cold,” 25 percent could be called “indifferent,” 30 percent “compliant,” 15 percent “warm,” and just 10 percent “passionate.”
From a sexological point of view, women living alone, especially those who made no effort to find a husband, were to blame. Knudson wrote angrily, “I have emphasized repeatedly that dysparunia”—the technical label for frigidity—“signals an inner negation…. obstinacy cancels the will to submission…. There are women who refuse to be made happy; they resent the thought that the man has saved them, that they owe him everything.”
But readers were assured that such an ungrateful unwed female would suffer for her obstinacy.
Walter Heape, an active commentator on sexological matters, called spinsters—all varieties—the “waste products of our female population… vicious and destructive creatures.” He suggested that like wounded dogs, they might, with the slightest provocation, snap entirely. “A thwarted instinct does not meekly subside,” he declared. “It seeks compensation and damages for its rebuff…. As the number of these women increases every year and, in systematic depreciation of the value of life, they are joined and supported by thousands of disillusioned married women who also scoff at marriage and motherhood as the only satisfactory calling for women.”
In other words, the single idea was contagious, and as it spread these women became increasingly scary. By 1929, the vicious psycho-spinster, a frustrated, vindictive harridan, had debuted as an American character. Walter Heape was one of many who characterized the evolving nightmare. Here is a part of his 1928 study of “inherently frustrated women who have failed to marry by the 25th year”: “She is… the guardian… [seated] in every auditorium of every theatre… haunt[ing] every library… in our schools, she takes little children and day by day they breathe in the atmosphere of her violated spirit.”
Sexology promoted itself as a salvation, a means for innately shy, prudish young girls—or girls who’d been wrongly swayed while at school—to marry and to enjoy a natural womanly sex life that led to many wonderful babies. There was the promise of great joy, if only a woman cooperated and did it right. Even the frigid might be brought back to life. But it was also true that some new spinsters were so deeply frigid, so mentally scarred, that there was no hope for their recovery or return to life.
This sad old girl was shown, as always, to be socially pathetic (“The normal woman must have something to live for, if it be only a cat,” wrote Mrs. Juliet Wilbor Tompkins in 1927.) But now she was also potentially sick. According to Tompkins in “Why Women Don’t Marry,” Cosmopolitan, for some new spinster misfits the “ways of sex will always remain a sealed—and rather horrid—book she reads at her peril.” Others of these “nuns by blood” would evolve a “repose, a gentle power of indifference” that sometimes made them “bewilderingly” interesting to men “who wonder if they may not be awakened.” The sad truth, however, was they would always be dormant. Even if they wed, their strange stillness would render any union abnormal. “Such women may marry and have ten children without seeming to come into any close relations with life: to the end they are stray angels, cool and aloof. The man who marries one of them will have no tempests to encounter, yet his way will not be… easy… for he can never fall back on his sex with her.”
The language of sexology, its strict hierarchies of frigidity and lesbianism, suggested that there was serious scientific proof for such claims. If anything, sexology gives us proof that female freedom was so terrifying, so unthinkable, that it had to be killed off—and not just by inventing replacement icons. Finally, all female abnormality would be smothered beneath a pile of specious scientific fin
dings.
HOW THE NEW SPINSTER MADE OUT
In spite of these warnings, most young women still felt “a Ferris-wheel-at-the-top thrill,” as one of my own subjects put it, about trying on a single life. Even if the top jobs were closed to women,[9] there were still so many dizzying possibilities they seemed to pass by as if in a movie montage. My favorite character in search of career is the fictional Carol Kennicott, the determined, unintentionally hilarious heroine of Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street (1920). In one early packed paragraph, we learn that Carol had “hoped to discover that she had an unusual voice, a talent for the piano, the ability to act, to write, to manage organizations,” and that with each disappointment, she “evanesced anew—becoming a missionary, painting scenery, soliciting advertisements,” and on and on until she’s talked into marriage by a doctor from the Midwest with the promise of his rising hometown for her to conquer. Stuck in dreary little Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, she takes up urban planning, working to change street directions and move buildings, not that anyone has asked her to. She runs away once, to Washington, but comes back, because she’s waited too long. She has a child. She is not a career girl at this point but a middle-aged woman from, and even she has to admit it, Gopher Prairie.
Had it worked out for her in the big city, Carol might have discovered what many real young women had discovered: Jobs were not, as the Atlantic Monthly had concluded, “open-sesame’s to life.” They were, as any man could have testified, only jobs. Una Golden, hero of an earlier Lewis novel, The Job (1917), skips out on small-town life and rushes to the city where she finds work in an office, a new world that sustains her for about half the book. That is, until the day Una understands that it will never change. She asks herself, “[what are] days… beyond a dull consistency of… machines and shift keys and sore wrists?” Not much, and at the end Una establishes herself and her fiancé in a successful real estate brokerage.[10]
She was one lucky character. In the late 1920s, the lawyer, writer, lecturer, and feminist Crystal Eastman prophetically stated, “Women who are creative… with administrative gifts or business ability and who are ambitious to achieve and fulfill themselves along these lines, if they also have the normal desire to be mothers, must make up their minds to be sort of superman.”
Margaret Culkin Banning, who wrote sensible new-spinster stories for the Saturday Evening Post, continued well into the 1920s to praise the new spinster as that sleek figure in a modish cap, freed of the troubles of her married friends. But she understood the point Crystal Eastman had to make. It would increasingly be difficult. With some resignation, she wrote in 1929,
The normal social unit is made up of a man and a woman in love, courting or married. The unmarried woman who has made a job the other half of her social unit… is bound to be somewhat extraneous… out of the social picture…. The masses… administer printed condolences and sedative terms—“new woman,” “bachelor girl,”—but the world in general has not approved the sight of a lady jogging through life alone.
All of this discussion came to an instantaneous halt with the 1929 stock-market crash. Within weeks, it seemed, the troubling unwed American female—whether professional, fun, academic, political—slipped from beneath the cultural microscope. The U.S. Women’s Bureau estimated that just six months after the crash, two million women, many single, had lost their jobs. It was made very clear, however, that men had suffered more. They’d lost more than just jobs; they’d lost their essential core of masculinity. Amidst a collapse so hulking and vast, there was little energy left to think about the single woman. But there would always be something to say.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Suspicious Single: Job Stealers, The Riveting Rosie, And The Neurotic Husband Hunter
—“But aren’t ya ever going to fall in love?”
—“A career itself is a romance. I haven’t the time…”
—“Aren’t ya ever going to marry?”
—“My de-aah, when you spend 14 hours a day with your dearest illusion, it loses something.”
—RUTH CHATTERTON EXPLAINS LIFE IN FEMALE, 1933
Now, listen… forget about yourself… You know what it means to the girls in this show? Those poor kids gave up jobs and will never be able to find other ones!… If you let them down… they’ll have to do things I wouldn’t want on my conscience and it’ll be on yours!
—ALINE MACMAHON, THE SMART CHORINE, GIVING HELL TO HER DELINQUENT PRODUCER, GOLD DIGGERS OF 1933
Let him know you are tired of living alone…. You want him to take charge. You want now to have your nails done.
—U.S. GOVERNMENT “READJUSTMENT” GUIDE, 1945
SINGLE GIRLS ONLY NEED APPLY
If attention turned to the single woman—and occasionally, of course, it did—there was just one question for her: Did she work?
If the answer was yes, the response was almost always angry. Women, during the Depression, were not under any conditions supposed to hold jobs. Jobs were for men—all those guys thrown out on their asses and depicted sitting home, too depressed to lift their feet for the carpet sweeper. Women seen dressed for work, entering an elevator in an office building, made this horrific situation, this stigma of compromised manhood, that much worse. Even if she was en route to a job no man would take, the stares, the muffled traitor talk, reminded her of life’s primary motto: “DON’T STEAL A JOB FROM A MAN!”
This made life tense and difficult for single women, because single women were just about the only women out there working—and sometimes there were more of them working than men. By 1932, legislation in twenty-six states prohibited married women from holding any jobs whatsoever, and that included teaching and positions in the Civil Service should a relative already hold one. In states where getting married didn’t require retirement, an employed woman who married was nonetheless expected to make a “full disclosure” or risk losing that job or incurring fines for “misleading statements.” And that applied even to women in those female jobs no man would take—typing, filing, cleaning.
My father, a schoolboy during these years, recalls: “If we found out a woman who worked in our school was married, we were shocked. I think at one point there was talk that the librarian had a husband and we wondered, why does she have a job? Why is she working? If her husband is a dentist or a lawyer or a truck driver, what does she have a job for?”
There was much discussion of job-hogging acts of afemininity. However, little was said about the myriad problems, anxiety, and sacrifices of single women, many of whom were also supporting their families, parents, siblings, grandparents—the new dependency in crisis mode. Millions of unemployed single men would ultimately regain jobs and misplaced respect. So would some single women. But more than a quarter of all women who’d been between twenty and thirty during the Depression years would never have careers. They also stood to lose much more.
“A quarter of all women” is a much repeated estimate that’s hard to break down. But it’s known that thousands would not, as planned, attend college or at least finish up their degrees. Hundreds of thousands who would have married never wed, never had children, and by 1932 the U.S. marriage rate had hit a historic low, while the birthrate had dropped to its lowest point since 1900. And many of those who married simply did not consider themselves financially stable enough to have children. Despite the danger and illegality, abortion was commonplace, and according to a 1933 Gallup Poll, 63 percent of the population favored “some form of birth control.” In 1933 the condom industry, a $350 million enterprise, produced something like one million units a day. Wives could obtain an early form of diaphragm known as a pessary, and so could single women, as long as they posed as wives and appeared in doctors’ offices wearing wedding rings.
Mary McCarthy[11] describes the complex procurement process in her novel The Group, set in the thirties and written in 1966. For weeks one character schemes and plans to get the item, telling her prospective lover that she will call him as soon as she has it in her hands. Af
ter an embarrassing doctor’s “fitting”—what is perhaps the first flying-diaphragm scene in all literature—she leaves with her secretive bag and calls him to find he’s not in. She walks around, calls again, then again, and finally tells his landlady that she is waiting in Washington Square Park. Seated on a bench, the precious treasure on her lap, she starts to reconsider. Hours have passed and obviously he’s not coming. Ultimately she leaves the bag beneath the bench and walks off feeling terribly alone and embarrased.
Many real single women spent the Depression years feeling terribly alone and desperate. Work was hard to find and no matter how irrational it came to seem, there was still a stigma attached to the job hunt. The compromised “forgotten” man—he was the one who needed work. But there were also needy women, and some of them literally began to starve. Fainting, in fact, became a common melodramatic plot point in the numerous backstage musicals of the time. The starving girls were almost always revived by Broadway stars who just happened to be passing by and who went on to make the emaciated girls tap-dancing miracles. Back on earth, of course, fainting was not a career option. Most women who could, as well as those who couldn’t, typed. Even college graduates typed. Barnard College reported that only one third of the class of 1932 who sought jobs found them, and that most of the class at some point took up typing.