Bachelor Girl_ The Secret History of Single Women in the Twentieth Century - Betsy Israel [113]
Of course at least one among the young professionals questioned it all. Here that was a thirty-two-year-old advertising account executive who, pictured chewing a pencil, admitted, “I want a career, but I don’t want to be the kind of woman men talk about as career women. I’d like to keep at least a few shreds of my femininity.”
Single-girl stories always included such confessions, worries, or an authorial caveat, as if it was the writer’s responsibility to list all contraindications for this radical trial drug called independence. Most of the pieces concluded with a haunted question: “Even now, in black moments, they ask, ‘What am I doing here?’” or “Why should I stay? Who’d notice that I was gone?” “What if there is no one here for me?” or “Is this…it?” But there were also breakthroughs. Entrée to a key social circle. A new man. Better, several men. And there were always the women who—damn it all!—went out and battled to become the serious “girl” who did not type. (Typical tale: As late as 1968, famed NPR correspondent Nina Totenberg was told by a potential employer, a friend, “Nina, you know we have our girl already.” Nina, successfully, went and became the Girl somewhere else.)
Even the average single woman now had, as the Reader’s Digest said, “a shot at life previously unimagined. Today’s plain Janes have opportunities their spinster aunts never did—trips to Europe, a Peace Corps assignment in Asia, interesting jobs in research or government. And in all these places they have a chance to display a mettle that may attract a man who might otherwise have been addled by a momentary attraction to a dumb blonde.”
They also had a bit of fun. Many became expert at blowing off whole afternoons at foreign films or in Lord & Taylor’s. And gradually, whether they liked the idea or not, young single women began to go out in mixed groups. When asked where they were going, no one said, “On a date.” The new reply was “Just out.”
THE SINGLE STRIP
The “swinging” singles scene began with a simple and unglamorous realization: Young people were lonely. Families had begun their slow dissolve, shown the first fresh results of divorce, corporate transfers, migrations south and, of course, the familiar, now more frequent announcement “I’m off to the city, Ma, bye!” Many magazine stories and essays began this way: “The girl or boy who lived next door or two towns over has gone, off to school in the East, to Europe, or New York City.” It was a cliché—any reference to a girl next door had long been a cliché—and yet it was in some undeniable way true. “Anonymity” replaced “togetherness.”
In his 1965 book, The City Is the Frontier, Dr. Charles Abrams, the head of Columbia University’s urban-planning department, warned that the city was unprepared for the “convergence” of all these anonymous strangers. How would people meet? Not on the street, where a strict taboo prevented eye contact and conversation. The city, Abrams advised, would have to open to singles, to build special housing, unique public meeting places, become in some sense what he called a “trystorium.” Thus began a small singles industry. At the start there were simple “pay parties,” mimeographed telephone lists, and gimmicks—restaurants with phones at the tables so that if a girl wished, she might call a man seated elsewhere, or “wash-a-terias,” Laundromats that served Cokes and played records. In late 1964 Mike O’Harro, an ensign who had founded a private dating “association,” organized a computerized list of forty-seven thousand singles nationwide. “I had the idea at a party I threw in Virginia,” he told Newsweek. “I realized that every person at this party, everyone did different things, and they were all lonely. I was lonely, and it occurred to me that it had to be true in other places.”
Along with others who’d had the single epiphany, he began to stage regional activities. To be single in Denver at the time might have meant attending a