Bachelor Girl_ The Secret History of Single Women in the Twentieth Century - Betsy Israel [112]
Every day they come. They come from Oregon and Iowa, from Utah and Illinois, from Ohio and California. The come from small towns and medium-sized cities…from colleges and communities where they were important, special, secure. They come to a city that is dirty and difficult and massively indifferent to them. A city that will charge them outrageous rents and pay them shamefully small salaries at first…it is a city bursting with thousands who are equally talented and gifted. Who are they? These women ignoring the fears of parents, the advice of friends, the gloomy prediction of city planners?…How many will there be this week and the next? How many will there be in five years?
One soothing remedy from the past was to count them. According to New York’s YWCA, there were about 100,000 more in 1964 than there had been the year before and an employment agency specializing in the now popular “communications” jobs (advertising, TV, magazines) reported its “applicants from out of town going up, up, up—8 percent more this year [1964] than last.” There were 350,000 total, reports read. One heard that 25,000 were hiding out in the Village, 300 of them appearing semiweekly in Babe’s Beauty Shop and close to 400 working or volunteering in museums. Odd random surveys, to cite one, revealed that 500 girls interviewed on the subways had once been Girl Scouts, though most—93 percent—did not think their scouting skills helped much in their lives as city girls. And it seemed they now wanted jobs that demanded more than a proven ability to whip through “A-S-D-F-J-K-L-semicolon.” Glamour in its 1963 “Happiness Index,” reported, “Happiness is an $8 raise; the boss’s compliment; not having to shave your legs.” A contemporary issue of the Saturday Evening Post proclaimed: “The girl who comes to New York is no longer just the young actress or ballet dancer yearning for a chance…Madison Ave. has replaced Broadway as the street of dreams…the new girl is more likely to see herself writing sparkling copy or holding a clipboard for a television producer.”
By the mid-sixties, young single women had begun to appear in ads and fashion spreads as busy TV-set assistants, lone car drivers, career girls holding blueprints with pencils tucked behind their ears. Although these were models, human props, it’s hard to imagine anything like it—discernible professional tracings—even five years before. Lone girls were also shown doing unlikely things. (One 1965 Goodyear ad showed a woman in standard sensible dress changing a tire. Read the caption: “When there’s no man around, Goodyear should be.”) Even tampon ads featured actual photos of young singles with names like Deborah or Patty. Dressed crisply in white, they were “stepping out” on their own. Tampax, say what you will, was another sign of their “independence!”
There were also certifiable single working girls on TV—Marlo Thomas as That Girl in her yellow-striped chain-belted minis; Honey West, girl detective—as well as clever dare-taking teenagers (Patty Duke; Sally Field) and magical creatures beyond male control as on Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie, and the little-remembered My Living Doll, in which Julie Newmar, prior to Catwomanhood, played a beautiful robot who goes her own way. Real life provided even more exotic singular oddities (Joan Baez,* Gloria Steinem, Barbra Streisand, Renata Adler, Shirley Chisholm, Diane Arbus, Jane Fonda, Anna Karina, Suzanne Farrell, Twiggy). Even the singles featured in the long newspaper stories (“Why?” “For how long?” “What about those babies?”) seemed more stylish, daring, and accomplished. One World Telegram Sunday section, circa 1965, featured young, pretty, and, for a change, serious professionals. They interviewed a twenty-five-year-old woman who designed furniture. Another worked at Mademoiselle and also freelanced for a magazine called In: A Guide to the Swinging Single