Bachelor Girl_ The Secret History of Single Women in the Twentieth Century - Betsy Israel [100]
She was happily “astray.” Or at least surviving nicely. And she wrote home to say as much on expensive stationery that had on it the word “Miss.” One 1957 Science Digest survey of 6,750 single women, age twenty-five to fifty, reported, “We now seem to be in a nation with a certain group of females who do not look forward to getting married…. they keenly desire other experiences outside the normative marital pattern. They may not always understand why they feel as they seem to. Yet they nonetheless do.”
From another report, written at the University of Michigan: “Whatever secrets they’re not telling…we can now safely say that for certain of these girls, the search for a mate may take an entirely unpredictable path. They are waiting. Even if this, from any reasoned point of view, allows their options to give way.”
One popular holding pattern was to take up residency inside a parent-approved, high-rise nunnery. The YWCA offered small rooms for rent, these regarded as a bit déclassé, and even less glamorous were the barebones old-style boardinghouses. Most nervous first-time émigrés fantasized about the exclusive all-girls hotels on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, specifically the Barbizon, a serene Italianate landmark on Sixty-third Street that was to rooming houses what Smith and Wellesley were to colleges. As the familiar ads read, “Some of the world’s most successful women”—and that included Grace Kelly and Gene Tierney—“have been Barbizon Girls.”
The copywriters left out an essential word: briefly.
A nineteen-year-old resident explained to one of the many afternoon papers, for one of the many “Barbizon Life” stories: “It is the place where you go when you leave something—college; your immediate family; your old life. And for that it’s perfect—as long as you don’t stay too long.” (The oldest resident, usually juxtaposed in photos with a young freckled preppy type, was in her eighties. She was famous for playing the house pipe organ at the afternoon teas.)
In 1958 Gael Greene, then of the New York Post, wrote an extensive ten-part series devoted to her twenty-three-year-old life at the Barbizon, attempting to do for the high-rise residence hotels what Dorothy Richardson had done for shabby lodging quarters fifty years earlier. Like so many other recent graduates, Greene had come to the city “seeking something indefinable—something to do. A rent-paying job, romance, the alchemy that will transform an ordinary girl into an extraordinary woman.”
What she found at her first destination, the glamorous Barbizon, was an overheated planet of lonely women, spinning in an orbit that paralleled that of the city but did not overlap. As she wrote,
…a phone that does not ring. Tears of Homesickness. Gentle smiles of resignation…these are the marks—worn bravely and bravely concealed—by girls and young women alone. There are thousands in every corner of every city. They have no one habitat. Many live in cells—at the “exclusive Barbizon Hotel for Women,” at the Salvation Army’s Evangeline House, at the YWCA. I have lived among them. Each cell is an island. Each island is surrounded by depths of fear:
Fear of Failure
Fear of Spinsterhood
Fear of Sexual assault in a Subway station
And those unknown, inexplicable fears that dull the complexion and glaze the eye.
The day Greene arrives, one floor mate warns, “It’s not easy to make friends. Don’t think you’re going to meet just hundreds of boys or that you’ll meet the One.”
She doesn’t. She doesn’t really meet anyone, except Oscar the famous doorman, who gets her name wrong. She goes out for lone walks and contents herself with small gestures such as