by Betsy Israel
This same kind of “holdout” was at the core of the bobby-soxer phenomenon. There were other elements, of course, namely, advertisers thrilled to have unearthed an independent peer group (pubescent girls) that ran a slice of underground economy (baby-sitting). Bobby-soxing further gave to Shirley Temple a mature but still cute persona to inhabit before retiring. But most important, to be a late-forties bobby-soxer was to be a young woman between girl and wife. Soon enough she’d emerge from the protective cocoon of rumpled jeans, saddle shoes, and daddy’s shirts. Soon she’d begin her husband hunt in earnest. But just for the moment she was off the market.
Once-upon-a-time single women might have urged her to stay there, or at least not to rush.
In 1949 the New York Times interviewed female members of the college class of 1934 to see how their lives had played out during the Depression and World War II. Of the entire class, 82 percent were still married and only 12 percent worked “outside the home… the predominant experience of the class of 1934 was as housewife.” We also learn that almost 90 percent had children, and that as of 1949 many of these kids were not yet in school. The story moves along to its point: “A strong note of betrayal runs through… the study. These women entered public life in a flush of post-suffrage optimism. They belonged to a generation of women which stressed and exalted in the importance of jobs for women.” Real jobs. Not the kinds of jobs they ultimately found going through the “Jobs-Female” section of the classifieds. Some of them “understood the employment realities.” Others were bitter, like the interviewee who concluded that her life had been worsened by having to work in a “lesser position.”
But it would be far worse—and there was a consensus among the women interviewed—to go through life singly. To be single was to “experience the feeling of contamination,” as one expert put it in Ladies’ Home Journal, or as Time somewhat awkwardly described the single state in 1950: “pin-stuck with a cramp of isolation.”
Of course there is a women’s film that deals specifically with issues of singular contamination and isolation. It’s called, appropriately, Autumn Leaves (1956), and stars Joan Crawford, as a spinster who marries a man she does not really know in order to improve a life spent inside her L.A. bungalow, where she types manuscripts with maniacal speed and efficiency. As it turns out, her husband, a younger man, is plainly maniacal—a kleptomaniac, a pathological liar, prone to crying and “shrieking like a woman,” until Joan has no choice but to “put him away.” At the home, he receives electroshock treatment, a procedure usually associated with snarly, uncooperative women. Joan, soon after, receives a jolt of her own. Seated on the edge of a straight-backed chair, hands mangling her purse, she confronts the psychiatrist, the authority figure who had replaced the preacher as the man who brings the bad news.
The diagnosis: As a late-marrying spinster, she does not represent to her husband an actual wife. Rather, she represents “neurotic need.” If she had children or seemed at all a sexual creature, she might have been a mother figure; as it is she is more of an “aunt.” It is clear that he will have to leave her because she is, in her tainted spinsterish way, as sick as he is. Still, there is some twisted hope for them both. The wounded man and his neurotic need walk together across the hospital grounds. He pauses at a point to examine her hand, which is bandaged. Once, before his commitment, as she lay sobbing on the ground, he dropped the typewriter onto her wrist, making it impossible for her to earn a living. In so doing, he had graphically demonstrated his desire to be a man. A starting point.
Anyway, at least, they were married. And nothing would have more social significance in the 1950s.
Sociologist David Reisman, author of The Lonely Crowd (1950), once remarked that in the nineteenth century the failure to marry was considered a “social disadvantage and sometimes a personal tragedy.” In the 1950s, however, it would become “a quasi-perversion.”
CHAPTER FIVE
The Secret Single: Runaway Bachelor Girls; Catching the Bleecker Street Beat and/or Blues at the Barbizon
It may be said that she has learned by the use of her independence to surrender it without a struggle or murmur when the time comes for making the sacrifice.
—ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE, ON AMERICAN WOMEN, 1838
The Single Career woman… that great mistake that feminism propagated may find satisfaction in her job. But the chances are that she will suffer psychological damage. Should she marry and reproduce her husband and children will be profoundly unhappy.
—LIFE MAGAZINE, SPECIAL REPORT ON WOMEN, 1956
Girl gets off bus in Port Authority Terminal, goes into Bickford’s, Chinese girl, red shoes, sits down with coffee, looking for Daddy. Life. Something.
—JACK KEROUAC, “A BEAT TOUR OF NEW YORK,” HOLIDAY MAGAZINE, 1959
I DO, I DO, I HAVE TO
I had a friend for a while when I was single who, between day jobs, worked as a performance artist. According to her self-produced catalogue notes, her art consisted of, or was “located” in, the re-creation of “aesthetic epochs,” as they were “parsed out in the locution, Decades.” That meant she continually redid her apartment according to themes such as “1922” and “1890.” The 1950s, however, represented her greatest triumph—a live-action tableau vivant starring a single girl, living alone in a single-girl apartment that is outfitted with the perquisites, the furniture and clothing, of married life.
“Jill,” as she was known within the installation, asked all visitors to leave their shoes at the door, directing them to period shoe racks that held all manner of appropriate footwear: bowling shoes, saddle shoes, impossible pumps, sensible shoes to look good beneath a gray flannel suit. If there were no shoes that fit, visitors walked in socks among the various pieces: the blond-wood Scandinavian couches and modular chairs, and the coffee tables—low and slatted or biomorphic—each stacked with amoebic ashtrays, old issues of Life and Look. A dwarfing hi-fi cabinet opened onto a tiny TV screen and turntable. The space was small, and because she’d made a breakfast nook and a sewing room and because there were filmy stockings everywhere on lines “drying,” visitors selected decorative pillows and hit the floor.
During the run of this “show,” Jill appeared in lima bean–green midriffs with striped pedal pushers. Or she’d whip open a door wearing mock Dior New Look tea dresses, squealing “hel—loow,” Annette Funicello trying on a mid-Atlantic accent. Most all of this annoyed her boyfriend, Jim, a writer who lived in the space with Jill, whose name, he liked to remind people, was really Ann. Jill would French-inhale her cigarette and squeeze his arm sympathetically. She understood. Here was a man who every day for months had been asked to impersonate a “beat poet, struggling,” when all he wanted to do was write or drink his coffee. But it was hard even for Jim to deny that life inside this made-up 1950s could be absurd and amusing. Jill served pancakes, fondue, and highballs all at once. And we all played a game she called Do the Dot. This required participants to gather around the ancient TV and stare expectantly at the tiny screen. Slowly the tiny white spot, the old TV warmup dot we’d all forgotten, would materialize at the center. It glowed there a minute, then expanded into a mess of bad reception. Everyone screamed for an encore and Jill would turn the TV on and off and then again—on and off—until she’d start to maniacally laugh and sometimes pretend to faint.
She’d get up, go on to the next activity, but the point, I always thought, had been made: Had she been a real fifties single, a bachelorette, alone, with all the perquisities of married life but no marriage, she might have gone crazy.
Simply stated, marriage in the 1950s was the absolute norm. In 1953, Look magazine rhapsodized: “Not since the age of Victoria has the idea of the happy home compelled such overt sentiment and general admiration… advertisements with their happy parents and rosy children in a setting of creature comforts and domestic bliss, the magazine covers with their warm scenes of family life… testify to the expectations with which men and women enter the blessed state.”
But as it was expressed in almost every publication, public-service announcement, newsreel, and classroom lecture, a Female Miracle had occurred, resulting in the birth of a new “unique femininity.” In reaction to the postwar man shortage, or to the pop–Freudian imperatives to “adjust,” many women had abandoned their drive to work in the world of men. Look editors, as if celebrating a new-model car, wrote: “Forget the big career… now she gracefully concedes the top jobs to men. The wondrous creature also marries younger than ever, bears more babies and looks and acts more feminine than the emancipated girl of the 20s and 30s… if she makes an old-fashioned choice and lovingly tends a garden and a bumper crop of children, she rates more loud Hosannas than ever before.”
Single life more than ever stood out as a social aberration, what an old family friend of mine calls “living polio. Not married, you were in the iron lung. Paralyzed.” And there was resolutely no excuse for it. One 1954 home-economics textbook spoke out harshly. “Except for the sick, the badly crippled, the deformed, the emotionally warped and mentally defective, almost every girl has an opportunity to marry.” A popular female advice columnist seemed to feel even more strongly. “Every American girl must acquire for herself a husband and a home and children… any program for life in which the home is not the center of her living, is worse than death.”
Occasionally, a writer broke ranks and published a story with a title like “There’s No Right Time for a Girl to Marry” (the New York Times, 1952). But these were anomalies and served most often as dartboards for more conservative writers and for the corporate heads who felt moved now and then to speak out about the necessary place of the American female in the home. (The manufacture and sale of furnishings and cars had become huge business, and between 1950 and 1958 sales of major appliances alone would rise by 240 percent.)
It all sounds a bit crazy, I have to say, almost science-fictional. But the rhetoric is backed up by numbers. By 1951, almost 60 percent of all American women were married—one in three of them having wed by age nineteen. By 1957, 14 million girls were engaged at age seventeen and many more were married by age twenty, and most of them were mothers at twenty-one. In 1958, 97 out of every 1,000 girls between the ages of fifteen and nineteen gave birth. Betty Friedan would later estimate that the U.S. birthrate in the mid-1950s had come close to overtaking India’s.
I interviewed one woman, a pediatrician, married at twenty in 1956, divorced in 1968 with four kids. She laughed, then deeply sighed as she recalled “the marriage-attack-from-Mars years.”
If I tried honestly to describe it, I’m not sure my own four girls would believe it. One example, in high school, if you did not have a date for a Saturday night, that meant you stayed in, hiding out, and swearing your younger siblings to silence. And I mean you were HIDING. In your room, with the lights off, in the event a boy you knew passed in a car and saw your light on. That meant they would KNOW you were in without a date…. College years, it was all right to date around for a year or so… [but] if you weren’t set by junior year, and there was another group of new freshmen coming, oh, that meant your life was slipping away…. Land[ing] a guy seemed like the only possible way you were going to survive economically…
It is hard to read a magazine or watch a movie from that time and imagine any woman living in peace by herself. Everyone in the culture seemed programmed to harangue her. The Saturday Evening Post warned in 1952, “It’s harder than ever to snare a husband!” Unless, of course, one made sacrifices, for example, abandoning school. The writer, Rufus Jarman, speculated that the dreaded war brides, all 113,000 of them, had moved in on American women because too many of “these American dynamos had those three letters of doom—Ph.D., doctor—in front of their names.” To the GIs, the American single had shown “superior airs” and no instinctive gifts for housekeeping. But now, he noted, “most girls who are doing postgraduate work for various high-flown careers would drop their studies and get married in a minute if the right man came along.”
Some limited exceptions were made for artistic types—dancers, actresses, fashion designers—and it further helped if one resembled Lauren Bacall or Audrey Hepburn. Later in the decade, exemptions passed to younger celebrities who had a tough kind of girl/boy quality—Shirley MacLaine (married, though her husband lived full-time in Japan) and Françoise Sagan, who, at twenty-one, had published a wild unapologetic mistressy novel called Bonjour Tristesse. Françoise instantly became an object of fascination to men and women both, who loved her short hair and red sports car and her way with a cigarette. Then, of course, she was French, barely spoke English, and the French, as one commentator wrote, were born “astray.”
But even here, in provincial married America, all sorts of girls went astray. Even if they did so very briefly.
DOWN THE UP STAIRCASE
The roots of the 1950s marriage mania reached back into the postwar culture: the GI Bill, which made low-income housing and other benefits available to veterans who married; the restrictions these same GI privileges imposed on women (fewer college openings; fewer jobs), and then all that pseudo-Freudian dogma demanding that real women seek out their male halves. But there were thousands who, setting aside domestic destiny, graduated or just left home with something else in mind besides a wedding. Stashing their marriage prospects into imaginary safety deposit boxes, middle-class girls traveled to Europe. Traces of these temporary runaways can be found in fifties films such as An American in Paris, Three Coins in the Fountain, Funny Face, Marjorie Morningstar, in some of the Gidget movies, and, most memorably, in Breathless, in the form of Jean Seberg’s morally ambiguous girl/boy reporter.
Others left home for New York and jobs in theater, dance, publishing, or just to cut themselves off from suffocating fiancés, dull jobs, or like Holly Golightly in Truman Capote’s novella, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, lives so desperate and dreary one can only guess at the details.
Starting in about 1953, at the height of “togetherness”[12]—a magazine-inspired concept advocating the total centrality of nuclear-family life—there seemed to be a rise in the number of single young women settling in New York City. The intensity with which reporters tracked this alleged rise, interviewing employment agents, Realtors, or clerks at all-girl hotels, demonstrates how terrorizing the single female was as mere concept.
“It was still such a radical notion,” says one my subjects, Simone, now sixty-six.
In fact, to get away was like testifying before a miniature version of the HUAC committee: Were we now and had we ever been inclined to hurt ourselves by deliberately ruining ourselves?… Leaving home was supposed to be very, very dangerous…. But we were girls who were not ready for the Donna Reed life. Poor Donna Reed! Even she wasn’t Donna Reed! She was an Oscar winner!… At home, everyone, in that J. D. Salinger sense, was required to put up a false phony self and it just got so tiring…. So you confronted your parents, and they acted as if you’d just announced you’d become a Communist or a Nazi and a slut. But your bags were packed. Like a spy, you had the details worked out in advance. Now, you had to hold your ground under interrogation.
Many editors, professors, and psychiatric professionals fixated on this “lone female” escapee, studying her like a lab animal who’d been wired to do one thing and was now atypically doing something else. In the press there was the formal bow, or military salute, made to
the good-sport all-American wife out in the ’burbs. But the real fascination was with these city types—the astonishing 34 percent who, by 1954, had made it to age twenty-four without marrying. She or “it” was debated, as an entity, in every publication from the Reader’s Digest to the Atlantic Monthly. Sometimes she appeared as a caricature—a dazed-looking girl, hitchhiking, a bridal gown in one hand and a suitcase in the other (no one picks her up), or a young woman watering plants on a sooty fire escape juxtaposed with a woman, in sun hat, cutting flowers in a large country garden. Humorists created bestiaries of lone-girl types, for example, the “Can’t-Help-It-Drabbie,” “The Mammary-Deprived,” “The Marginal Wallflower,” the “Office Matron,” “the Premature Auntie Griselda,” “the Thespian Manqué.”
The Kinsey Report on Female Sexuality, published in 1953, shocked readers as much as had the original male report several years before—and seems to have fed fears about these amorphous but threatening gangs of female strays. (One of Kinsey’s troubling statistics: More than half of all college-educated women, plus 20 percent of noncollege girls, had engaged in at least one same-sex erotic experience. If that was true, what was likely to occur in “pervert’s-ville” New York City?) Post-Kinsey, the language used to urge girls back into domesticity, into marriage (as if all that many had actually left!) turned apocalyptic.
For a while, in 1954 and ’55, writers bypassed the gray and rainy adjectives common to sad-spinster stories and rushed on toward the nuclear arsenal: “Atomic Red Alert for Romance!” “From Here to Oblivion—Marry Now or Marry Never!” “Snag Your Space of Shelter, Girls, Before You’re Crowded Out!”