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By Root 1371 0

era belonged to Doris Day, as she played a series of working girls with nice apartments, wise-cracking maids, and careers in demanding but still feminine areas, usually interior decorating. She was always well dressed, articulate, and unusually happy with herself. Until someone started teasing her about her love life. Usually this came down to the question of whether she was a virgin. It’s clear that the accusation bothers her—she probably was a virgin—but it’s not something that, until now, she’s felt badly about. To achieve the kinds of things she has achieved, she’s had to live a disciplined life, looking after herself, part of which meant keeping in mind society’s vicious sexual double standard. For the time period, this attitude seems less prudish and warping than it does practical. (For of course if she had not been a virgin, she’d have had hell to pay for that, as well.)

Unfortunately the issue would in short time make a joke of Doris Day. As comedies began their descent into so-called sophisticated sex romps, the Day/virginity factor became a repetitive gag. (As one producer famously quipped, “I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin.”) She came to seem righteously wholesome. Dull. A too-chatty full-figured gal snobbish critic Dwight MacDonald once described as “bovine.”

But the best of the Day characters were stalwart about sex for a reason. They understood how easily it could be misinterpreted and used against a single woman. In Minor Characters, a 1983 memoir of 1950s Manhattan, Joyce Johnson wrote: “The crime of sex was like guilt by association—not visible to the eye of the outsider, but an act that could be easily conjectured. Consequences could make it manifest…. In the 1950s, sex—if you achieved it—was a serious and anxious act.”

CROSS YOUR LEGS. DO NOT UNCROSS UNTIL WED.

By 1957, sex seemed to be everywhere—in magazines, novels, in the movies—and if you were single and living in the city, there was a sense that it might soon arrive in your very own apartment. The Saturday Evening Post was not alone in declaring, “There are new considerations a girl living alone must take into account.”

In all the many etiquette guides, sex had been little more than a shadow presence, an issue alluded to but not directly addressed. Most of these how-to-live guides covered general comportment—how a woman should walk down or cross the street without seeming too “available”; how she should remove an apartment key from her purse, and how, if there was no doorman, one stood there seeming respectable while opening a door, on a city street, all alone. One could further study how to walk down the apartment hallway when putting out garbage; how to stand or sit while talking on the phone, including, in one book, some pointers on gracefully twirling the cord.

Sex, however, rated few paragraphs. Because allegedly there was no sex. Guides were there to help young women better avoid even the hint. A small sampling of postdate evasions from two books, circa 1953:

—(To be said just before reaching home, while yawning). “Gee, I wish I didn’t have to get up so early—six A.M.! (checks watch) How did it get to be so late? I wish I could ask you up, but perhaps another time. I’ve had such a nice evening. Goodnight.” (Girl then very quickly races up steps to house or out of taxi cab. She waves.)

—(To be said as she opens her apartment door and sees a suitcase, a prop she planted earlier). “Oh my, look! Ssshhh! She’s here! My roommate! She’s a stew! She just flew in from Japan. Oh, dear. I’m so sorry. We’ll have to take a rain check on that nightcap, I think.”

—(To be said if the man was already inside, drinking that nightcap). “Well, I do have to get up awfully early.” If that didn’t work, “I wish I could offer a refill, but (blinks, squints) I’m getting a migraine.” In desperation: “My mother is here from Cincinnati. She’ll be back any minute and so…” Sometimes a roommate might magically appear, or a neighbor who needed (female) help with “a very personal and very upsetting emergency!”

But it got harder to delete sex as a presence in