by Betsy Israel
Looking for love in New York City is harder than finding a seat on an F train to Queens at rush hour. You can get swamped on the platform. Somebody can cut in front of you. The train can go out of service. When it comes to finding that special person—and we’re talking about relationships here, not just sex—a lot of New Yorkers never leave the station…. [these] are a complicated time for singles, between crushing work obligations and confused notions of how men and women should relate to each other.
“It really makes me want to puke,” says Helen, twenty-six, a currently unemployed copywriter who has lived through many Valentine’s Days and found them “more oppressive than Christmas.” She continues:
There is always the huge Valentine story—about how the creative guy proposed to his girlfriend by glueing letters to a Scrabble board. And they are as a couple so urban chic. They are only twenty-three, and yet they live in some amazing loft in TriBeCa and the skinny-girl delicate little bride-to-be is called Amelie or Chantal and she designs, oh, laced gloves or petite evening bags for dogs. And He, the man, wears those nerd glasses and has on a tie for some reason…. You think, these aren’t real people, or these people are models. And of course they have been styled. To get your attention. And to get your goat. TO PISS YOU OFF. I shouldn’t let it happen, have that response, but it’s just very effective advertising.
There’s a kind of story, a series of images, even more bothersome than the corny all-alone holiday story. That is the thousands of stories, in every known form of media—“the relentless hailstorm,” as one former colleague put it—all about having babies and raising kids.
“I think it started with thirtysomething, in the eighties,” says Gail, thirty-nine, a nature photographer.
It was that horrible Hope character bouncing around with a baby in a forty-room house…. I don’t dislike children, please! I just can’t stand the way you are forced to “react” to them in a way that somehow expresses wonderment with a hint of jealousy because you don’t have any. It’s so sad! Another sad reminder…. I feel like I’m watching [on TV] old fifties footage of the baby boom in the ’burbs only it’s set in the present…. You walk down the street, you’re late and rushing, but wait, you can hear it in the distance getting louder—it’s a stampede! Strollers. And these women never think to move their triplets’ stroller. It’s like, okay, I obviously have the right of way, and the culture supports that. You are just a woman who does not have children, is not married, and either you move or you will get run over.
Some, like Gail, call this confrontation “pure arrogance on the part of anxious younger women… the there-but-for-the-grace-of-God shit.” Some wish only to clarify their own views on the child issue. Martha, forty-four, says:
I’m not childless, I am child-free. And neither is my dog a substitute child. My dog is a fine dog. I am not confused on this point…. It’s hard to believe, but I like my life…. I feel like I earned my life and my feelings about it. Because believe me, living in this culture, it is hard not to feel horribly about yourself when you are young and not following the feminine script…. I write nothing permanently out of my own personal script! I’m ready now to do these things, if they come up. I just wasn’t before and that doesn’t make me a monster or a rule-breaker or a bitch who just, obviously, doesn’t like kids because she complains when she is nearly flattened by strollers on Seventy-second Street…. Mothers take a perverse pleasure in punishing nonmothers. “How dare she speak that way? Oh, that hostile body language! She must not have any children!” That’s the refrain of our age.
The media refrain has variations, but in essence it remains the same: No matter what the single woman says, she can’t really be happy. Her life is barren and disappointing. Friends consider her a social exile. She is in danger at all times when on her own, and she could miss out on becoming a mother. She is, as Anthony Trollope wrote of his thinned-out, run-down Lily Dale, “blank, lonely and loveless.” She is living the “long afternoon of unmarried life.” I quote from a classic 1930s spinster novel: “Librarians never marry. And they never die.”
Repeat.
Well, it makes for terrifically grim and sorry copy. And for a long time, I think, women believed it. Or at least they understood there were restrictions, a unique system of singular Jim Crow—unwritten laws concerning where they could go, when, for how long, and with whom. Through the 1960s these matters were actually spelled out in terms so precise the syntax and wording seem borrowed from Deuteronomy.
But though still misunderstood and—thanks to writers and directors—still so often maligned, single life is no longer what we for years have enjoyed calling a half life. There are still archetypes, easily applied methodologies for organizing and controlling the way we think about single women. Then there are the unavoidable live women themselves as opposed to the images.
During the nineteenth century, many real women (as opposed to spinsters and shrews) found it easier and more satisfying to choose women friends over men and/or family for their essential life “partners.” And it’s this long-discouraged practice that accounts for the true appeal of Sex and the City. A simple reading presents a very clever, witty drama concerning a variety—almost every variety—of relationships with men and sexual issues (premature ejaculation; strange bathroom habits; trying to make lovers out of sex toys and humans out of men who are angry, et cetera). But the real action and pleasure and love is among the four girlfriends, who spend all their available time together, discussing all of these other relationships. It’s like life on an imaginary cruise ship—the four separate briefly, go off and have their various trysts in their various rooms, then return to the dining room, where they review the day, drink, and split dessert four ways. The real conflict occurs right there, among the women; it’s in the way they push one another, tell one another the embarrassing absolute truth, hitting on weak spots and self-defeating patterns. And the amazing and perhaps fantastic element is how they don’t walk out on one another. If they do, if there are hurt feelings, everyone participates in the reunion, which will typically involve baskets of homemade muffins and/or blender drinks and new shoes.
And it is now distinctly possible that another generation is going to miss the cues of single-illness, or uncomfortability, altogether. Recently I took a bunch of ten-and eleven-year-olds to see the movie Kate and Leopold, starring Meg Ryan as a thirty-fivish career woman who dresses like and has the body of a good-looking young man. In fact, her boss at the marketing company to which she’s devoted her life compliments her by telling her that she’s not really a woman. She’s like, and this is the good part, she’s like… a man. Her ex-boyfriend, like that of every other alleged spinster character—like Bridget Jones and Ally McBeal—has let her down. She gave him “the best seven years of her life.” He replies: “Those were the best?”
He’s much too preoccupied, anyway, with finding fissures in the space/time continuum and, as the movie starts, has found a portal into the nineteenth century. A handsome duke and inventor somehow follows him back into the present and home to his apartment. Two hours later, Meg, who still lives upstairs from this unfortunate boyfriend, is given every single working woman’s dream choice: Go back in time and be rich and beautiful and beloved by a handsome duke, or stay here and be great at your job. Of course, she goes, by throwing herself off the Brooklyn Bridge, the site of the portal, and landing in the nineteenth century, wearing a blue dress.
I asked the ten-and eleven-year-olds what they thought about it, assuming they would vote for portals and dukes and fancy dresses and any way out of wearing those blah “work clothes” plus having a horrible boss. But they surprised me. One told me there were no “jobs for women except secretaries” and so who would want to live then? Although, hedging, she added that Kate’s life “now” was “totally boring” and her blue dress was “extremely pretty.” A girlfriend of hers suggested that Kate could move to a better apartment and, because she’d been promoted, she could buy all new clothes! She could get “
someone who wasn’t a weird geek for a boyfriend!” The first girl then added something that she’d learned in school: “Most people in those times didn’t even live to be thirty.”
Which led to a moment’s reflection. Another girl who had favored Kate’s going back now said, “If she really went back to then, then now, when it’s time for her real life, she’d already be dead.”
She should live well in her own time and, as they said when I was single, “On her own terms.” And no one should say anything more about any of it. There have been too many epitaphs for the single woman, and almost every one of them is pathetic. She is not.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
A study of single women relies heavily on the accomplishments of women’s historians. These academics and agitators have taken what was, twenty-two years ago, during my student years, a loosely organized post-sixties discipline and turned it into a recognized field of remarkable scholarship and theory. The body of historical works is at this point so vast that it is physically impossible to list all the books and articles I have consumed over the years and that have influenced my thinking about single women. But I include in the following notes the primary texts I consulted for each section of Bachelor Girl, any document I’ve quoted from, and a few related works that I think, or hope, will be of interest.
There are many excellent overviews of women’s history. I used the following: Sarah Evans, Born for Liberty: A History of Women in America (New York: Free Press, 1989); Mary P. Ryan, Womanhood in America: From Colonial Times to the Present, 3d ed. (New York: Franklin Watts, 1983); William Chafe, The Paradox of Change: American Women in the Twentieth Century, a 1991 reworking of his earlier The American Woman: Her Changing Social, Economic, and Political Role, 1920–1970 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972); Nancy F. Cott, ed., Root of Bitterness: Documents of the Social History of American Women (New York: Dutton, 1972); Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz, eds., Becoming Visible: Women in European History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977); Nancy F. Cott and Elizabeth Pleck, eds., A Heritage of Her Own: Toward a New Social History of American Women (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984).
A few more finely honed time periods: Mary Beth Norton, Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–1800 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980); Margaret Fuller, Women in the Nineteenth Century (1855; New York: W. W. Norton, 1971); Elaine Tyler May, Great Expectations: Marriage and Divorce in Post-Victorian America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
On the history of feminism:
The standard reference and most frequently assigned women’s history text is Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States (1959; New York: Atheneum, 1970); Rosalind Rosenberg, Divided Lives: American Women in the Twentieth Century, American Century series, Eric Foner, ed. (New York: Hill and Wang/Noonday Press, 1992), is invaluable for its analysis of the parallel struggles of black and white women, individuals, and activists; Nancy F. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987); Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Eighty Years and More: Reminiscences 1815–1897 (1898; New York: Schocken, 1971); Elizabeth Cady Stanton/Susan B. Anthony: Correspondence, Writings, Speeches (New York: Schocken, 1981); William P. O’Neill, Everyone Was Brave: A History of Feminism in America (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1969); Mari Jo Buhle, Women and American Social ism, 1870–1920 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978); Linda Gordon, Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1976). And for all those ages twenty-one to twenty-eight who, like my re search assistants, never took a women’s history class (usual recollection: It was “gay”; “it had this stigma”; “it was passé”), here is a brief beginner’s reading list of the second twentieth century feminist outburst, a movement that, like it or not, continues to shape all female lives.
Kate Millet, Sexual Politics (New York: Ballantine, 1969); Mary S. Hartman and Lois Banner, eds., Clio’s Consciousness Raised: New Perspectives on Women (New York: Harper & Row, 1974); Vivian Gornick and Barbara K. Moran, eds., Woman in Sexist Society: Studies in Power and Powerlessness (New York/London: Basic Books, 1971), (see especially famed sociologist Jesse Bernard’s “The Paradox of the Happy Marriage”); Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1975); Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (complete with diagrams for the revolution) (New York: William Morrow, 1970); Michele Wallace, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman (New York: Dial, 1979); the brilliant but scattered opus by “individualist” and celebrity feminist Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971); Juliet Mitchell, Women’s Estate (New York: Vintage, 1973); Robin Morgan, ed., Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women’s Liberation Movement (New York: Vintage, 1970); Mary Wollstonecraft, On the Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792; New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974); Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation Between Women and Men (1898; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (1963; New York: Lau rel/Dell, 1983), and Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1952; New York: Vintage, 1989).
Major cultural overviews:
There are a few academics who break through and, without sacrificing the beauty and complexity of their argument, write their studies in colloquial English. To put single women in context I relied on three scholarly works. First, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg’s erudite and imaginative essay collection, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). Another essential work is Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Anchor, 1988). And Lois Banner’s American Beauty (New York: Knopf, 1983) is a well-researched and amusing book on beauty culture and a must-read for anyone with an interest in the tangled evolution of female style.
Image and advertising:
For advertising in the nineteenth century, Ellen Gruber Garvey, The Adman in the Parlor: Magazines and the Gendering of Consumer Culture, 1880s to 1910s (New York: Ox ford University Press, 1996); Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979); George Burton Hotchkiss and Richard B. Franken, The Leadership of Advertised Brands (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1923); John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin Books, 1972); Erving Goffman, Gender Advertisements (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979); Martha Banta, Imaging American Women: Ideas and Ideals in Cultural History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987). The best and most amusing feminist media survey of the postwar years is Susan J. Douglas, Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media (New York: Times Books/Random House, 1994); also Joan Brumberg, The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls (New York: Random House, 1997).
On film:
The two best books on women in film, both published in 1973, approach the subject from differing perspectives. Marjorie Rosen’s Popcorn Venus: Women, Movies & the American Dream (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1973) is a thorough sociological and historical accounting of women’s roles in film from the silent era through the 1960s; Molly Haskell’s From Reverence to Rape, 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), takes a psychoanalytic approach to the female characters and film tropes of the same period. Two period studies that attempt to assess the effects film had on young women are: Herbert Blumer and Philip M. Hauser, Movies, Delinquency and Crime (New York: Macmillan, 1933) and Henry James Forman, Our Movie Made Children (New York: Macmillian, 1935); Kate Simon’s memoir A Wider World (New York: Harper & Row, 1986) is one of many memoirs and stories of taking refuge, and plotting out a life, at the movies. As she writes, “The brightest, most informative school was the movies. We learned how tennis was played and golf, what a swimming pool was and what to wear if you ever got to drive a car… and… we learned about lo
ve, a very foreign country like maybe China and Connecticut.” Also: Tania Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory (New York and London: Routledge, 1988); Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies (New York: Vintage, 1976); John Margolis and Emily Gwathmey, Ticket to Paradise: American Movie Theaters and How We Had Fun (Boston: Little, Brown, 1991).
On New York:
Kenneth T. Jackson, ed., The Encyclopedia of New York City (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); Lloyd Morris, Incredible New York: High Life and Low of the Last Hundred Years (New York: Random House, 1951); Hank O’Neill, Berenice Abbott: American Photographer (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1982), on the premiere photographer of the city; Mary McCarthy, Intellectual Memoirs: New York, 1936–1938 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992); Mary Cantwell, Manhattan, When I Was Young (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1995); James McCabe, Light and Shadows of New York (Philadelphia: National Publishing Company, 1872); Dan Wakefield, New York in the Fifties (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993); Elizabeth Hawes, New York, New York: How the Apartment House Transformed the Life of the City (New York: Knopf, 1993); Luc Sante, Low Life (New York: Vintage Books, 1991).
ON THE PRESS:
American journalism:
Frank Luther Mott, A History of Newspapers in the United States Through 250 Years, 1690–1940, 3d ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1962); Single Blessedness, or the Single Ladies and Gentlemen Against the Slanders of the Pulpits, the Press and the Lecture Room (C. S. Francis and Co., 1852); Don C. Seitz, The James Gordon Bennetts: Father and Son (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1920); Horace Greeley, Recollections of a Busy Life (New York: JB Ford, 1868); Hans Bergmann, God in the Street, New York Writing from the Penny Press to Melville (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995); Paul H. Weaver, News and the Culture of Lying (New York: Free Press/Macmillan, 1994). Godey’s Ladies Book, founded in 1830, became the premiere women’s magazine, the model for all others, throughout the nineteenth century. Stories, lectures, allegories, storiettes I used in research: “Woman” (1831), “An Old Maid” (1831), “Husband Hunters” (1832), “The Bachelor’s Dream” (1832), “Mary, the Prude” (1832), “Female Accomplishments” (1835), “Female Education” (1835), “Women at Twenty-one” (1835). Books on Godey’s include: Ruth Finley, The Lady of Godey’s, Sara Josepha Hale (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1931). Also, on magazines: Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, reprinted and updated, 1938–68).