Bachelor Girl (2 page)

There are hundreds of relevant novels, ranging from
The House of Mirth, Sister Carrie,
and
After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie
to
Fear of Flying, Looking for Mr. Goodbar,
and
Bridget Jones’s Diary.
There are some fascinating academic studies. And there are many interesting if sometimes repetitive journalistic offerings, usually magazine articles (a day/night/week in the life of a single) that grow into books and/or oral histories.

Some of the best oral histories become meditations, as in
The Improvised Woman,
a wonderful book by journalist Marcelle Clements, in which she alternates subjects’ remarks with her own thoughts—all to explain how thousands of women, thirty-five to fifty-five, found themselves permanently single and raising children alone. This she viewed as nothing less than a radical rewriting of the social contract. Because of this proposition, the book was trashed by critics as “too seventies,” meaning that it seemed too celebratory, too self-consciously groundbreaking—
too feminist
.

I may as well warn you that there is no way to discuss single life at this point without getting “feminist.” Nearly all American women will for some part of their adult lives exist singly—that is a statistical fact. Some of us will enjoy it, some will feel relieved or depressed or will have no particular views on the subject. And yet we all know that “single” as a social entity has its unique complications. Namely, other people’s sexist attitudes.

A Columbia University senior sighs and says, “You know that, as a woman, single is childlike, younger, and that a mature individual forms combinations…. If, as a woman, you do not, you will come to understand
that ‘single,’ as a word, begins with the same letter as ‘stigma.’…‘Cancer,’ I am sorry to say, has the same number of letters.”

A thirty-six-year-old graphic designer is less glib: “I see my married friends and female relatives mostly when the ‘other half’ is away. They come down to my loft and it’s, like, they’re so amazed to find that it’s really specifically decorated…. And this is even if they’ve
been there before
. It’s so insulting. I had one friend, a school chum, who seemed paralyzed by my having Le Creuset cookware. It was, like, do you have to have a wedding license to apply for heavy French pots?”

No one has the ability to make the many presumptuous views of single women disappear. But the impact might be diminished by some clear sense of where these sad-girl stereotypes originated, and how, as in a mass game of telephone, they became sadder and more grotesque over time. To track evolving views of single women, I read selectively through one hundred years of newspapers, magazines, and novels. I studied advertisements, caricatures, photographic style, fashion, theater, movies (silent, serial, sound), radio, and TV. I collected high school artifacts (filmstrips, home-ec primers, yearbooks). And I’ve encapsulated relevant academic opinion and research as it filtered down into the mainstream culture.

Most interesting to me and in many ways most useful, I read diaries of women who’d lived singly in 1866–69, 1884–88, 1900, 1942, 1951, 1961–62, 1973–76, and 1999.

A FEW NOTES ON APPROACH

The roots of single phobia curl back into antiquity. But I’ve started my investigation with the industrial revolution, and the emergence of displaced single women, specifically the middle-class spinster and the immigrant working girl. I’ve organized the chapters according to the single icons that came after—factory girls, “shoppies,” steno girls, new women, bohemians, Gibson Girls, and the numerous other types that followed them across the twentieth century and into the present. But
Bachelor Girl
is not a simple pictorial timeline, a semiotic tour that charges through decades, admires
the era’s single pinup, then rushes on. Nor is it encyclopedic history. I have combined my historical single archetypes with their rough counterparts now—mostly women in their midthirties and early forties, the point that marks what one magazine editor, forty-four, calls “The Pass-Over Ceremony.” As she explains: “In your twenties, you’re a free bird. You are an unmarried person who has options she hasn’t yet exercised. After the pass over…it’s metamorphosis…. You are viewed, and you know it, as a different woman. An unmarried, as opposed to a merely single, person.”

Along with this primary peer group, I interviewed all over the age map: women in their late teens and twenties, a big eager group now in their fifties and sixties, a few in their seventies, one voluble eighty-five-year-old, plus the occasional ten- or twelve-year-old with strong views about independence as it might affect future careers in veterinary science. Except for the under-twelves, all but one wanted their name and any identifying detail changed. I agreed, of course, but asked that my subjects choose their own pseudonyms. This request seemed appropriate, since many of the earliest single working girls invented fantasy names for themselves. Whether stuck in a factory, behind a store counter, or cleaning someone’s house, the Marys, Hannahs, and Bridgets of the world became for ten to fifteen hours a day Absintheia, Serenissima, Cassamandrina, or my favorite, Briar Desdemona Woods, née Mary O., a seamstress circa 1870 noted for her speed and small stitches.

Because I’ve drawn from the popular media, in its infant and more mature forms, I have narrowed my dig to the feminine icons most consistently held out to represent American womanhood. My primary iconography, therefore, is white, if not always predictably middle-class. Of course women of (all) color have lived out, and continue to live, the single drama, and their personal narratives intersect at many points with those I’ve emphasized. But they make few primary appearances in the public record until occasional stories on the “sad,” “dreary,” or “dead-end” world of the “Negro single,” circa 1966. (It would be impossible, anyway, to do justice to the complexities of the black single experience in this volume. It requires and deserves its own study, and I sincerely hope someone takes on the challenge.) Likewise, I have not included much material on self-defined les
bian women. But I do work through the various ways that “spinster” and “lesbian” have overlapped at times to describe an afeminine woman who, according to prevailing dicta, ranked as a human mutation.

Finally, I have pretty much settled the single woman in New York City, specifically Manhattan, where right now an estimated 1.95 million single women live among some 1.4 million single men. Of course the historical trail of the single leads through Europe and New England, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, and just about every abandoned suburb and small town in America. (As early as 1868,
The Nation
noted “…the city is the habitat of the single. The country town or small city is an uncongenial clime for the species.”) But New York City exaggerates the trends and figures—as well as the nasty remarks—that are prevalent everywhere.

As of this writing, 42 percent of the American female population over age eighteen is technically single. Most have never married, although I must note that it’s difficult to say precisely how many in this grouping are gay. (Census takers cannot by law ask, most gay-rights organizations are too financially strapped to conduct precise nationwide counts on their own, and of course many respondents would not answer truthfully. Thus, figures vary dramatically.) The never-weds are followed in number by widows and then the divorced, a number that fluctuates constantly.

Some census officials, and the professors and authors I’ll call census spectators, predict a drop in the age of first marriage (now 26.1 for men; 25.2 for women) and an “increased post-collegiate married cohort.” Others predict just the opposite, describing a country inhabited by urban “tribes,” groups of thirtyish women and men who have extended the college-era concept of the group house into adult life. (The TV phenomenon
Friends
picked up on this years ago.)

Whatever the prevailing trends, most every woman will one day find herself in the single subcategory, marked as I was as a single type, an inexplicably stubborn and undesirable female alien. And there will be no escaping it. As a prescient single woman wrote, in 1955, for
Mademoiselle
: “We are never allowed to forget what the billboards, television, movies, and the press would have us remember.”

That is the story
Bachelor Girl
has to tell.

IN THE SPINSTER MUSEUM

It seems safe to say that in 2002 nobody is a spinster and that a certain percentage of the population is not entirely aware of what a spinster is. For those in the latter category, I offer a brief tour of the Classical Spinster Museum.

It’s an odd and dusty exhibition, and yet pieces of the collection are still scattered about the culture. A forty-two-year-old pianist who called herself “Mildred—definitely Mildred” says that her relatives give her money as she leaves any family event, in case, as an unmarried, childlike person, she doesn’t have her own. Another woman, thirty-eight, describes phone calls from relatives and friends who are “really calling to make sure I have not died and, as no one noticed, I’ve gone ahead and decomposed.” A single stockbroker, thirty-six, says, “My sister asks me to do errands that often require me to stand on long lines and this is ‘reasonable’ to her because she has children and I do not. What
is
this presumption?”

I’d call it an essential part of the spinster legacy.

IN WHICH THE SPINSTER ARRIVES

The first spinsters appeared in thirteenth-century France and a bit later in Germany and England as spinners of cotton and wool. They were not yet spinsters but
femmes seules
—unwed young girls, orphaned relatives, and widows of the Crusades who performed their tasks within the self-sustained family home. Most stayed there. Yet there were some who lived independently, dealing for themselves with weavers and textile merchants and often earning their praise. As late as 1783, in a
Description of Manchester,
we learn that “weavers were…obliged to pay more for the spinning than the
price allowed by the merchants ‘but darst not complain…lest lose the spinner.’”

Long before the industrial revolution—and before the implementation of a restrictive British common law—single women worked on their own in other ways. Town and city records, portions of which have been published in academic papers, indicate that unwed women in medieval France, England, and Germany traded in raw wool, silk, and rare spices. Some engaged in foreign trading and owned their own ships, and a few are said to have managed large estates and breweries.

On into the seventeenth century,
spinster
was used to identify a respectable employment category. When later that century the French began using
spinster
to indicate an unwed woman, the term was understood to be descriptive: a woman on her own, for any number of reasons, and in need of an income.

In England, however, another spinsterly model was in the making: the Old Maid, who first took form as a loud, bosomy theater grotesque known as “the Dame.” Here was a new female creature so vain, so rabidly flirtatious she seemed unaware that the men she desired found her repulsive. For best effect, the dame was played by a man. Even in France, where the view of the serious, dedicated spinner prevailed, the playwright Molière created a protospinster, his own prehistoric Old Maid, in the form of Bélise, a conceited and oblivious character in
Les Femmes savantes
(1672). Bélise has never wed, and without companionship, talking to or arguing with herself or whomever happens to be standing there, she has come to believe that she’s a genius. Just as the British recognized the dame as a harridan with access to rouge pots, so French spectators recognized this blathering female as a deluded
idiote
.

By the late eighteenth century, these apparitions—the spooky lone woman who was neither brilliant nor beautiful—had coalesced. The resulting character, often set down at the edges of good society, appears first in
The Expedition of Humphry Clinker
by Tobias Smollett (1771), a novel reexamined in a 1990 doctoral thesis, “Singleness of Heart,” by scholar Susan Leslie Katz. The spinster part is small but highly detailed, as if the curtain had risen on a sitting-room drama and there, standing rigidly far
stage left, was an odd-looking woman in conversation with herself. As the creature inches her way center stage, a male voice relates the woeful tale of one Tabitha Bramble. (The name Tabitha is classical spinster—similar to Tituba, the Caribbean servant at Salem, Massachusetts, who allegedly taught the spells and charms that led Sarah Good and nineteen others to be burned or hanged for witchcraft. And “Tabitha” would be long associated with single women—tabbies, tabby cats, would become common nineteenth-century single nicknames—and with witches. The baby witch on the beloved 1960s TV series
Bewitched
was named Tabitha. The grandmother witch, Endora, was exceptionally catty, a real Tabby. And, to switch popular forms, Dorothy L. Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey called his troops of excellent war-widow detectives “the Cattery.”) But back to the tragically appointed Miss Bramble:

And I leave out her dog, a cursed animal. Tabitha kicked it.

Before the debuts of the Dickensian sideshow freaks—the world-renowned bride, Miss Havisham, Miss Wade of
Little Dorrit,
and Rosa Dartle of
David Copperfield
—and even before Hawthorne’s Hepzibah, the “mildewed piece of aristocracy” wandering her way through
The House of the Seven Gables,
many voices articulated the case against the old maid. In 1748 the
Oxford English Dictionary
defined her as “any spiteful or ill-natured female gossip or tattler.” Alexander Pope made it personal: “My soul abhors the tasteless dry embrace/of a stale virgin with a winter face.” Wordsworth commented with cool remove—describing a maiden withering on a stalk—while Henry Fielding expressed pure and immediate dis
gust: “She did not resemble a cow so much in her breath, as in the two brown globes which she carried before her.” A few years later he added this advice: “Young ladies” dared not venture too close to one of these “types for the girl was sure to be bitten by one, as by a mad dog.” That is, if the maid in question still had teeth. A widespread public discussion had established that the old maid’s teeth were rotting at a faster-than-average rate. Without explaining exactly why, one medical treatise, circa 1766, featured a spirited debate about whether or not the maid should have them all pulled to avoid embarrassment “to one’s relations” caused by rotting incisors.

In her early incarnations, the old maid was not associated with the industrious and respected spinner. Rather, she was a toothless parody of the uneducated minor noblewoman who had been trained for nothing more than marriage and then had failed to capture a husband. Just think of Cinderella’s stepsisters. (It’s not surprising that this groping sadistic duo emerged in their distinctive modern form in the Perrault version of the fairy tale published in seventeenth-century France.)

But the industrial revolution and its aftermath would permanently blur the distinctions between the goodly spinner and the crazy old maid.

Once the self-sustaining mercantile household—the entire working system of artisan, apprentice, and journeyman—collapsed, those who’d worked there, the spinners included, were left to negotiate a place within the new economy. Many spinsters sought work inside the textile mills, although the mills favored the very young girl and then usually fired her when she turned twenty, or at whatever point she began to seem “older,” meaning tired and likely to complain. More mature spinsters took custom sewing or quilting assignments known as “out work.” When they could. The competition was intense, there was never enough work to begin with, and many were forced to quit. A few daring misses took more public positions in small token or “cent” shops, but the large majority moved in with former employers or distant relatives, who supplied room and board in exchange for household work and child care. Those without any connections advertised. Governess, companion, nurse, fine seamstress—these positions would be pinned onto the spinster’s image like a wilted, brown-edged corsage.

Among the castaways were hundreds of unlucky upper-class girls. In
some cases they’d been orphaned and their family homes lost to male relatives through the machinations of British inheritance laws. And some stood to lose prospective mates. With the industrial revolution, it had become common practice among the upper classes to postpone marriage until the groom had established himself financially. But in both Europe and the United States, many men had quickly learned to live well as bachelors, renting private rooms, joining private clubs, taking mistresses. Now, when the intended had suffered so drastic a setback, there was even less urgency to wed. As one MP put it, “Before us lies the disaster we have…watched coming. A girl who has trained for the arts of wifehood…schooled in the gracious arts, who fails so much as to wed? We witness the unfolding of a tragical redundant class.”

These perceived changes were amply documented in the 1851 British census. It seemed that there were in England 405,000 more women than men, creating a surplus in all segments of the female population.
*
Known as redundant or superfluous women, they officially became a social problem, and one with no easy remedy. Those who worked would compete for a limited number of jobs. And there were those who could not quite bring themselves to work. The pamphlet
Dedicated to the Refined Young Lady,
reprinted consistently from 1860 to 1905, dictated that one might make her way, without loss of station, in lace making, fancy needlework, or as a “paid reading partner.” She might also, under an assumed name, sell canned jams and jellies, write love stories for magazines, or give “dramatic readings.” The pursuit of an actual job, however, was impossible, for to work in an office, “to stamp envelopes…would greatly decrease the likelihood of marriage.” The better girl might work “for cake” but not “for bread.” (It should also be said that this girl might not be cut out to do real work of any kind. The résumé of Mattie Silver, the central female character in Edith Wharton’s
Ethan Frome,
typifies the situation: “Her equipment, though varied, was inadequate. She could trim a hat, make molasses
candy, recite ‘The Curfew Shall Not Ring Tonight,’ and play ‘The Lost Chord,’ and a pot-pourri from ‘Carmen.’”)

Yet many, of course, were left with few choices. The Brontë sisters, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, were among those who routinely made visits to local “intelligence,” or employment, offices to apply for the scant number of jobs hundreds had applied for already. In Charlotte’s case, the jobs she eventually secured provided background and details for three of the most complex single heroines in all literature: the stoical Jane Eyre, Caroline Helstone of
Shirley
(1849), and, my favorite, Lucy Snowe of
Villette
(1853), a boarding-school teacher so fiercely self-contained—she has suffered a severe trauma she cannot speak of—that Jane Eyre, in comparison, seems like a gay lady at Mr. Rochester’s house party. When left alone at the school during a holiday, Lucy suffers one of the most realistic nervous breakdowns in all literature. If not strictly autobiographical, this episode suggests that the author at a young age knew the misery of enforced, impenetrable solitude.

William Makepeace Thackeray wrote, intending to praise Charlotte Brontë, that she was “that fiery little eager brave…tremulous creature!” As he explained, “[I] see that rather than any other earthly good…she wants some Tomkins to love her and to be in love with her. But you see this is a little bit of a creature, without a penny of good looks, thirty years old, I should think, buried in the country.” She was a spinster. But at least a spinster with talent.

With so many others lacking literary or any other talents, what was Great Britain to do? The most famed proposal, entirely serious, came from one W. R. Gregg, a conservative commentator, in 1862. In his view it was essential that the British “restore by emigration of women that proportion between the sexes in the old country and in the newer ones.” The difficulty, he imagined, would be “chiefly mechanical. It is not easy to convey a multitude of women across the Atlantic or the Antipodes by an ordinary means…. Totransport the half million from where they are redundant to where they are wanted at an average of 30 passengers a ship would require 10,000 vessels, or at least 10,000 voyages.” (To clarify, the only transport of women out of Great Britain for reasons of marital status had occurred years earlier, when “purchase brides” had been shipped to the Virginia Colony for the “price of transport.”)