Bachelor Girl

by Betsy Israel

  As one salesman put it, there was scattered throughout the country a whole generation, sixteen to twenty, “none of whom have owned a second pair of shoes. Can they know what it is to have a closet full of shirts? Wearing the same clothes every day for weeks, months on end…. How many recordings does the average youngster own? No need to start counting…. Imagine having your own radio!”

  This atmosphere was captured by one of my oldest subjects, who declines to give her age but says, “My name is Ida-Mae, that’s how old I am”:

  There was a longing to run around with your friends, and talk fast about… pure nothing…. I remember our mothers couldn’t understand why we wanted to have many boyfriends, instead of just one. And music, oh yes! My mother, I remember this, called it “Jewish sex music”! Maybe the clarinet was too phallic for her. Benny Goodman was prominent…. We were always dancing, in basements or someone’s living room. Sometimes it got a little lewd. But, believe me, in the average crowd, nobody had sex. We ran around with boys…. After the Depression years, going out for a soda—that was fun. Oh boy! And if you happened to go with fifteen other kids who all wanted to sit in the same booth—even better!… Nobody knew what was coming. I remember thinking about two things. I was going to find a husband. And I was going to college. Not in that order.

  But, like others, she encountered resistance to what she called “the college end of the bargain.” With the wane of the crisis came a renewal of public arguments about the purpose of higher education for women. Why, and especially after this enormous social mess, would the average girl want more than a home? And if that was to be her destination, was it fair to men, who had suffered, that she take up needed space in classrooms? The Atlantic Monthly, 1937, solemnly noted: “When the point is reached where, in order to secure a higher salary, she must study for a master’s degree, she may realize with a sudden anguish that her chance of marriage [is] growing more remote and that the pattern of her life is more and more following the lines of spinsterhood.”

  During the late 1930s universities were referred to as “spinster factories.” And as in the Victorian period, prescribed remedies to this factory life turned up in the media. A typical Life feature demonstrated how a mother might work on a girl when she was young so that when it came time for college that girl would already be married. One 1937 story consisted of several panels in which the chosen girl, Susan, eleven, was pictured deep in training to be “a winning female!”

  In one panel, Susan makes beds. In another, she studies the way her mother fixes her potentially “beguiling” nails. In still another photo, Susan sets the table. “Homemaking doesn’t come instinctively to a teenaged girl,” Life explained. “It’s easier to teach a little girl than to nag at an older one…. Now the child can do simple meal planning and cooking, creditable bed making and charming table setting.”

  It was a familiar process. Evidence is dragged forth to prove that what society wants for single girls is what these girls want for themselves. Back in the nineteenth century, no intelligent young woman wished for bedrest, the prescribed “cure” for hysterical antifeminine behavior. Yet after all she’d been through—the shrieking fights with mother! Her insane demands not to wed!—wasn’t bedrest what she secretly craved? Likewise, after the Depression, after all she’d been through, did she really want to do tough academic work? Ignore for a moment the actual facts, for example, that 15 percent more women were enrolled in college in 1938 than in 1933. Instead consider some of the expert arguments.

  To begin with, the number of female professionals had increased by a mere 8.5 percent during the 1920s. If single women were serious about careers, as opposed to mere jobs, wouldn’t that figure be higher? It was further noted that professional women earned less than their male counterparts, so much less that they could not possibly be serious about sustained and important careers. And even in “female” professions, men outearned them. In 1939 male teachers averaged $1,953 a year, women just $1,394; male social workers received $1,718 compared with women’s $1,442.

  Young women continued to draw up their own personal blueprints, and to present their own plans. And they were continually besieged with these retorts. In one 1938 Coronet piece, a twenty-year-old relates a conversation she had with her mother. The daughter said she wanted to see France; her mother replied, “So did Amelia Earhart,” the aviator who’d recently gone missing. “See to getting yourself settled! Figure that and someday you can take a trip.”

  Those who took the solo trips—college, careers without husbands, forays to Greenwich Village—found it no more difficult, than those who’d gone before. But they were viewed differently in the post-Depression world. Why now would anyone risk their security? In novels and stories, we find images of women missing more than their hearts; they are falling apart.

  Let’s look at two popular novels. Ann Vickers (1933), by Sinclair Lewis, concerns an ambitious social worker who becomes a prison warden and reform advocate, somewhat like Clara Barton. In coordinating such a difficult career, Ann Vickers has sacrificed anything resembling a coherent personal life. She has an illegal abortion. When she does finally marry, it ends in divorce, and she takes up with a gangster. Although successful (and popular!) as a prison warden, she suffers a nervous breakdown.

  In The Folks, Ruth Suckow’s novel about the Iowa farm family, we pick up the story of Margaret Ferguson, the dark and arty girl who ran off to Greenwich Village and rechristened herself Margot. Finally, after several years spent living in New Mexico with her married lover, she returns to New York City. Margot’s life has been, to choose one word, controversial. Her family doesn’t understand; in fact, only one small-town neighbor has ever understood at all. “Margaret’s generation of girls is wonderful!” she had said to herself during one of Margot’s rare visits home. “They went out and grabbed at life.” Margot’s thoughts precisely. Yet that was years ago, and now, at almost thirty, she finds the city of dreams and adventure changed and cold. “She felt a bitter hatred of the noise and the hugeness around [Grand Central] station, making her think of how she was now to earn a living. Everywhere [she] seemed to see these smooth metallic girls whom she hated. They were like the modern buildings, not individualized but stylized… groomed into urban smoothness.”

  Later, wandering her old neighborhood, Margot is stopped by a sight even worse: a “hag” selling pencils on a street corner near the apartment where she once had burned candles and danced with scarves. It’s an archetypal moment in the single narrative: The younger woman sees her future in the older one, in the lonely and forgotten hag selling “pencils she knew no one wanted to buy.” During the mid- and late thirties, protagonists like Margaret-Margot were held up as icons of female disaster. If college and career could make you crazy, the unconventional life was like a suicide. Usually writers posed it as a question: What became of runaway girls, not just the down-and-out but the bohemians, the superannuated flappers, the Margots, who’d set out to see the world without a guidebook? The answer: Either they’d wise up and marry or they’d eventually take a place on the street corner.

  Jean Rhys, in her melancholy novels, was a premiere chronicler of the aging adventurer now about to fall apart. The best of her slender oeuvre is After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (1930). Here we have the problem called Julia, a Londoner long ago self-exiled to Paris, where she’s had her share of exotic experiences. Now she is older and broke. One former lover, noting her shabby clothes, observes, “It was obvious that she had been principally living on the money given to her by various men. Going from one to another had become a habit… she had not saved a penny.” All true. As Julia explains to one of them, “You see, a time comes in your life when, if you have money, you can go one way…. If you have nothing at all… you go another.” And sometimes rather than fight, you take up residence in a fantasy world. “Every day is a new day,” Julia dreamily tells herself. “Every day you are a new person.”

  There were millions of single women in 1940—office drones, struggling re
porters and nurses, end-of-the-road new women, the homeless, and all those still waving a tattered bohemian flag. But what became of any of them was once again a question put indefinitely on hold.

  HOW I WON THE WAR

  So much has been written about the experiences of women during World War II that I will not describe in the usual minute detail how they “answered the call to duty,” as invoked by the deep, paternalistic urgings of mid century newsmen—Walter Cronkite, Eric Sevareid, Edward R. Murrow, and Lowell Thomas.

  Let’s instead look at it this way: The entire female population was for an odd slip of time effectively single. No one knew if their fiancés, boyfriends, lovers would ever return. As one California woman wrote in her diary in 1942, “All plans changed last week or fell away.” Single meant “available,” but not as prospective brides to men. The War Manpower Commission, supported by the Office of War Information, produced voluminous amounts of working-girl propaganda to fill the void.

  Millions of suddenly essential female workers took over male positions such as cabdriver, elevator operator, bus driver, and security guard. In one year, the number of female defense-factory workers increased by 460 percent, a figure that translated into 2.5 million women assigned to the unlikeliest tasks. Instead of making carbon copies or assigning homework, many women now manufactured tank parts, plane frames, engine propellers, parachutes, ships, gas masks, life rafts, ammunition, and artillery. Another two million women continued in or picked up clerical work; the number of newly indoctrinated typists would double before the end of the war. And for the more serious, educated woman, the absence of men presented a guilty holiday. For the first time, many women found positions in symphonies, as chemists, and in some states, as lawyers. Harvard University accepted its first small number of female medical students in 1944.

  Suddenly it was glorious and patriotic to be single. Newsreels with titles such as “Glamour Girls of 1943” reported that with “industrial advances” a girl might do “practically anything!” There were no limits to “the types of jobs a woman could do…. whether she has a husband or not.” Any single gal who didn’t step up, sign on, cooperate, was considered as much a disappointment and failure as those who had favored a career over marriage in decades past.

  One female worker recruitment film, entitled To the Ladies, and shown as part of newsreels throughout 1942 and ’43, opens with an establishing shot of fictional Middletown, USA. The camera pans the sidewalks, town squares, store windows and finds only women. They’re young, hair down, in flowered dresses, or they’re older, more professional-looking, hair piled up, shoulder pads piled up nearly as high. We intercut between life scenes: girls at a drugstore counter giggling over sodas and twirling in their seats… women buying nail polish… women having lunch… women going to the movies in the afternoon. The Voice of Authority asks us to compare this lackadaisical portrait with others from around the world.

  Why, look at the women of England! Forced to send their kids off to the country or into tube stations. And the French! Here we cut briefly to fashionable women tearing up their last good clothing to use as tourniquets for bleeding soldiers. We also watch a Russian grandmother building something in her kitchen that looks like a bomb. Meanwhile, back in innocuous Middletown, idle females carried out the “meaningless household chores” that had previously been declared their purpose in life. As the camera moves back and away from the street set, the women look like little kids rushing around as they play.

  As if the point hadn’t been made, a companion film, Women of Steel, introduced a shop-girl welder and her Hungarian great-grandmother who, using her blowtorch, lit a male coworker’s cigarette.

  There she was, the one singular female icon to arise from this antisingular period: Rosie the Riveter, industrial pinup, her hair back in a snood or kerchief, her body swimming inside overalls, one hand holding the signature blowtorch. What’s rarely mentioned is how few ever made it to welder status and the coveted role of human cigarette lighter. And of the few who did, 99 percent were white. At the time, many didn’t take note or find such discrimination unusual; the society was segregated, and most whites had never before worked with those then referred to as Negroes. (If white women worked in offices, black women were lucky to clean them at ten P.M.)

  It’s one of the first things we learn during the average “Rosie” documentary, most made during the late 1960s and early 1970s. The Jewish, Italian, and Irish workers recall the exhaustion and exhilaration. They all talk about loneliness. When we come at last to a black worker it’s clear that wartime single life was often lonelier than any white women might have imagined. One former black welder spoke in a 1972 documentary.

  I had done all the requirements, the hours, but it was just the case they’d never put anybody in the more interesting welder jobs unless she was white…. three years of me watching—it seemed like hundreds of girls get in there before me… yeah, I finally got in. And they think I don’t know they paid me less than half [the salary] of the whites?… when it was leaving time, they always made me and the others wait until the white ones had left first. So we never talked…. I remember thinking one day, oh God, is this stupidity?… Here we were all alone pretty much. None of us, just from the faces you could see, was going home to very much…. It was a strange time, very tough, and I couldn’t get over that we couldn’t break it down a little, stick it out together.

  They had at least this in common: Despite reports indicating that as many as 75 percent of all working women wished to keep their jobs after the war—black women, for example, had increased their presence in the clerical sector by five thousand jobs—Rosie and all her sisters were to become the century’s most exotic, briefly celebrated temps. At the time, they would never have believed it.

  In May 1942 Business Week reported that airplane plants considered women 50 to 100 percent more efficient in wiring instrument panels than men, due to general carefulness and a greater attention to detail. The authors of this survey felt confident in stating that women could perform 80 percent of all war-industry jobs and all but 80 out of 937 jobs in civilian industry. Boeing Aircraft in Seattle utilized squads of superwomen for moving and lifting heavy loads. Sperry Gyroscope announced: “Women can and do work in every capacity possible.” Tough individualized women, reflections of this stunning assessment, began to appear in the popular culture. Wonder Woman, after Brenda Starr, was the most popular cartoon strip of the period, and movie serials—the cartoonish and cheaply made “B” movies—tracked exotic creatures such as Ruth Roman in Jungle Queen, Kay Aldridge as “Nyoka,” deeply embattled in the endless Perils of Nyoka, and Marguerite Chapman as Spy Smasher. For the first time since its introduction in 1923, the Equal Rights Amendment was voted three times to the Senate floor.

  Throughout the war years, an unusual number of actresses worked playing single women in films. Olivia De Havilland and Ann Sothern played aircraft workers in Government Girl and Swing Shift Maisie. Lucille Ball played a rich girl turned defense plant worker in Meet the People. Lana Turner played an unlikely war correspondent in Somewhere I’ll Find You and an heiress turned WAC (the Women’s Army Corps) in Keep Your Powder Dry. Movie girls also contended with what had become a housing crisis. In The More the Merrier Jean Arthur shared an apartment with two men. In The Doughgirls Ann Sheridan pretended to be married so that she could keep a Washington, D.C., hotel room. Ginger Rogers starred in Tender Comrade, as one of several women who chip in to share and fix up a large house. And they get along beautifully, with no trace of the competition and bitchiness of Stage Door (1937), in which some of the above-mentioned stars lived in a boardinghouse for actresses, battling one another for auditions, dates with producers, and walk-on parts.

  But as early as 1942, a campaign was under way to prepare the workplace for men by planning—and I paraphrase an actual headline—how to get rid of the women. A Time story complained that women flirted at work and, as evidence, reported that Douglas Aircraft had been forced to close its Santa Mo
nica bomb shelter due to “lovemaking” during the lunch break. It seemed that women wore transparent blouses and “peekaboo” sweaters that distracted men.

  Other publications quickly leapt on the story. There was an excessive powdering of the nose on company time. Absenteeism due to menstrual periods or constipation or both. Rampant gossip. Business Week, once so enthusiastic about this addition to the workforce, reported in 1943 that single women had been caught “soliciting” for extra cash, although it was unclear where the alleged munitions-plant prostitution had occurred. WACs were the target of endless jokes and nasty cartoons. Suddenly everyone knew the acronym “PWOP” (pregnant without permission). The subject of their underwear, specifically, what color it was, became a conversational topic. There were more than 300,000 WACs, and not a week passed without some newly invented scandal, very often involving suspected mass lesbianism. As if to purge the last impression, a 1944 Tangee lipstick ad showed photos of seven uniformed women and this declaration: “We are still the weaker sex. It’s still up to us to appear as alluring and lovely as possible.”

  The New York Times Magazine apparently agreed. In 1943 it ran a piece called “What About Women After the War?” The question was answered, primarily, by a female personnel manager who adopted the tone of an advice columnist. “Different women want different things,” she wrote. “I think most of them—whether they admit it or not—want only to marry, have a home and a man to do their worrying (and sometimes their thinking) for them.”

  The Labor Review for September 1945 casually reported that the Department of Labor was now “laying down recommendations on separation of women from wartime jobs” and the “ways and means [to] cushion the effects of transition.” The “transition” wasn’t smooth; it was brutal. Several states reinstated old restrictions that forbade women from lifting more than twenty-five pounds in the workplace, to cite one of many examples, or hired only “first-class” mechanics, when most women rated only third-class status. Unions reinforced seniority clauses, and the GI Bill would give veterans preference in all government hiring; the civil service accepted applications only from veterans.