Bachelor Girl (21 page)

Then, unexpectedly, Miss Vale falls in love with a younger man and seems to change, but not in the way we anticipate. Instead of becoming a “real” woman—warm and sexually receptive to her husband—she becomes a female martyr. Reworking a classic spinster story line, Miss Vale relinquishes her man to the one person on earth she feels for at all, her younger sister. The girl is nineteen or so, an eager, sweet college kid; the hero is
thirty-seven. At one point, watching her fiancé and sister dance, remarking on how “young” they seem, she realizes that she has missed the boat or, more appropriately, gotten on the wrong elevator. She lets them go. During the Depression years, she might not have been quite so giving.

In
Baby Face
(1933), a heartless-woman masterpiece, Barbara Stanwyck, a speakeasy bartender, puts on a decent dress and works her way up within a corporation, starting on the first floor as a filing clerk. We know immediately that she’s an operator. She casually asks a colleague how she got
such
a great perm. She asks another one where she got the
fabulous
shoes. She shows up with the perm and identical shoes the next day. Soon she’s headed up the corporate skyscraper. On each new floor (accounting, mortgages, et cetera) she’s transformed: better clothes and hairstyles, an entirely new professional manner. At each stop she lures then abruptly drops at least one ardent lover, although one man she keeps around—a strategist and booster, who’s advised her and helped finance her climb. Finally we see her at the top, draped in one of those sparkly floor-length gowns so many thirties heroines wear just to swish around the house. In this key scene, the lover and friend charges into her office. He needs cash. He’s desperate. And he asks her point-blank for some jewels he once helped her buy. She stares at him. Thinks. And then she delivers a heartless-woman manifesto: “I have to think of myself. I’ve gone through a lot to get those things. My life has been bitter and hard. I’m not like other women. All the gentleness and kindness in me has been killed. All I’ve got is those things. Without them, I’d be nothing…I’d have to go back to what I was! No! I won’t do it, I tell you, I won’t.”

And she doesn’t.

In
Dangerous
(1935), Bette Davis plays an actress who when refused a divorce, tries to kill her husband by smashing the passenger side of their car, his side, into a tree. (The staged accident was a common heartless-woman maneuver that would be adopted by the overly anxious, neurotic single bitch of the late forties.) To her dismay, the husband lives as a cripple. As a heartless bitch, naturally, she has to leave him, and ruin her own life—retiring from the stage and wandering the city drunk. One evening, a fan spies her out having her liquid supper. He comes over and compli
ments her, though she alternately ignores him and denies who she is. After much back-and-forth and many drinks, she admits her identity. A romance grows slowly. When he gets too romantic, however, she barks, “Oh, don’t be so
intense
!” He asks her to marry him. Her response: “Oh, it makes such an
issue
of everything!” And, as it happens, she’s still married to the man she disfigured. After more drinks and many fights, plus a failed rehab sequence, she goes back to the husband, begrudgingly attempting to act the wife. Let’s put it this way: If the guy could have moved, he would have killed her.

The greatest entry in the heartless-woman genre is
Three on a Match
(1932). In this bizarre tale, three old school friends meet by chance, each having turned out just as a childhood prologue had predicted. Joan Blondell, recently out of prison for theft, works as a chorus girl. Bette Davis, very young, skinny, and timid, is a stenographer. Elegant Ann Dvorak is married, wealthy, and has an adorable child.

They meet for lunch. Ann, at one point, turns to Joan, the ex-con, and says, “It’s
you
I really envy—your independence and your courage…I accepted the first man who wanted to marry me—I thought it meant comfort and security.” The two friends stare at Ann in disbelief. She goes on: “Oh, I suppose I should be the happiest woman in the world—a beautiful home, successful husband, and nice youngster. But somehow the things that make other people happy leave me cold. I guess something must have been left out of my makeup.”

As if on cue, they light their Chesterfields—three to one match. According to superstition, one says, the last to get her cigarette in there and lit will suffer a horrible fate. In this case, no big surprise, that’s Ann Dvorak. Whatever it was “left out of [her] makeup” kicks in like a drug.

She flees her home, taking the child with her onto a cruise. Then, leaving him alone in her stateroom, she wanders the ballrooms looking for men. She picks out a scary sort, a gangster with a round face and tight striped suit, and off they go at port, leaving the boy on the ship. (The father eventually rescues him.) Inexplicably, then, she cuts off all contact with her family and begins a life of petty crime. One day months later the husband runs into the girlfriends, Bette and Joan, and decides to make a
new life with them—that they will be the “three.” He marries Joan and hires steno girl Bette as the little boy’s governess.

Another day months later Ann shows up outside the house, her thuggish boyfriend looming behind. Annoyed, he pushes the ragged-looking Ann toward a smart-looking woman approaching in furs. Ann looks up to see Joan, her replacement, home from shopping. She asks after the boy, then gets to the point. She needs money. Joan gives her a little, and Ann is gone, back to her gangster. She gives him the money; he shoves her. “Hey!” he shouts, “ain’t that dame married to your husband?”

Throughout these years, single women were objects of suspicion. Perhaps they worked when men did not. Perhaps broke and alone, they hitchhiked from place to place—as unwomanly a thing as a knife fight. In mass-movie fantasy, some grew into self-contained man-eating monsters.

But most real women, like most men, were just frustrated. They had been forced to take an unexpected detour from what they once would have called “the normal things.” And this tangent had lasted so long that the once-upon-a-time state known as Normal now seemed exotic. Especially for the young among them—all those who had grown up without dance crazes and arguments about flappers and smoking. Asked what she remembered about these years of “massive economic dislocation” (as common a phrase as “Jazz Age”), Bess the bookkeeper said, “I wanted panty hose. I wanted a room that had fewer than four sisters and a cousin in it. I wanted to get married—well, forget that. Forget the room while we’re at it. Panty hose.”

THE SWING OF THINGS

The original new women, now in their fifties, had organized their networks and pushed hard for their causes—aid to indigent families with children, civil rights, minimum-wage laws, nationally sponsored health care—and they had a stalwart ally in Eleanor Roosevelt. Several of the circle headed New Deal agencies, and as a unified block they spoke out about the unspoken everything, from the harassment of unwed mothers to the instant need for antilynching legislation. Now they looked toward Europe.

Genevieve Parkhurst asked in a 1935 issue of
Harper’s
: “Are the women of America going to realize the destiny marked out for them when they began their long march toward emancipation? Or are they, like the women of Germany, to stand accused of having betrayed themselves?”

The American Women’s Association called upon all American women to fight fascism, which dictated that women stay in their homes and reproduce for the glory of the Fatherland.

I imagine average American women hearing this and blinking up into the light, confused, exhausted, and mumbling something like “panty hose.” As historian Lois Scharf wrote in
Holding Their Own
(1982): “The massive economic dislocation…riveted the attention of Americans along the entire ideological spectrum…events overseas…[were] completely subsumed by anxiety…demoralized…disintegrating families,” and within a few years, she might have added, the complete indifference of many young women.

In 1935, shortly before her death, Charlotte Perkins Gilman lamented that the original new women had failed to train successors. Others admitted that they had, in fact, alienated many young women by publicly insulting the popular culture of the 1920s. All that was true. But if many young women were apolitical, it was not because they felt excluded by older feminists. With the exception of the very wealthy and the very lucky, most young women had missed out on the basic things they’d been raised to expect, as one young woman told the
New York Times:
“dating, driving, horseback riding…. I never went ice skating or out dancing…. One year our school play was canceled because the stage was considered unsafe and there was no money to replace it. Also we had no sets and costumes.”

As the Depression finally eased, this young woman, like thousands of others, would officially attempt to have fun. As early teenagers, these “kids” threw parties, listened to music—big-band, swing—that offended their parents, evolved an inside slang (“ugly duck” and “scrag” versus the “fly” or “nifty” girl), and traveled in high school packs, kid constituencies that, as in the 1920s, formed a discernible if less extravagant youth group.

As one salesman put it, there was scattered throughout the country a whole generation, sixteen to twenty, “none of whom have owned a second
pair of shoes. Can they know what it is to have a closet full of shirts? Wearing the same clothes every day for weeks, months on end…. How many recordings does the average youngster own? No need to start counting…. Imagine having your own radio!”

This atmosphere was captured by one of my oldest subjects, who declines to give her age but says, “My name is Ida-Mae, that’s how old I am”:

But, like others, she encountered resistance to what she called “the college end of the bargain.” With the wane of the crisis came a renewal of public arguments about the purpose of higher education for women. Why, and especially after this enormous social mess, would the average girl want more than a home? And if that was to be her destination, was it fair to men, who had suffered, that she take up needed space in classrooms? The
Atlantic Monthly
, 1937, solemnly noted: “When the point is reached where, in order to secure a higher salary, she must study for a master’s degree, she may realize with a sudden anguish that her chance of marriage [is] growing more remote and that the pattern of her life is more and more following the lines of spinsterhood.”

During the late 1930s universities were referred to as “spinster facto
ries.” And as in the Victorian period, prescribed remedies to this factory life turned up in the media. A typical
Life
feature demonstrated how a mother might work on a girl when she was young so that when it came time for college that girl would already be married. One 1937 story consisted of several panels in which the chosen girl, Susan, eleven, was pictured deep in training to be “a winning female!”

In one panel, Susan makes beds. In another, she studies the way her mother fixes her potentially “beguiling” nails. In still another photo, Susan sets the table. “Homemaking doesn’t come instinctively to a teenaged girl,”
Life
explained. “It’s easier to teach a little girl than to nag at an older one…. Now the child can do simple meal planning and cooking, creditable bed making and charming table setting.”

It was a familiar process. Evidence is dragged forth to prove that what society wants for single girls is what these girls want for themselves. Back in the nineteenth century, no intelligent young woman wished for bedrest, the prescribed “cure” for hysterical antifeminine behavior. Yet after all she’d been through—the shrieking fights with mother! Her insane demands not to wed!—wasn’t bedrest what she secretly craved? Likewise, after the Depression, after all she’d been through, did she really want to do tough academic work? Ignore for a moment the actual facts, for example, that 15 percent more women were enrolled in college in 1938 than in 1933. Instead consider some of the expert arguments.

To begin with, the number of female professionals had increased by a mere 8.5 percent during the 1920s. If single women were serious about careers, as opposed to mere jobs, wouldn’t that figure be higher? It was further noted that professional women earned less than their male counterparts, so much less that they could not possibly be serious about sustained and important careers. And even in “female” professions, men outearned them. In 1939 male teachers averaged $1,953 a year, women just $1,394; male social workers received $1,718 compared with women’s $1,442.

Young women continued to draw up their own personal blueprints, and to present their own plans. And they were continually besieged with these retorts. In one 1938
Coronet
piece, a twenty-year-old relates a conversation she had with her mother. The daughter said she wanted to see
France; her mother replied, “So did Amelia Earhart,” the aviator who’d recently gone missing. “See to getting yourself settled! Figure that and someday you can take a trip.”

Those who took the solo trips—college, careers without husbands, forays to Greenwich Village—found it no more difficult, than those who’d gone before. But they were viewed differently in the post-Depression world. Why now would anyone risk their security? In novels and stories, we find images of women missing more than their hearts; they are falling apart.