Bachelor Girl_ The Secret History of Single Women in the Twentieth Century - Betsy Israel [115]
At the time, of course, an enormous slab of the American single population was not in singles clubs of any kind, but still in college. Some would avoid the singles scene by getting married the day after graduation. But the MRS. degree had already begun its slow fade from the curriculum. “When I started school in 1965, we wore plaid skirts and had proper dates and had parietals,” says Sally Hoffe, a fifty-four-year-old lawyer, never wed and now a single parent. “By the time we left we were dressed in flowing scarves and ragged jeans and many of us had no makeup on except maybe a crescent moon on our forehead. We had thrown out hair dryers….Sex—we just had it. And unless you got pregnant or caught VD, the tone—at least with certain people anyway—the whole subject was casual as can be.”
In March 1966, Time devoted its Education section to a story on the younger “free sex movement,” what was largely a Berkeley phenomenon that had been around in some form since 1960. Printed below an extremely dark and blurry photo: “As they do at countless collegiate parties everywhere, the couples wriggled to the watusi and gyrated to the jerk, while recorded drums and saxophones resounded in the dimly lit apartment of a University of California student in Berkeley. Unlike most parties, however, the boys and girls were naked.”
“That sounds about right,” says Sally Hoffe.
Very Berkeley, but I’d be lying if I said in the Midwest I did not attend my share of like events…there was a lot of loosening-up of what you wore and who you were. Or who you thought you were that week…[but] not everyone participated. There were many girls who still had on the sensible Butterick sew-it-yourself shifts…. There were the wedding announcements and the “bride elect”! I always remember that phrase, bride-elect, the chosen. But what was it she chose?…My radicalization was to see this engagement ritual as a kind of sleepwalking…. Didthey really want to get married, or had they run out of ideas already?
At about this point in time it becomes more difficult to write about single women as a unified class. There were so many variations on the single state, so many stops along the singular spectrum. For example, in 1967 half of all women in their thirties were married mothers who remained at home full-time. But of these women, 17 percent were legally separated, or temporarily apart from their mates due to the Vietnam War. Thousands of women were already choosing to keep rather than give away out-of-wedlock babies—and to live with friends, sisters, boyfriends. The number of women who reported cohabiting or “having recently cohabited” was at about 550,000. Some single women lived in Upper East Side apartments or at the Y. But an equal number lived in communes or feminist collectives or in coed group housing. And many were developing unique new views of singularity. A graphic artist and illustrator recalls life on “the commune of the Feminine Mystique, Brattleboro, Vermont”:
Everyone was equal and everyone was beautiful and cooked. Of all the memories of that time, I still see mostly the bowls and bowls of spaghetti. And I remember what they looked like the next morning, when I came down and, as one of two women, found them waiting for me…I was never really able to have roommates after that. If there was one night and things didn’t get put away, I became this insane despot…. I think it’s true about a lot of single women—theyhave their weird baggage. They’re pretty much always there, living alone, for a reason. And that reason is usually other people, no matter how many times they make the mistake again and again…. I think most of us end up where we want to be.
In Mary Gordon’s first novel, Final Payments (1977), we meet a young woman who’s devoted her entire adult life to caring for a pious father. Like a nun, she leaves the house for a walk just once a week; the rest of the time she organizes his papers, infuriating the local widows who desperately want the job. After his death, the widows seek their revenge, joining with the church leaders of this small Catholic