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This new female “type”—still, of course, years from reality—so excited authors and sociologists that they began to examine the possible specimen right away. What many saw was a normal girl, a future wife who had, amidst this onrush of divorce, become cynical, a wary spectator at what Phyllis Rosenteur in The Single Woman (1961) called the “quickie in-and-out affairs that often masquerade these days as marriage.” She called her the “intuitive woman” and charted her development in this way:

Out of childhood, into adolescence, a girl begins observing for herself, and what she sees and hears and feels runs counter to conditioning. Many become confused and, more than that, suspicious…. Nothing is accepted as blindly as before and some may even actively rebel against some of the rules. Others merely back away from both the “normal” path to marriage and the ranter’s route to stormy singleness; in some private corner of themselves, they plot an independent course, and then pursue it just as silently as people will permit.

The following year, researchers at Stanford announced that women with deep insight into established male/female roles were less likely to make an early “uninformed” marriage. Science Digest reported that a University of Michigan study of twenty-five hundred singles had found unwed women to be happier overall than their male counterparts—no matter the persistent belief that men idealized their bachelor years and left them reluctantly. With the exception of divorced women, who were uniquely stigmatized, researchers concluded, “the single woman who lives alone…[was] not usually a frustrated old maid. And among those who live alone, women are not the weaker sex. Generally, single women…experience less discomfort than single men…. They are more active in the working through of the problems they face and appear stronger than single men in meeting the challenge of their position.”

Helen Gurley Brown, newly appointed editor of a revivified Cosmopolitan, hated that language—“discomfort,” the “challenge” of one’s sadly “compromised” position, or the word frustrated as it applied to anyone single. She had just married for the first time at thirty-seven. And, using her own slang (“mouseburger,” for example, meant a quiet, spinsterish girl) and dousing it with exclamation points, she’d published the best-selling Sex and the Single Girl (1962). Here we meet a new variation of the single girl, this one a tornado of competence—pretty, slim, but also smart, “up” on the news, well-read, and given to sewing and cooking while at the same time cramming in some art history or Russian literature. She worked hard at a job in the arts and lived by herself in a sleek, sexy apartment. She was enormously popular but seemingly choosy, selective; very hard to get.

As Helen Brown says of her own single days, “The phone just rang incessantly. It was terribly annoying if you were trying to get something done. There were nights, I tell you, when I just carried the phone over and put it into the freezer.”

She’ll go on to tell you of the radical impact she made with this vision of a single aristocrat. (“It was the first time anyone suggested that being single was not the same thing as having a social disease!!”) But even though this girl “lived by her wits…sharpened…honed…coping with people trying to marry her off,” she was still an elaborately decked-out slab of bait. Brown devoted whole chapters to mascara, clothing, and bizarre seductive technique (“any unusual jewelry is a come on, but it should be beautiful or you’ll look too Ubangi!”). Just as nineteenth-century girls had been encouraged into smashes, their affectionate behavior good practice for the marital arts, so this new single girl was honing herself to be a unique modern wife or, in the spirit of Helen Brown, a delectable, frothy, and fabulous wife!

Still, all silliness aside, Brown was advocating a time-out for self-improvement before marriage. Gloria Steinem’s autonomous girl calmly