Bachelor Girl_ The Secret History of Single Women in the Twentieth Century - Betsy Israel [1]
More so than any other living arrangement, the single life is deeply influenced—haunted may be a better word—by cultural imagery. And the single woman herself has had a starring role in the mass imagination for many years. Admit it or not, most of us have our fixed ideas of single womanhood and at some point we all indulge in the familiar ritual of speculation: How did she end up that way? How can she stand it? And how might she correct what must be a dull, lonely, and potentially heartbreaking, meaning possibly childless, situation?
One hundred and fifty years ago, Sarah Grimké, tough “singleside” and “womanist,” wrote that marriage had ceased to be the “sine qua non of female existence.” In every decade since, many, many women have come to agree with her. And they have inspired more than the familiar ritual of pitying speculation and disdain. Single women seem forever to unnerve, anger, and unwittingly scare large swaths of the population, both female and male.
Writing from an academic viewpoint, historian Nina Auerbach notes, “Though the nature of the [single] threat shifts…the idea remains of contagion by values that are contrary to the best and proudest instincts of humanity.”
A woman writing in the New York Times some years back put it plainly: “There’s something about a woman standing by herself. People wonder what she wants.”
The media, in all its antique and more recognizable forms, has long served as the conduit for this stereotypical single imagery. Reporters, novelists, and filmmakers again and again have introduced the single icons of the moment by organizing them into special interest groups with neon nicknames: Spinsters! Working Girls! Flappers! Beatniks! Career Women! That’s the job, of course, to discover and explore newly evolving social phenomena. In the process, however, they’ve repeatedly turned the new single into a nasty cartoon or a caricature.
Most of the standard single icons have been portrayed as so depressing, so needy and unattractive, that for years women who even slightly matched the descriptions had a hard time in life. But gradually all variety of single types began to flourish within their own tiny worlds and eventually found that they might stake a claim in the larger one. And contrary to the melancholy depictions, the weepy confessionals, many audacious and self-supporting single women had a lot of fun along the way. They continue to. And so the press continues to cover them as well as what is still perceived as their “condition.”
My own young single life, and how it abruptly ended, makes a strong case study in the power of single imagery and the way our mass media distorts it. That particular ending also marks the beginning of this book.
SNAPSHOTS FROM A SINGLE LIFE
In 1986, I was twenty-seven, living alone, and working in publishing—a youthful life phase that I’d spent years trying to organize and had enjoyed, until the day I got up and heard the news. According to bulletins on the Today show, National Public Radio, and every local newscast, I had officially become a Single Woman. To summarize briefly what newscasters milked for half an hour: A study now infamous for its flaws had revealed an alarming decrease in marriage “prospects” among women anywhere in age between twenty-five and forty. If, like me, you’d “postponed matrimony” due to your career or your generational tendency to cohabit, you’d now confront the tragic reality of your birth cohort: There weren’t enough men and potential husbands for you and all of your friends.
It seemed ridiculous—a prespinster at twenty-seven? No hope of marrying at forty? Yet two researchers from Harvard and Yale were assuring me that my life and the lives of just about everyone I knew were now ruptured.
Before all this—as in the day before—I had been merely me: an attractive, short, nervous person who did well in jobs requiring “girls” with excitable temperaments. At the time I was a writer for several similar