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An acquaintance of mine recalls:

In the early to mid-seventies—that was when New York made its big turn…. It was not just edgy in some places, but filled withdrug addicts and people who weren’t wearing shoes and talking to themselves…. It seemed very dangerous all of a sudden…. I remember the week I was flashed by three guys, once right in the subway and, I swear, he was looking straight at me; once when I came home—I lived in the Village—and found a guy on the steps with his dick hanging out, and once as I waited to be buzzed in at a friend’s…. I had been at the bar [W.M. Tweed’s] where Roseanne Quinn disappeared, I still remember that, and I left and walked over to this apartment and there was the man with his dick out…. That’s when I got a purple belt in karate.

As journalist Lucinda Franks wrote of young women in the early seventies, “Anxiety had slipped around their lives like a back brace.”

It seems in the spirit of the times that Jane Fonda won the Oscar for Klute (1971), in which she played a prostitute stalked by a crazed john. Another hugely popular film, Play Misty for Me, flipped the roles, updating the noir B movie Detour, in which an inexplicably demented woman stalks a man she’s casually met, here a radio deejay played by Clint Eastwood. Looking for Mr. Goodbar, based on Judith Rossner’s 1975 novel, concerned a seemingly plain Irish-American schoolteacher who, in response to upsetting events in her past, starts to pick up men in bars, night after night, year after year, until finally one of them kills her.

But despite its seeming death sentence, single life in New York City continued to thrive. New Yorkers, after all, like single women living anywhere, had been forced to cultivate and maintain a sense of humor—satiric, or sardonic, and that adjective so often stapled to the single woman, masochistic. The most perfectly preserved example of sardonic female masochism may be found in the Gail Parent novel Sheila Levine Is Dead and Living in New York (1970). Sheila, who’d moved from Franklin Square, Long Island, to the city, has, after several years, decided that she has no hopes of marriage. Every girl in New York City has the same apartment she has, the same hairstyle, has read the same books and has the same recipes and goes to the same kinds of events to meet the same men. In the movies, Doris Day had moved to the city and day one found a spacious brownstone she paid for with her unemployment check. The next day she ran into Cary Grant, who accidentally spilled coffee on her, gave her a job, and eventually married her. As Sheila observes, her life has taken a slightly different course. Thus she’s decided to kill herself and spends most of the novel both looking for a mate and shopping for a nice, reasonably priced coffin.

But let’s put aside all the feelings of terror and doom and look at some of the more common low-grade anxieties that plagued the 1970s single pioneers. The best depiction of this ill ease, the widespread state of singular dislocation, may be found in a little-known film called T. R. Baskin (1971), starring Candace Bergen. Here is a young single woman, well educated and interesting, ready to experience life, yet self-protective and a little shy. Her circumstances, that is, the 1970s, don’t favor the self-protective and slightly shy. She has just moved alone to Chicago, has her own apartment, works at an anonymous office job, and on the weekends attempts to go out with her friends—but it’s always a struggle. In groups they go to restaurants and clubs or to apartments far more garishly decorated than her own. The parties always start up quickly. Never is she really a full participant.

By the early seventies, the singles culture had reached the point where men very often assumed that single women they met wished to have sex with them. That’s the atmosphere here—uninvited male hands suddenly everywhere. Men attempting to feed our heroine Kahlúa, whiskey sours, and spilling the drinks down her shirt. More than once we watch T.