Bachelor Girl_ The Secret History of Single Women in the Twentieth Century - Betsy Israel [116]
One asks if she wants to get married.
No, she doesn’t. “I want a terrific pair of high-heeled shoes…like Rosalind Russell…I want a very small apartment and I want people to refer to me as a bachelorette.”
“The term now is swinging single,” one of them tells her.
“And they call that progress,” she responds, knowing that they could have called it anything and called it an improvement.
SINGLE SLASHING
If singles were an increasingly diverse group, there was still one stereotype that reporters loved most of all—the “swinger”—that college grad with fake eyelashes and daiquiris or the faux hippies holding joints and daiquiris. By 1968, New York’s famed “singles ghetto” had been renamed the “girl ghetto.” And its residents came under unkind, often vicious, scrutiny. Tired of writing about bar etiquette, reporters began to meet subjects at their apartments to get the inside view, often the morning after a singles night out. Many of these apartments were in upscale buildings—three and a half rooms, the rent at about $225 per month, making a three-way share just affordable. No matter how lucky they might have felt, whatever it was they’d got away from, girls could never quite convey to male reporters just what it was they found so thrilling about their own interpretation of single life. That’s because reporters did not want to know.
These pieces (“Living It Up on Broadsway”) always began with an inventory of the girl’s appearance. She was usually dressed in a bathrobe or some kind of unflattering caftan or muumuu, one shoulder forward, so that it formed a bony shelf for messy hair. Mascara was always smudged and eyelashes glued together in tiny triangles. Here was the perfect way to survive articles you didn’t really want to write: Apply New Journalism techniques to an otherwise dreary scene. Stories told of freshly washed coffee mugs that “still had on them lipstick traces” and, once, brilliantly, a lipstick-stained school-size milk carton. They noted what was on the couch—a heart-shaped pillow, cat-shredded tasseled pillows, teddy bears—and what was under it (always a cache of cigarette butts, magazines, a shoe). These sorts of stories often included tours of the refrigerator, where some vegetable had metaphorically dried and shriveled. And they had a real time of it when it came to the medicine chest. Tranquilizers? Laxatives? And “depending on the carefulness of the housekeeping”…the Pill?
Occasionally, very occasionally, a woman wrote about the new single life for herself. The only prerequisite seems to have been that she find it, with six months’ retrospect, disappointing and scary. In 1966 The Washington Post Magazine ran an unusual parallel assessment of the city’s single life, from the point of view of a white writer, Judith Viorst, and a black writer, Dorothy Gilliam. The lead paragraphs:
Judith Viorst: Washington is full of single girls between 20 and 30 who are having a ball, cracking up from loneliness, being mistresses, living in deadly fear of rapists and purse snatchers, trying to decide which man to marry, or trying to face the dismal fact they never will.
Dorothy Gilliam: There are single Negro women all over Washington who live and breathe and laugh and weep and take tranquilizers and fret that there are too few men and too little culture. They aren’t poor or on welfare. Their lives are parallel to white working girls’ but with exceptions—exceptions that extend from the fact of their being Negro.
As the sixties wore on, the reporting moved from “realistic” to what may safely be called “hostile.” Writing about a bar in Washington, D.C., another Post reporter lightly described the patrons, then got down to it.
To walk into Wayne’s Luv is both an admission and an assertion. She is admitting