Bachelor Girl_ The Secret History of Single Women in the Twentieth Century - Betsy Israel [110]
Esquire in particular became obsessed with a female uprising. There were long essays on ball-busting new types, for example, the “American Witch,” a spoiled, selfish bitch who deliberately failed to share male enthusiasm for football and did not leap at commands for food. One parable told of a distant time when little Caroline Kennedy, grown and now president, oversaw a program that allowed every American woman to grow a penis. Men, psychological eunuchs, took refuge in bars.
Others objected along more familiar lines. Author Pearl Buck, returning to the States after years abroad, wrote that of all changes “the new ethics of sex” was most amazing, “so abrupt, so far reaching that we are all dazed by it.” But she believed that an insufficient few had stopped to consider the consequences—the many unwanted children that would still, even with the new “technology,” result in “rows and rows of tiny unattended cribs.”
Several professors from universities such as Stanford, Princeton, and Tufts foresaw in these loosened sexual constraints a dissolving national morality. If women, like men, could engage in whatever sexual practice they chose, when they chose, in short, without any external controls, they were more likely to develop a reckless spontaneity in other of their actions. From a letter to the New York Times: “Women, like some men, now find it fashionable to behave and conduct themselves in whatever way they choose, in consideration only of their own feelings. Too bad if there are children.” To quote one Harvard psychologist, “This sudden emphasis on individual choice, a morality of one, is…dangerous.”
Occasionally one heard a measured voice. Sylvia Porter, in her New York Post column, “Your Dollar,” took on the new female single as a social development that required a practical, not moralistic, response. She called on manufacturers to package smaller meals and scale products down to suit the family of one. The housing industry, she believed, would need “to develop centrally located…inexpensive, small apartments.” As she reported, “According to a census spokesman…there will be more and more [single women] as the years go on.”
In fairness, one professor who’d expressed concern about a relative female morality also urged caution in too quickly judging women. Considering female freedom, he had found at least one “salutary” side effect. “A woman free to find fulfillment in marriage and work” was far more likely to “be self-motivated. Autonomous…This is the kind of woman who makes the ideal teacher.”
It was, after all, still 1962 or 1963. Most of the single women inspiring such terrorized discourse were still in fact teachers, secretaries, or something else safely within the canon of female careers. A 1960s board game for girls, “What Shall I Be: The Exciting Game of Career Girls,” laid out the possibilities. Along with teacher and secretary one could work toward “stewardess,” “model,” “nurse,” trying to avoid two old-maid-ish cards known as the Duds, either a fat middle-aged actress with runny makeup or else an unmistakable spinster.
Interestingly, the spinster as a type had floated back into the national discourse, this time as the subject of an obituary. So many millions of girls automatically married that the society for some time had lacked traditional spinsters. But lamenting the lost spinster—that toothless, brutally bunned stick in black—was actually a handy way of denouncing the new single. In cartoon panels and staged photos, our suddenly beloved spinster was juxtaposed not with the baby housewife who had replaced her, but with a Pill-taking stew or a wealthy single babe, a socialite with décolletage stretching down to her navel. In 1963 The New York Times Magazine ran a spinster eulogy that refined the identity of the primary “spinster killer,” who was none of the above—not the baby bride, the pill-taking girl, or the rapacious socialite.