by Betsy Israel
I’M FEMALE, FLY ME
According to the Labor Department, single women in the sixties worked in greatest numbers as secretaries, titles that after several years might be renegotiated, fluffed up, and rechristened “assistants to.” That is, if the girl in question remained a girl and didn’t marry. There was still a deep mistrust of the married working woman, who would, wrote one insurance-company employee in Glamour, “naturally get herself pregnant at the first opportunity and abandon her precious files one afternoon, just like that.” (United Airlines enforced what were perhaps the most blatant restrictions. Until 1969, all stewardesses had to be provably single; if they married, they “retired.”)
But the finest of the young career breed—the white, the virginal, the unwed—were often canonized in Look and Life spreads, as they had been twenty years before. The jobs, or the companies at least, had cachet—CBS, the UN, Christian Dior. The girls, however, still took shorthand.
As Life exclaimed in 1962, “Glamor, Excitement, and Romance and the Chance to Serve the Country—How Nice to Be a Pretty Girl and Work in Washington!” And there she was—Nancy Becker of Columbia, Missouri, at her desk, chin at rest on manicured hands, her pearls, her pencils precisely arrayed, her eyes “full of stardust.” She worked, filing, for the Justice Department. On the following pages young women with similar jobs were seen at Georgetown dinner parties, playing touch football (just like the Kennedys!), and shopping for antique rocking chairs. “It’s the perfect opportunity and so honorable to be here,” said a twenty-three-year-old interviewed for the piece. “But I think we most all agree, most of us are going to be marrying and seeing where that takes us, even if that’s Kansas.” They’d always have Washington.
In New York City the working girls weren’t so sure. In a 1961 Mademoiselle piece, “The Great Reprieve,” young Joan Didion wrote of Manhattan as an Emerald City that held out to its most tentative residents
this special promise—of something remarkable and lively just around the corner…. They do a lot of things but girls who cometo New York are above all uncommitted. They seem to be girls who want to prolong the period when they can experiment, mess around, make mistakes. In New York, there is no genteel pressure for them to marry, to go two-by-two…. New York is full of people on this kind of leave of absence.
By 1963, the year The Feminine Mystique crash-landed, many reported “feeling bugged,” bothered about “all the intense spying to see what I am up to,” to quote an airline ticketing agent in Glamour. “I expect to look up and see my brother standing there, 600 miles from home, just dropping by to examine my ring finger.” One of Didion’s subjects refused any longer “to parry delicate questions about my plans.” They had left home, gone off, transformed themselves. They were trying.
“It was an outrageous dare,” says “Sally-Jo,” age now “fifty-plus.”
I remember getting off the bus from Wisconsin. It was in 1964. Beatles time. And I was waiting for my luggage—I’d brought a big round hatbox and a big suitcase-sized makeup kit—and I was standing right by the exhaust pipe. I remember feeling dizzy and thinking—Yes! This is it! I inhaled deeply. That’s how thrilled I was!… Asphyxiated, wandering off to find a subway, not a clue where I was going, holding a freaking hatbox.
Just as they had in the fifties, and in the thirties, and in the time of the Bowery gal, officials likened these “girls” to unwanted immigrants. It was as if the shirtwaisted shop girl had reemerged in Marimekko separates, gotten drunk at lunch, and been spied on her break doing the Watusi. No one knew what to do about her or it or them: gangs of fully developed females who’d finished at school and now seemed to be on quixotic scholarships of their own design. An excerpt from a 1964 inquiry published in the Sunday New York World Telegram:
Every day they come. They come from Oregon and Iowa, from Utah and Illinois, from Ohio and California. The come from small towns and medium-sized cities… from colleges and communities where they were important, special, secure. They come to a city that is dirty and difficult and massively indifferent to them. A city that will charge them outrageous rents and pay them shamefully small salaries at first… it is a city bursting with thousands who are equally talented and gifted. Who are they? These women ignoring the fears of parents, the advice of friends, the gloomy prediction of city planners?… How many will there be this week and the next? How many will there be in five years?
One soothing remedy from the past was to count them. According to New York’s YWCA, there were about 100,000 more in 1964 than there had been the year before and an employment agency specializing in the now popular “communications” jobs (advertising, TV, magazines) reported its “applicants from out of town going up, up, up—8 percent more this year [1964] than last.” There were 350,000 total, reports read. One heard that 25,000 were hiding out in the Village, 300 of them appearing semiweekly in Babe’s Beauty Shop and close to 400 working or volunteering in museums. Odd random surveys, to cite one, revealed that 500 girls interviewed on the subways had once been Girl Scouts, though most—93 percent—did not think their scouting skills helped much in their lives as city girls. And it seemed they now wanted jobs that demanded more than a proven ability to whip through “A-S-D-F-J-K-L-semicolon.” Glamour in its 1963 “Happiness Index,” reported, “Happiness is an $8 raise; the boss’s compliment; not having to shave your legs.” A contemporary issue of the Saturday Evening Post proclaimed: “The girl who comes to New York is no longer just the young actress or ballet dancer yearning for a chance… Madison Ave. has replaced Broadway as the street of dreams… the new girl is more likely to see herself writing sparkling copy or holding a clipboard for a television producer.”
By the mid-sixties, young single women had begun to appear in ads and fashion spreads as busy TV-set assistants, lone car drivers, career girls holding blueprints with pencils tucked behind their ears. Although these were models, human props, it’s hard to imagine anything like it—discernible professional tracings—even five years before. Lone girls were also shown doing unlikely things. (One 1965 Goodyear ad showed a woman in standard sensible dress changing a tire. Read the caption: “When there’s no man around, Goodyear should be.”) Even tampon ads featured actual photos of young singles with names like Deborah or Patty. Dressed crisply in white, they were “stepping out” on their own. Tampax, say what you will, was another sign of their “independence!”
There were also certifiable single working girls on TV—Marlo Thomas as That Girl in her yellow-striped chain-belted minis; Honey West, girl detective—as well as clever dare-taking teenagers (Patty Duke; Sally Field) and magical creatures beyond male control as on Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie, and the little-remembered My Living Doll, in which Julie Newmar, prior to Catwomanhood, played a beautiful robot who goes her own way. Real life provided even more exotic singular oddities (Joan Baez,[13] Gloria Steinem, Barbra Streisand, Renata Adler, Shirley Chisholm, Diane Arbus, Jane Fonda, Anna Karina, Suzanne Farrell, Twiggy). Even the singles featured in the long newspaper stories (“Why?” “For how long?” “What about those babies?”) seemed more stylish, daring, and accomplished. One World Telegram Sunday section, circa 1965, featured young, pretty, and, for a change, serious professionals. They interviewed a twenty-five-year-old woman who designed furniture. Another worked at Mademoiselle and also freelanced for a magazine called In: A Guide to the Swinging Single New York. There were real estate brokers. Broadway production assistants. Former civil rights workers hoping to get involved in politics.
Of course at least one among the young professionals questioned it all. Here that was a thirty-two-year-old advertising account executive who, pictured chewing a pencil, admitted, “I want a career, but I don’t want to be the kind of woman men talk about as career women. I’d like to keep at least a few shreds of my femininity.”
Single-girl stories always included such confessions, worries, or an authorial caveat, as if it was the writer’s responsibility to list all contraindications for this radical trial d
rug called independence. Most of the pieces concluded with a haunted question: “Even now, in black moments, they ask, ‘What am I doing here?’” or “Why should I stay? Who’d notice that I was gone?” “What if there is no one here for me?” or “Is this… it?” But there were also breakthroughs. Entrée to a key social circle. A new man. Better, several men. And there were always the women who—damn it all!—went out and battled to become the serious “girl” who did not type. (Typical tale: As late as 1968, famed NPR correspondent Nina Totenberg was told by a potential employer, a friend, “Nina, you know we have our girl already.” Nina, successfully, went and became the Girl somewhere else.)
Even the average single woman now had, as the Reader’s Digest said, “a shot at life previously unimagined. Today’s plain Janes have opportunities their spinster aunts never did—trips to Europe, a Peace Corps assignment in Asia, interesting jobs in research or government. And in all these places they have a chance to display a mettle that may attract a man who might otherwise have been addled by a momentary attraction to a dumb blonde.”
They also had a bit of fun. Many became expert at blowing off whole afternoons at foreign films or in Lord & Taylor’s. And gradually, whether they liked the idea or not, young single women began to go out in mixed groups. When asked where they were going, no one said, “On a date.” The new reply was “Just out.”
THE SINGLE STRIP
The “swinging” singles scene began with a simple and unglamorous realization: Young people were lonely. Families had begun their slow dissolve, shown the first fresh results of divorce, corporate transfers, migrations south and, of course, the familiar, now more frequent announcement “I’m off to the city, Ma, bye!” Many magazine stories and essays began this way: “The girl or boy who lived next door or two towns over has gone, off to school in the East, to Europe, or New York City.” It was a cliché—any reference to a girl next door had long been a cliché—and yet it was in some undeniable way true. “Anonymity” replaced “togetherness.”
In his 1965 book, The City Is the Frontier, Dr. Charles Abrams, the head of Columbia University’s urban-planning department, warned that the city was unprepared for the “convergence” of all these anonymous strangers. How would people meet? Not on the street, where a strict taboo prevented eye contact and conversation. The city, Abrams advised, would have to open to singles, to build special housing, unique public meeting places, become in some sense what he called a “trystorium.” Thus began a small singles industry. At the start there were simple “pay parties,” mimeographed telephone lists, and gimmicks—restaurants with phones at the tables so that if a girl wished, she might call a man seated elsewhere, or “wash-a-terias,” Laundromats that served Cokes and played records. In late 1964 Mike O’Harro, an ensign who had founded a private dating “association,” organized a computerized list of forty-seven thousand singles nationwide. “I had the idea at a party I threw in Virginia,” he told Newsweek. “I realized that every person at this party, everyone did different things, and they were all lonely. I was lonely, and it occurred to me that it had to be true in other places.”
Along with others who’d had the single epiphany, he began to stage regional activities. To be single in Denver at the time might have meant attending a “woodsie,” a weenie roast and dance party up in the Rockies. In New York, couples met at rooftop “drinks parties”; roofs had been declared among the “new mating frontiers.” “Causes” were also big—work for a candidate, attend many fund-raisers. Single visionaries took it further, plotting apartment complexes for singles only, miniresorts that would include pools and tennis courts, bars and lounges placed everywhere for optimum mixing.
Grossinger’s, the venerable Catskills resort, had held its first singles weekend in 1961. By the mid-sixties there was barely a resort or a cruise line that had not imitated the package. By 1965, single life was said to generate somewhere between twenty and fifty million dollars per year. And those figures grew as whole neighborhoods “went single.” Manhattan’s East Side, starting at East Thirtieth Street, heading up to Ninetieth and stretching from the East River all the way to Fifth Avenue, was christened “the singles ghetto,” a minicity of new high-rises and older buildings where girls learned a few quick rules about real estate. (“No one wanted to rent to three girls—three girls was a brothel,” says one marketing analyst, now fifty-six. “You claimed two and kept the third as a constantly recurring cousin from home. Or a stew.”) Thousands of actual stews, secretaries, ad copywriters, sports columnists, “just regular guys with jobs” filled out the area—780,000 of them, according to one insurance company. (There was in fact a real “stew zoo.” The address, as well known as the Barbizon Hotel’s, was 345 East Sixty-fifth Street. During the mid-1960s, the building was 90 percent stewardess-occupied.)
On weeknights residents filled the restaurants and movie theaters; on weekends, they filled the bars—Maxwell’s Plum, Mister Laffs, TGI Friday’s—a collection that stretched out along five crowded blocks of First Avenue. By midnight on Saturday, it seemed that someone had thrown a frat party without realizing a street fair was already under way. Newsweek called it “the body exchange.” Others likened it to a zoo, a “place made up of hands, hands, HANDS grabbing at you.” Or waiting on you. It became one of the city’s much-repeated mating tales that J. Walter Thompson employees actually competed for waiter and bartending jobs after hours. As one explained, “Where else am I going to meet chicks?”
The bar strip was also ground zero for journalists assigned to this generation’s singles beat. The standard device was to catch bits of conversations between couples who’d “connected,” as if on The Dating Game, and had invariably misheard each other’s names. The strategy, then, was to follow the strangers—one long-haired eyelinered female, one preppy male wearing bell-bottoms—as they moved in on each other and, if the reporter got lucky, left the bar together. But there were other scenes and other stories, and many girls could not stand the meat market that was the Upper East Side. Some preferred Village bars or jazz clubs or the scenes at Max’s Kansas City, Cheetah’s, or the Electric Circus, where there was less date making than dancing and for the shy a lot of visual distraction—Warholian performance art; the first of the sparkly-ball light shows—also much potential single-girl sex. Sometimes right there.
“Wherever you went out in the 1960s, and I went, just went, wherever—it was very dark,” says Julie, now forty-nine, divorced, and the mother of two kids she adopted on her own.
It was the bars that were labeled “singles” bars that were the creepiest, I thought. Little red candles, all those guys with the open shirts and this glob of hair sticking out. People dressed alike. I liked places where there was more of a circus-y diffused scene… these bars really were meat markets…. I can remember at Maxwell’s, or one of them I got dragged to this one time, being afraid of going to the bathroom because I had inadvertently made eye contact with this manly-man kind of guy at the bar and I was afraid he would misinterpret my walking toward the bathroom as a cue…. It seemed so predatory.
WHERE HAVE OTHER SINGLES GONE?
At the time, of course, an enormous slab of the American single population was not in singles clubs of any kind, but still in college. Some would avoid the singles scene by getting married the day after graduation. But the MRS. degree had already begun its slow fade from the curriculum. “When I started school in 1965, we wore plaid skirts and had proper dates and had parietals,” says Sally Hoffe, a fifty-four-year-old lawyer, never wed and now a single parent. “By the time we left we were dressed in flowing scarves and ragged jeans and many of us had no makeup on except maybe a crescent moon on our forehead. We had thrown out hair dryers…. Sex—we just had it. And unless you got pregnant or caught VD, the tone—at least with certain people anyway—the whole subject was casual as can be.”
In March 1966, Time devoted its Education section to a story on the younger “free sex movement,” what was largely a Berkeley phenomenon that had been
around in some form since 1960. Printed below an extremely dark and blurry photo: “As they do at countless collegiate parties everywhere, the couples wriggled to the watusi and gyrated to the jerk, while recorded drums and saxophones resounded in the dimly lit apartment of a University of California student in Berkeley. Unlike most parties, however, the boys and girls were naked.”
“That sounds about right,” says Sally Hoffe.
Very Berkeley, but I’d be lying if I said in the Midwest I did not attend my share of like events… there was a lot of loosening-up of what you wore and who you were. Or who you thought you were that week… [but] not everyone participated. There were many girls who still had on the sensible Butterick sew-it-yourself shifts…. There were the wedding announcements and the “bride elect”! I always remember that phrase, bride-elect, the chosen. But what was it she chose?… My radicalization was to see this engagement ritual as a kind of sleepwalking…. Didthey really want to get married, or had they run out of ideas already?
At about this point in time it becomes more difficult to write about single women as a unified class. There were so many variations on the single state, so many stops along the singular spectrum. For example, in 1967 half of all women in their thirties were married mothers who remained at home full-time. But of these women, 17 percent were legally separated, or temporarily apart from their mates due to the Vietnam War. Thousands of women were already choosing to keep rather than give away out-of-wedlock babies—and to live with friends, sisters, boyfriends. The number of women who reported cohabiting or “having recently cohabited” was at about 550,000. Some single women lived in Upper East Side apartments or at the Y. But an equal number lived in communes or feminist collectives or in coed group housing. And many were developing unique new views of singularity. A graphic artist and illustrator recalls life on “the commune of the Feminine Mystique, Brattleboro, Vermont”: