by Betsy Israel
Consider that in 1957, 53 percent of the American public had believed that unmarried people were “sick,” “immoral,” or “neurotic,” while only 37 percent viewed them neutrally. During the early seventies, a similar study found that just 33 percent of a large sample group had “negative attitudes and expectations” of the unmarried. Fifty-one percent viewed them “neutrally” and 15 percent approvingly.
There was even a weak but nonetheless official endorsement of single womanhood from the New York Times. In August 1970, the Times ran an editorial announcing the emergence of “the Liberated Woman.” It began by providing necessary context.
Because western societies are increasingly rich, they can afford to educate more of their women and provide them with leisure. Because science has eliminated most of the drudgery if not the tedium of farm [and]… household work, millions of women are free to leave the fields and the kitchens and work beside men… those women who have no taste for marriage or childbearing will feel less constrained by society to adopt roles which are uncongenial….
That was not to incite all solo girls to rush out and change. As the authors went on to note: “The family has proved to be a durable human institution in many social settings…. The revolution in the status of women will change much and will leave much else unaltered.”
One of the biggest changes would be in mass perceptions of unwed women.
During the next few years the single woman would enjoy her own widely endorsed public honeymoon. Newsweek reported the following year that “singlehood has emerged as an intensely ritualized—and newly respectable style of American life. It is finally becoming possible to be both single and whole.” There were stories on dropout wives, and some sociologists and economists predicted that we would eventually find ourselves in a “totally singles-oriented society.” Frozen dinners for one. A rebellion against the terms “double-occupancy” and “family discounts.” The Mary Tyler Moore show was in its prime, Rhoda and Phyllis still popping in to complain before fleeing Minneapolis for their own single sitcoms. In 1974 the New York Times wrote, “In all respects young single American women hold themselves in higher regard now than a year ago. [They are] self-assured, confident, secure.”
For the first time in decades, perhaps for the first time ever, single women began to think about establishing adult, fully furnished lives by themselves. Landlords, who’d clung to the image of stewardess-with-dead-plants (or, not that it was said out loud, “dead stewardess”), began to see a new kind of single female tenant—older, meaning thirtyish, more established and serious. In the words of one young woman, “Do not dare call me a swinging single. I’m an unmarried grown-up.”
“Women’s lib,” as it was still called, had started to change things. “I never in a gazillion years thought I would rent, much less buy a house without being married or at least living with someone,” says one never-wed art appraiser, “age—deliberately vague.” But, she says, by the time she’d reached thirty, “I was tired of living out of the big version of a suitcase—not having the nice things in the style I wanted them in because, goddamit, I was supposed to have these things selected from my registry, or to pick them out together with my husband, with whom I was to establish a real, permanent home…. I didn’t even have a nice car. Everything was on hold and I was just too far along in all the other areas of my life to live without a decent shower curtain or wineglasses.”
One marketing executive called it learning to “think singly.” And everyone, even the very married, was advised to learn the dance steps.
By 1975, one in four households were headed by single women, the combined results of so many women waiting to wed and so many others having their marriages unexpectedly end. The Equal Credit Opportunity Act of that year made it much easier for women to buy condos and entire houses and to have aligned in their wallets as many credit cards as they chose. (Before that, in many states, it was impossible for a woman to get credit except under her husband’s name.) And many were using them “to buy very ‘nice things’ like Limoges china and Baccarat crystal,” as The Christian Science Monitor reported in 1975. “They don’t feel that a woman’s home life begins when she marries.”
“It’s hard to imagine attaching much importance to an ashtray, or to even now believe you owned an ashtray, but I bought a Steuben ashtray,” says “Jo March,” forty-six, special-events manager for a large department store. “It was so clear and heavy and big it took over the room. I saw it that way, anyway. Because it was ‘real.’ Because it didn’t fold up or come in garish colors. I’m not sure I even liked it, I just wanted to have a Something that told people I was living in that place for real, that I was a big girl, and that I had taste.”
The other enormous change in single lives was the addition of children.
Back in 1960 an approximate 10 percent of all unwed mothers had kept their babies; ten years later that number had climbed to 45 percent, and in 1975 fully half of all unwed mothers—in most major cities in the Western world—kept their babies. When interviewed, most of these women said they’d like a mate and a large number indicated that they had wanted to live with the baby’s father. Then they’d go on to explain why, for many complex reasons, it was not possible. But that didn’t change a thing about the baby. He/she was hers and belonged to her alone (not in any way to her parents, spouse, priest, “society,” or the baby’s father), and she planned to raise him/her on her own. Starting in 1970, more young mothers every year would never marry.
It had also become easier for a single woman to adopt. In 1968 New York City officials had looked at the “staggering illegitimacy rate” and decided, according to one city-administration official, that “half a home would be better than none.” Borrowing from a Los Angeles program, New York social services offered to qualified singles “children termed hard to adopt,” meaning over the age of three, handicapped, or mixed-race. The adoptive parent had to meet specific criteria—have a steady income and a college degree. It was important that they have primary family members nearby. As it happened, all of those who qualified were women, former or full-time social workers, either widows or divorcees.
The most visible symbols of change were not these sudden mothers minus fathers but the outspoken and very cool-looking single celebrities. The best example of the breed was without a doubt Gloria Steinem. Steinem began her public life during the early sixties as a hardworking journalist, who happened to be very pretty and went to A-list parties and dated famous men. She hated being referred to as a “woman writer,” which of course meant the secondary, soft kind of reporter. But from the start of her writing career, she’d been drawn to women as a subject. To mass changes occurring in women’s lives. And to situations that exposed what was not yet called sexism. She also chose female subjects who seemed to have much stifled anger and no voice, most famously Pat Nixon, who managed to express much outward public rage at Steinem’s perceptive and honest portrayal.
The details of Gloria’s life intrigued people. She’d grown up poor and neglected, then won a scholarship to Smith and spent a year abroad as a Neiman Fellow in India. She returned to New York and settled into an Indian-themed studio in the East Seventies that she kept filled at all hours with interesting people—politicians, reporters, actors, and, increasingly, prominent women. Over the years, Gloria was most frequently pictured out dancing with her wealthy, good-looking beaux. But by the early seventies, once she’d been declared the new voice of feminism, magazines like Newsweek stopped the dance-party photos and went with long vertical shots of her giving speeches, the sort where the viewer begins at the shoes and works up the long, long legs to the incredibly short dress, to the famous hair, and then, lastly, the microphone.
No matter what Gloria Steinem said or did, no matter whom she interviewed—and she was for a long time a political columnist for New York magazine—it would be noted only that she “did something for clinging dresses,” thanks to legs “worthy of mini skirts.”
She was described as �
�the thinking man’s Jean Shrimpton.” Even after she’d founded Ms., turned her apartment into a sort of women’s shelter, and become the women’s movement’s most important player, its secret weapon—the one not perceived as ugly, angry, or cranky—here’s how people wrote about her: “She stands there, striking in hip-hugging raspberry Levi’s, 2-inch high wedgies and a tight poor-boy t-shirt. Her long blonde-streaked hair falls just so above each breast and her cheerleader-pretty face has been made wiser with the addition of blue-tinted glasses; she is the chic apotheosis of with-it cool.”
Gloria Steinem liked to state that “young girls were refusing to be blackmailed into domesticity.” But no matter what she said, the ultimate question for Gloria Steinem was always What about you? She was gorgeous, though well into her thirties, and so what was she waiting for? When all was said and done, people wanted to know When Would Gloria Settle Down?[14] Otherwise put, when would she shut up and get a man?
She married for the first time at age sixty-five.
THE SINGLE TAKES A SLIDE
The 1980s, by any estimate, marked a low point in the public accord between single women and men, each side accusing the other of roughly the same crimes: insensitivity, dishonesty, stupidity, and sometimes martyrdom. It was during the late 1970s that this public mudslinging got under way. In newspapers and books and on TV talk shows, the women—“liberated,” successful, often divorced—suddenly began to lament a shortage of intelligent, sensitive men. And it was more than mere numbers, more than the well-known fact that so many men were gay. It was the quality of the men themselves. As Mademoiselle had put it with great prescience back in 1955, “Perhaps there is only a shortage of desirable men—men who are not too fearful and too repressed or too smug or too uninteresting.”
In stories typically entitled “Where Are the Men Worthy of Us?” prominent women denounced the single-male population—those “guys” hunkered down in dated bachelor pads, who readily lied and preferred jail bait or the standard fuck-and-run. Reporters in cities everywhere gathered groups of men in bars, apartments, offices, and asked them to answer the charges. Sessions sometimes lasted well into the early morning. Christ! Weren’t these bitches just spinsters-in-training? Victims of women’s lib? They were probably dogs. There were references to dry vaginas.
And the conclusion: If there was a shortage of men, it was only because so many women out there were female losers. As one man, forty-one, told the New York Times: “All these intelligent, articulate frank strong women… [who are] attractive, beautiful and who now feel so much better about themselves, now look around only to find men suffering from various sexual and psychological dysfunctions? Who’s jiving whom? If you’re not turning us on, baby, check your assets. You really haven’t come a long way. You are boring us.”
On it went, from 1974 to 1980:
Women: “I have lost all patience with men who like little girls.”
Men: “Women want to see your pay stub and your investment portfolio before accepting a drinks date.”
Women: “Aging bachelors can age all on their own, without my assistance.”
Men: “What do women want? They want to be free to do whatever they want, as long as a man pays for all of it.”
Both: “It’s just too hard… I think I’ll stay home… I got an answering machine!”
Columnist Russell Baker, in 1978, questioned the value of so many staying home alone.
The women’s movement attempts to lionize the female bachelor. Newspapers, books, and magazines recite happy tales of women who, having successfully skirted the perils of husbands and nestbuilding, have found contented anchorage in private harbours alone with their TV sets, their books, their wine, their pictures, their telephones, and their self-fulfillment…. you wonder whether we are becoming a race that is simply afraid of people.
There were many women out there in other parts of the country who were not afraid of people, not angry, and not included in this press coverage of the single and her minidramas. Single life as presented in the mass media was a phenomenon of the big cities and the affluent areas in particular. Said one woman in the mid-seventies:
I just laugh when I read about the exciting single life… what wonderful chances there are for a girl alone today. That Cosmopolitan Girl! Wow! I’m a secretary to a man who owns a liquor store—the only other men I meet are married liquor dealers. If it hadn’t been for my kids, I would’ve moved to a bigger town—maybe Detroit, when my husband took off. But I bring home ninety-five dollars a week—before taxes, get that—and my mother takes care of my two little girls while I’m working…. Where is my wild single life? And I am twenty-eight, thank you.
At the same time, no matter their circumstances, all single women had many unlikely things in common.
To speak of the very tangible, unmarried women’s household incomes averaged 60 percent less than two-income (usually married) households; unmarried men, however, maintained household incomes just 15 percent less than those of married couples. Single women paid more taxes than married women—as much as 20 percent more (“America has a severe case of the singles,” said Money magazine in 1976). And there was also the bizarre single world of insurance. For a long time it was hard for single women to buy homeowner’s insurance: because there was likely to be no one home during the day, she was considered a bad risk.
And they shared less tangible things.
Most significant was the fact that women, even if they loved their single lives, were not accustomed to spending so much time by themselves. In Toward a New Psychology of Women (1979), Dr. Jean Baker Miller, a feminist and psychiatrist, addressed this absence of “connection.” She described one subject, a “bright career woman” about twenty-seven or twenty-eight, who was “very active and effective” but essentially depressed. As difficult as it was for her to believe, this woman had found that she could not feel happy without a man around, even briefly, to watch her and approve her efforts. After many years of training to perform in front of or manipulate men—not that she would have put it quite that way—she found that she needed the affirmation, if not the security of a regular relationship. As quoted in a story on the book:
I know it’s bullshit… but what if there isn’t a man there, watching me? Then it’s like this moment—whatever it is I am doing—doesn’t matter…. Of course I really care about my girlfriends; that’s a given in my life. But those bonds can’t really ever develop into what I’d call the fundamental thing. To make it real, or meaningful, or whatever, there has to be the sound of one man clapping. I know this sounds totally sick.
Miller argued that such women—and there were a lot of them—suffered less from father fixations or advanced insecurities than they did problems of “affiliation,” what Miller called the learned overemphasis on connections to men. As she wrote, “They lack the ability to really value and credit their own thoughts, feelings and actions. It is as if they have lost a full sense of satisfaction in the use of themselves and of their own resources or never had it to begin with.” One single woman, thirty-one, put it bluntly: “There’s the sense that there has to be the other person there.”
There was also the shared sense that the singles scene, or culture, or business was becoming an embarrassment. “I went, I swear, once to a ‘singles fair,’” says a bonds trader, forty-eight, married now but at the time the kind of woman who had “affiliation” issues. (“I always sat on my couch facing kind of sideways, with my legs curled up, as if I was having a conversation with someone. I wasn’t.”)
She recalls leaving the fair after one group exercise: To walk out of the hotel hosting the event and into a nearby “department store and to walk out with the names and phone numbers of three single men. I would rather have risked the humiliation of being rejected at Studio 54 than have had to do that,” she says. “This was the key to my future?”
Singles expos, singles magazines (Your Place or Mine?), and humiliating gift books (How to Make Love to a Man, with chapter headings such as “W
ash the Dishes Nude”) made single life seem sleazy. And it was still, more so than ever, a dangerous way to live.
City cops and social workers routinely made statements to newsmagazines such as, “Young unmarried women are destroyed by seeing liberation strictly in terms of sexual freedom.” They referred to the fact that the single murders so common in ’73 and ’74 had continued and now most often had a drug connection. And they didn’t mean the much beloved Quaaludes. (Just to give some sense of how “beloved”: In 1979, Edlich’s Pharmacy at First Avenue and Fiftieth Street reported filling eighteen thousand prescriptions for methaqualone, generic for ’ludes, more than half the entire state’s total and more than half went to young women.)
“Nice” girls were found in motels far west on Forty-second Street, overdosed on heroin, and others OD’d from the lines of cocaine that were passed around on party platters. Girls from the suburbs were found in Central Park, unconscious or dead. Rape attacks were up or just reported more consistently.
The head of the New York City rape squad very memorably put it this way: “Single women should avoid being alone in any part of the city, at any time.”