Bachelor Girl_ The Secret History of Single Women in the Twentieth Century - Betsy Israel [101]
PLAYING IT SINGLE
On television during the mid-to late 1950s, single women showed up in the familiar guises. They were older widows saddened or made sarcastic by life; busybody aunts, maids, older sisters, teachers, or mistress-of-ceremonies types who sang and introduced guests or “gave testimonials,” meaning they held and caressed the sponsor’s product and spoke about it for up to a full five minutes. On commercials, single women were either invisible or ethereal, creatures disconnected from physical life. They never appeared in their apartments or houses or in their offices. We never saw their front steps, their kitchens, their cats. They were pictured only in fantasy scenarios—standing next to Chevrolets and gesturing, waving from magically flying Chevrolets, and dressed most often in evening gowns. The single woman had no place in a domestic scheme, unless she was a spinsterly grandmother or one of those ascendant female consumers, the teenager.
The single woman in 1950s television lived on the sitcom. Here, she almost always played a grown woman who behaved like a perky superannuated teenager. She lived at home, usually with a widowed parent, held a clerical job, and either matchmade crazily for everyone in the cast or became the subject of matchmaking by everyone in the cast. Consider three prime-time examples:
My Little Margie. A precursor to Gidget, minus the surfing element and smirky cuteness. Margie, played by Gale Storm, whose name promised something slightly more dramatic, lives with her widowed father; although she is supposed to be twenty-one, she seems at times to be about twenty-seven and at others thirty-five. The plotlines can be reduced to two conflicts. First, Daddy can’t control his overgrown baby as much as he’d like, and, second, Margie can’t control Daddy. She doesn’t like his girlfriends and often tries deliberately to spoil his dates. Gidget with a Freudian undertow.
Private Secretary. Here we meet single girl Susie McNamera, the top secretary to important talent agent Peter Sands. Naturally, Susie is in love with Peter but not fully aware of it as she organizes every facet of his existence, including the arrangement of his paper clips and assessing the merits, so sadly few, of his dates. Eventually, she realizes that she wants to marry Peter and plots with the receptionist to change her image. No one, including a resident expert at the Museum of TV and Radio, is too sure what happened next because the show went off the air suddenly.
Meet Millie. Secretary Millie Bronson lives with her widowed mother, whose job in life is finding Millie a suitable husband. Millie has a boyfriend, Johnny, who is the boss’s son. But knowing what comes of such class-crossing arrangements, Mom is ever on the lookout, and so is the requisite house beatnik, Alfred Prinzmetal, an artist who does nothing but comment, often to Millie, whom he has deemed worthy of his erudition. This was one of the first shows to establish a principle that would long exist on TV if rarely in life: Everyone loves the single girl. She is the adorable needy human equivalent of a stray pet others want to domesticate.
In fifties films, the single woman turns up most often as a recognizable spinster (Kim Novak in Picnic; The Rainmaker with Katharine Hepburn) or as the exceptional quirky character, in the upper-class division Katharine Hepburn (Desk