by Betsy Israel
maintaining contact among, 50
as widows-manqué, 23n
work sought by, 18, 19–20, 23, 50
see also new spinsters; old maids
spinster stories, 50–52, 156–57, 262
Stanley, Henry Morton, 62
Stanley, Olga, 112
Stansell, Christine, 58, 71, 89
Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 33
Steel, Dawn, 250
Steinem, Gloria, 210, 211, 213, 218, 235–37
Sterling, Claire Wellesley, 94
stock-market crash (1929), 147
Stoner, Lucy, 74
Storm, Gale, 196
stronger sex, women as, 172
Suckow, Ruth, 108–9, 163–64
suffrage movement, 74, 100, 114, 117
laws achieved by, 36, 45, 119, 126
political agitation in, 114, 173
Sullivan’s Travels, 155
Swanson, Gloria, 130
sweatshops, 58
syphilis, 68, 123
“Tabitha,” as name, 17
“Tale of Not So Flaming Youth, A” (Kirk), 134–35
tampons, 128, 218
Tarbell, Ida, 50, 115, 117
Tarkington, Booth, 102
tea dances, 120–21
telephone operators, 103n, 152
Temple, Shirley, 178
Terrible Honesty (Douglas), 127
Thackeray, William Makepeace, 20, 48
Thomas, M. Carey, 26
Thompson, Bertha “Boxcar Bertha,” 154
Thompson, Dorothy, 146n
Three on a Match, 158–59
Tompkins, Juliet Wilbor, 111–12, 145
Totenberg, Nina, 219
Toward a New Psychology of Women (Miller), 239
Traffic in Souls, 122–23
“transient bureaus,” 154
T. R. Baskin, 231–32
“treating,” 70–71, 88, 94, 135
Triangle Shirtwaist fire, 60
Trilby (Du Maurier), 110, 125
Trollope, Anthony, 48, 262
Trowmart Inn, 105–7
Truman, Harry, 175
tuberculosis, risk of, 136
Types from City Streets (Hapgood), 91
Ugly Girl Papers, The (Power), 69
University of Michigan, 194, 211–12
upper-class women, 117, 124
clothing of, 74–75
department stores and, 85
as domestic employers, 60–61
feminist, 109
muddy hems of, 74, 90
“slumming” by, 93–94
as spinsters, 18–19
urban sketch, 63–64
Ursuline religious order, 34–35
Valentine’s Day, 260
Van de Warker, Ely, 142
Van Ever, Jean, 174–75
Vanity Fair (Thackeray), 48
Viorst, Judith, 226
WACs (Women’s Army Corps), 168–69, 170
Wald, Lillian, 36
war brides, 171, 185
wartime jobs, 164–70
black women in, 166–67
in Civil War, 45, 46–47, 90
competence in, 167–68
for educated women, 165
in films, 167–68
number of, 165, 169
preparatory campaign for separation from, 168–69
propaganda for, 130n, 165–66
temporary nature of, 167, 168–70
WACs in, 168–69, 170
in World War I, 129, 130, 142–43
Wasserstein, Wendy, 40
Welter, Barbara, 27
Wharton, Edith, 19–20
“What About Alice?” (Cohen), 248
What Should We Do with Our Daughters? (Livermore), 142
“What’s Wrong with Ambition?” (Weaver), 189–90
Wheeton, Ellen “Nelly,” 34
Where Are My Children?, 38–39
white slavery, 122–24, 125
Who’s Who (1902), 116
“Why Women Don’t Marry” (Tompkins), 111–12, 145
widows, 172, 198–99, 209, 235
widows-manqué, 23n
Wilcox, Susanne, 115
Wilson, Edmund, 129–30
Wine of Youth, 132–33
witches, 17, 197
Wollstonecraft, Mary, 37–38
womanists, 109, 114
Women, The (Luce), 39–40
Women of New York, or Social Life in the Great City, The (Ellington), 77
Women of Steel, 166
Women’s Bureau, U.S., 147, 175
women’s colleges, 26, 114, 143
“women’s” jobs, 103, 150, 152, 170, 178
Women’s Moral Reform Society, 31
women’s movement, 208, 233, 234, 236, 251
see also feminists
Women Who Went to the Field, The (Barton), 47
Wonder Woman, 167
Woolf, Virginia, 110
Wordsworth, William, 17
Work-a-day Girl: A Study of Some Present-Day Conditions, The (Laughlin), 86
Working Girl, 101
World War I, 126, 127, 129, 130, 142–43
World War II, 146n, 164–70, 178
see also postwar period; wartime jobs
Wright, Fanny, 35
Wylie, Janet, 227–28
Wylie, Philip, 228
Wyman, Jane, 198–99
“yellowback” romance novels, 60
“Yellow Wallpaper, The” (Gilman), 47–48
Yezierska, Anzia, 66–67, 69
Zaharias, Babe Didrikson, 155
Ziegfeld Follies, 94
About the Author
BETSY ISRAEL is a journalist and former editor who has contributed to the New York Times, Elle, Rolling Stone, GQ, Harper’s Bazaar, Redbook, People, Mademoiselle, Vogue, New York, Spin, Playboy, and the Los Angeles Times, among many others. She is a former columnist for Glamour, US, and New York Woman, and was a contributing writer for Mirabella. She has written numerous screenplays and is the author of a memoir, Grown-Up Fast: A True Story of Teenage Life in Suburban America. She lives in Manhattan with her husband and two children.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.
Praise for Bachelor Girl
“Bachelor Girl is such a delectable read that it belies its stature as a profoundly important synthesis. It takes a witty and perceptive stance on the culture, but it’s also a prodigious journalistic investigation that disinters the droll and moving social history of the single woman in America.”
—Marcelle Clements, author of The Improvised Woman: Single Women Reinventing Single Life
“Bachelor Girl is essential reading…. It provides a unique framework for understanding today’s single girl.”
—USA Today
“Ms. Israel’s book provides a useful history of single working girls and new women of all stripes, from the shop girl to the Gibson goddess to the swinging single…. Replete with both Dickensian details and humorous asides.”
—New York Times
“When it comes to being a bachelor girl, women have long been stuck with a stigma. Author Betsy Israel explains how to defy it.”
—Cosmopolitan
“Betsy Israel deconstructs all the old ‘single girl’ stereotypes, providing us with a fresh, perceptive point of view and elevating the bachelor girl to her rightful place in modern American social history—and it’s about time.”
—Susan Seidelman, director, Sex and the City and Desperately Seeking Susan
“Betsy Israel salutes single womanhood from the last century’s spinsters to the career gals of today.”
—Vanity Fair
“What a read! At long last, a book that really tells it like it is. I loved it!”
—Liz Smith
“A lively history of single women, shifting between the facts of women’s lives and their representation in the media…. Fascinating.”
—Boston Globe
“A must-r
ead for contemporary bachelor girls. Israel’s insightful study examines the plight of the single woman as a social phenomenon from the mid-1900s to the present.”
—Booklist
“Betsy Israel explores, in a thoughtful and entertaining style, why society persists in finding nonconforming women both threatening and perplexing.”
—Elle (Canada)
“Required reading!”
—New York Post
“Betsy Israel’s social history covers everything from 1920s flappers to 1970s career girls, with wit and style. A must-read for feminists with a sense of humor.”
—Marie Claire
“Single women are still designated as different from the other kind, not a group any single figure is particularly comfortable to be signed up with. What is this categorizing about? Betsy Israel’s brilliant new book takes us through a century of ‘different-ness’ and explores why it might be extant.”
—Helen Gurley Brown, former Cosmopolitan editor in chief and author of Sex and the Single Girl
“[Bachelor Girl] is not one history but two: an examination of popular perceptions about single women since the Industrial Revolution paired with the lesser-known truth about how women actually inhabited their roles…. Engaging, convincing, even stirring.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Israel has an easy journalistic style and clips along at a good pace. She coins some witty phrases—‘the Cult of Independence’—and often breaks for the ironic aside…. An intriguing balance of cultural history and pointed detail.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Bachelor Girl takes a revealing look at just how far the single woman has come. For those girls and the country’s women in general, Bachelor Girl serves as a reminder, as well as a yardstick: You may have come a long way, but don’t forget the hardy souls who made it possible.”
—BookPage
“Impressive…. Israel’s witty and provocative look at a topic dear to many women deserves wide readership.”
—Publishers Weekly
“You can take all the glowing adjectives you know, lay them in a row, and still not have enough to accurately describe this 294-pager that will make your heart sing.”
—Massachusetts Post-Gazette
“Betsy Israel’s Bachelor Girl is the history of women in the U.S.”
—More magazine Book Pick
Copyright
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BACHELOR GIRL. Copyright © 2002 by Elizabeth Israel. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Adobe Digital Edition April 2009 ISBN 978-0-06-194074-3
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Notes
1
Some early feminists pointed out that the numbers needed interpretation. Women lived longer because, never soldiers or bar brawlers, they often kept their bodies intact past age thirty. They didn’t leave home as often as men, meaning that when census inspectors called, they were in. There also now simply seemed to be more women, because so many formerly hidden middle-class women were out on the streets.
2
Some single women headed west—by themselves. The Oregon Land Donation Act of 1850 was originally intended to entice spinsters and younger women to come west and marry homesteaders. Changes to the law during the next decade allowed several hundred women to stake land claims of their own.
3
There were a few categories of spinster exemption. For example, if a woman had lived a privileged life on the stage or been a famous painter’s model or dancer, she would be presumed to possess a stage trunk full of romantic stories forever putting her out of the banal spinster category. The other “out” was the widow-manqué, the spinster who had been engaged to a brave soldier, dead in battle, his picture forever on her bureau. An excellent widow-manqué can be found in Jane, one of the two spinstered Sawyer sisters in Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, who lost her great love to the Civil War. Although Jane had “never left Riverboro in all the years that lay between and [had] grown into… [a] spare New England spinster… underneath was still the faint echo of that wild heartbeat of girlhood.” Her sister, in comparison, was hard, unyielding, and nasty. And occasionally a spinster character might redeem herself by marrying late, miraculously shedding her dusty paper chains. A great twentieth-century example is Miss Parthenia Ann Hawks of the musical Show Boat (1926), who’d lived “a barren spinster’s life” before her marriage to Cap’n Andy.
4
The corollary of the single woman who refused to bear healthy white children was her married contemporary who sought ways to abort unwanted children. During the mid-nineteenth century, in the decades just before the abortion outlaw, a common image in the American press was “the Aborting Matron,” a piggy, self-satisfied wife downing poison or else portrayed as demonically possessed.
5
The majority of applicants turned back at Ellis Island were unable to prove that they had waiting relatives. Either that, or they had physical problems (usually eye trouble) and/or mental disorders. Being female and single—and especially if there were no waiting relatives—was at times as incriminating as rheumy eyes. Many, many lone female travelers were sent back.
6
The most famous ghettoizing process was under way at the phone company. Telephone operator had been a respectable job, meaning a male job, until corporate expansion created several tiers of more challenging positions. By as early as 1902, the Bell Telephone System employed 37,000 female switchboard operators. Their rationale: Women had “more calming” voices and were “more patient.”
7
Historian Eleanor Flexner notes that it took four pages of small type to list all the male occupations women took over during the war. Without the influence of World War II–style propaganda, women of all ages had trained to build armaments, to repair furnaces, while a very large corps of nurses traveled, often driving ambulances, between battle sites. Many continued their work, putting themselves at enormous risk throughout the flu pandemic of 1918.
8
The saddest new-dependency story belongs to blond thirties screen idol Jean Harlow, who was shoved into the film business by an insensitive, piggy mother and a lecherous stepfather. Never satisfied she’d done enough for them, they pushed her harder, and spent a great deal of her money. Eventually she broke free of them but had only a few years on her own. She died at twenty-six of a botched abortion.
9
Most American medical schools placed a 5 percent quo
ta on female admissions, 1915–1945; Columbia and Harvard law schools still excluded women applicants until 1937, as did the New York City Bar Association.
10
It’s interesting that Sinclair Lewis, the man, seems to have had a personal change of heart about career women when his own wife, former journalist Dorothy Thompson, became exasperated with marriage and his drinking and went off to cover World War II. He left her in 1937, claiming that her work had destroyed their relationship. “American women are like that,” he concluded, “killers of talent.”
11
Some of the best recorded sex in all thirties literature can be found not in the sexologized males of the period but in Mary McCarthy, particularly in the interwoven short stories The Company She Keeps. On a long train ride after leaving her husband, a sophisticated, educated young woman, a self-styled radical and intellectual, finds herself with no one to talk to and so chats morosely with a red-cheeked Midwestern type, probably a salesman. They get violently drunk, then for hours on end perform every imaginable sex act in his berth. In the aftermath, he declares that he will leave his wife or take her for his permanent mistress. She claims to have been blacked out through most of it and, recalling the rest, would like to jump from the train. In the end, ignoring his entreaties, she decides to collect it as an experience, knowing the purple love bites and hand marks still visible on her buttocks will go soon enough, and she will be once more her sophisticated self.
12
“Togetherness” grew from the work of famed sociologist Talcott Parsons who, along with other academics, wrote long tracts on “modern personality” as it related to the structure of families. As that translated, the modern family unit had to shed the old-fashioned day-to-day contact with the extended family. “No home is big enough for two families,” Parsons wrote. “Particularly of two different generations, with opposite theories on child training.” As one magazine put it in 1954, “The modern family, as a singular unit, pools brains, looks, activities and thinks like an army platoon and competes against other platoons in the neighborhood.” Single women, through with school, momentarily adrift in life, were sometimes invited back to stay a while with the platoon. But like traditional spinsters, they were often given specific tasks to carry out in exchange for board.