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CHAPTER SIX

THE SWINGING SINGLE: CAREER GIRLS, THE AUTONOMOUS GIRL, THE PILL POPPER, AND THE LONE FEMALE IN DANGER

I used to pick out the people who lived alone—on the subway, the street. Every time they had these glassy eyes, like nothing’s living in ’em. Dead.

—NATALIE WOOD TO STEVE MCQUEEN, LOVE WITH THE PROPER STRANGER, 1963

Whatever your age, your single state is nothing to be ashamed of. Let the girls who marry at 18 or 20 defend their position. They’re the ones who are missing out.

—REBECCA E. GREER, WHY ISN’T A NICE GIRL LIKE YOU MARRIED? 1969

We have a message for the men here today: FUCK OFF FUCK YOU. You have caused enough grief humiliation for centuries…Leave your lie-wives and girlie-friends. Give us back the names we came with. Go!

—A BROCHURE I FOUND IN A PARK, SPRING 1970

THE SECOND COMING OF THE SINGLE GIRL

Images of the 1960s have been so long in circulation that someone born in 1984 could easily assemble his or her own timeline or montage: JFK and Jackie; the Zapruder film; Martin Luther King and Malcolm X; Vietnam (with asides for the Beatles, the Apollo missions, LSD), and, depending on one’s mood that day, conclude with Woodstock and microminis, or Kent State and My Lai.

In most schematics, single womanhood as a significant phenomenon does not make the charts alongside the antiwar crusade or the blossoming of the counterculture. It bubbled along throughout the sixties as a bright and sexy trend, a magazine story or pictorial that could also be played as maudlin or scary. As a serious, permanent social fact, it would emerge with the women’s movement of the early 1970s. And the early women’s movement was the last and, as many, many frightened people viewed it, the least serious of the uprisings. Who was being hurt, exactly? Was the phrase “white middle-class woman” next to the word “oppressed” an oxymoron?

One “then girl” explained: “Nobody took you seriously if you were married and presumed to be a housewife—you were just another married speck. What were your problems—and who cared? If you were single, even if you were wearing bright yellow vinyl boots like I was, you were still just a girl who was going to become a housewife. No great tragedy…. As someone who might have a complicated political or social situation—forget it. You were invisible.”

By the mid-1970s, however, single women would emerge as among the most economically and socially significant of all the onetime shadow population groups. Being single, like being openly gay, would finally lose any lingering taint of ugly character weakness, any hint of pathology, and come to seem an entirely viable way to live—what someone back in 1925 had first called a “lifestyle.”

Traces of this new single appear as if on cue in 1960. First, the 1960 census reported that 9.3 million households, about 18 out of every 100, were headed by solo women. (And the dramatic rise—more than a million since 1950—was genuine; it did not reflect the fact that there were simply more households overall.) More women, it seemed, earned their own money, and because there was more readily available housing, they did not have to live with relatives if they chose not to. True, most of these women were safely identified as widows, but close to 2 million were divorcées, 900,000 were separated from their husbands, and most shocking of all, 1.4 million of these women had never wed. “Who Needs a Man Around the House?” asked the New York Mirror Magazine in spring 1960. Beneath the enormous headline we see a Grace Kelly blonde, stretching as she gets out of bed wearing a negligé. We next see her pictured seated serenely with coffee and newspaper, and in another frame she is casually repairing a broken cabinet all by herself. It’s threatening, but for safety’s sake, a cat has been included in one photo and a caption reassures readers that she used this pet as an “outlet” for expressing affection.

By the early sixties, marriage as a national ideal, an enforceable teenaged daydream,