Bachelor Girl_ The Secret History of Single Women in the Twentieth Century - Betsy Israel [111]
I’M FEMALE, FLY ME
According to the Labor Department, single women in the sixties worked in greatest numbers as secretaries, titles that after several years might be renegotiated, fluffed up, and rechristened “assistants to.” That is, if the girl in question remained a girl and didn’t marry. There was still a deep mistrust of the married working woman, who would, wrote one insurance-company employee in Glamour, “naturally get herself pregnant at the first opportunity and abandon her precious files one afternoon, just like that.” (United Airlines enforced what were perhaps the most blatant restrictions. Until 1969, all stewardesses had to be provably single; if they married, they “retired.”)
But the finest of the young career breed—the white, the virginal, the unwed—were often canonized in Look and Life spreads, as they had been twenty years before. The jobs, or the companies at least, had cachet—CBS, the UN, Christian Dior. The girls, however, still took shorthand.
As Life exclaimed in 1962, “Glamor, Excitement, and Romance and the Chance to Serve the Country—How Nice to Be a Pretty Girl and Work in Washington!” And there she was—Nancy Becker of Columbia, Missouri, at her desk, chin at rest on manicured hands, her pearls, her pencils precisely arrayed, her eyes “full of stardust.” She worked, filing, for the Justice Department. On the following pages young women with similar jobs were seen at Georgetown dinner parties, playing touch football (just like the Kennedys!), and shopping for antique rocking chairs. “It’s the perfect opportunity and so honorable to be here,” said a twenty-three-year-old interviewed for the piece. “But I think we most all agree, most of us are going to be marrying and seeing where that takes us, even if that’s Kansas.” They’d always have Washington.
In New York City the working girls weren’t so sure. In a 1961 Mademoiselle piece, “The Great Reprieve,” young Joan Didion wrote of Manhattan as an Emerald City that held out to its most tentative residents
this special promise—of something remarkable and lively just around the corner…. They do a lot of things but girls who cometo New York are above all uncommitted. They seem to be girls who want to prolong the period when they can experiment, mess around, make mistakes. In New York, there is no genteel pressure for them to marry, to go two-by-two…. New York is full of people on this kind of leave of absence.
By 1963, the year The Feminine Mystique crash-landed, many reported “feeling bugged,” bothered about “all the intense spying to see what I am up to,” to quote an airline ticketing agent in Glamour. “I expect to look up and see my brother standing there, 600 miles from home, just dropping by to examine my ring finger.” One of Didion’s subjects refused any longer “to parry delicate questions about my plans.” They had left home, gone off, transformed themselves. They were trying.
“It was an outrageous dare,” says “Sally-Jo,” age now “fifty-plus.”
I remember getting off the bus from Wisconsin. It was in 1964. Beatles time. And I was waiting for my luggage—I’d brought a big round hatbox and a big suitcase-sized makeup kit—and I was standing right by the exhaust pipe. I remember feeling dizzy and thinking—Yes! This is it! I inhaled deeply. That’s how thrilled I was!…Asphyxiated, wandering off to find a subway, not a clue where I was going, holding a freaking hatbox.
Just as they had in the fifties, and in the thirties, and in the time of the Bowery gal, officials likened these “girls” to unwanted immigrants. It was as if the shirtwaisted shop girl had reemerged in Marimekko separates, gotten drunk at lunch, and been spied on her break doing the Watusi. No one knew what to do about her or it or them: gangs