Bachelor Girl_ The Secret History of Single Women in the Twentieth Century - Betsy Israel [105]
The bachelor girls in question were usually models or Rockettes; starlets, including Tina Louise; debutantes; the serious young career women “who work in the budding communications field;” and sometimes shockingly “open” rising stars. Like “Queen of the Bachelor Girls” Kim Novak. In two columns, she was pictured with four different men, including one South American dictator and a “Negro” entertainer (Sammy Davis, Jr.). She was also pictured all alone, sitting back in a chair, eyes closed, her bare feet up so that a reader had to remark both at her casual mien and her flaming red pedicure.
Bachelor girls like Kim, it was solemnly reported, “play by their own rules.”
For example, good for three columns, they dated married men. “Sure, I mean, course we do,” one BG told an eager reporter. “If only for the convenience! They don’t stay. They don’t make a fuss. In some ways it’s the ideal date.” One “Swedish girl” interviewed for the husbands series told the News that “other girls laugh at me because I don’t understand why they would go with a husband. They can’t see that it is a problem.” The Americans defended themselves. They were not immoral but “regular” women “making the most of a difficult situation”—not meeting the right men, perhaps not yet ready to—and, as another put it, “We are not evil. We are tired of sitting home on the weekends…. What does it mean to be immoral? We are just living the lives we have and we happen not to have husbands…. I do not think that for this reason we are going to hell.”
Surprisingly, the author of one 1959 story sided with them. Sort of. “Today in the midst of the rootless, unmarried groups that gravitate to a large city, a girl finds that it is often ‘square’ to be good. Besides, she herself isn’t quite sure anymore what is good and bad, and neither is anyone else…. there is not a dropping off of morality. Just a shift in emphasis.”
Others disagreed entirely. In 1959, the Juvenile Aid Bureau, a social agency that had previously dealt largely with runaways, was charged with “easing the flow of incoming girls to New York City.” As one bureau official explained, “We spot a girl getting off a bus or a train and wandering the streets. We question her.” Under an obscure piece of municipal legislation called “the Girl Terms Act,” they could further “hold her until her family can be queried. If there is no family, or, as is often the case, the family does not want the juvenile back, and if the girl has no immediate relations in New York to claim her, we will send her back to the point of embarkation on her ticket.” In 1959 the JAB reported returning 350-plus suspicious-looking girls (that meant oddly dressed girls, slutty-looking girls; those too young and those not white).
Everyone acknowledged that most of these girls would find their way back in. At best they’d get clerical jobs they’d quickly lose, becoming rootless “wandering types.” Or they’d become prostitutes and drug addicts. Worse, they might become bohemians.
ON THE BEAT
The Beat generation is one of those mythical twentieth-century constructs that we associate with a loose conglomerate of crazy brilliant men. Jack Kerouac and his male muse, Neal Cassady; Allen Ginsberg, of course, and William Burroughs—and all the lesser luminaries who floated into and out of their lives, novels, and poems from their days at Columbia University, circa 1945 through the 1960s. But floating around in the background, handing out invitations to poetry readings, discussing art and writing, were a lot of intriguing young women—Hettie Cohen Jones, Joyce Glassman Johnson, Elise Cowen, and poet Diane diPrima, among many uncelebrated others.
These never quite became household names, but many of the onetime Beat girls went on to become writers and artists, just like the men. And some turned out to be chroniclers. It’s these women who later wrote the best memoirs of Beat life in New York City and San Francisco. And as much as these stories and the memoirs—How I Became Hettie Jones; Minor Characters; Beat Girl—re-create the joy