Bachelor Girl_ The Secret History of Single Women in the Twentieth Century - Betsy Israel [117]
No stories ended without a reference to television. In Washington, D.C., clerks were stuck at home watching Get Smart. (Although Agent 99 had a fairly exciting single-girl life.) Secretaries in Chicago all had colds in the winter and nothing but Gilligan’s Island, The Beverly Hillbillies, and Lost in Space reruns to keep them company. Some stuck in their mate-meeting high-rises might have tuned in to one of the popular doctor’s shows, many of which carried a special message for uppity single women. In a 1989 essay, academic Diana Meehan relates the sad fates of three single-girl guest stars on these 1960s hospital dramas. First, on the popular Marcus Welby, M.D., Welby protegé Steven Kiley makes an advance on a nurse and she rejects him. Within hours she is thrown from her horse and paralyzed. On Dr. Kildare, a “No, thank you” to an internist seems to lead right away to a leukemia diagnosis. On the precursor to E.R., Medical Center, the one who says no, in the span of twenty minutes, contracts breast cancer.
During the early seventies, there was a popular Friday-night show called Love, American Style. According to TV Guide, more people were likely to see it in a given week than to experience anything like love of any genuine style in their lifetimes.
DAYS OF MACE
Back on August 28, 1963, a petty thief named Richard Robles broke into an Upper East Side apartment and killed the two young women who lived there. Years later, when such single killings had become commonplace, New York Times reporter Judy Klemesrud wrote with complete accuracy: “The brutal slaying of a young single girl…probably causes more shock and public horror than any other.”
But the “single girl murders” as they became known across the country that fall, were a shocking devastation. The perpetrator had chosen the address, 57 East Eighty-eighth Street, because he’d seen an open window, there was no doorman, and he thought no one was home. When he got through it, intending to steal jewelry or money, Janice Wylie, a blond twenty-one-year-old Newsweek researcher, ran in from the other room. Robles grabbed a kitchen knife and raped her. Emily Hoffert, a new roommate, entered the apartment, shrieking that she would remember his face, identify him—and something snapped. Robles began clubbing both girls with glass soda bottles, then for an hour slashed and stabbed them with knives.
The case is remembered now as the one that led to passage of the Miranda rights legislation; the wrong man, not properly questioned, spent years in jail before Robles was apprehended. But what remainded in consciousness, of course, was the girls. Emily had just started work as a teacher. Janice wanted to be an actress and looked so hopeful, ready to go!, in all her pictures. Her father, Max, a well-known adman and writer—who, with a third roommate, found the naked bodies—later committed suicide. (An ironic footnote: It was his brother, Philip Wylie, who wrote such misogynist tomes as Generation of Vipers, the World War II diatribe that accused those neurotic “Lost Sex” women of ruining men, killing them, destroying their souls.)
An entire litany of single female names would follow, perhaps most famously Kitty Genovese, a twenty-nine-year-old bar manager who’d decided, in a highly unusual move, to stay in the city when the rest of her large Italian family made the move from Brooklyn to Long Island. She was stalked at 3 A.M. after exiting a Queens train and stabbed repeatedly en route to her apartment; notoriously, neighbors all around the complex heard her shrieking but none called the police. The one man who considered it later