Bachelor Girl_ The Secret History of Single Women in the Twentieth Century - Betsy Israel [120]
THE BIONIC SINGLE
In many ways it was an excellent time to be young, single, never-married, or even divorced. Penny, a science writer, now forty-nine, says,
People don’t understand that the 1960s progressed very slowly in terms of actual change. On tape, it all looks like a…colorful streak! But for a long time girls had helmet hair and pleated skirts on, stockings with garters, not panty hose, plus squishy-toed heels. To go out, you prepared for upwards of two hours. You went out “put together” or you—my mother said this—“put your face on” and then, all “faced up,” you could face the world. Even though the fashions had this baby-doll quality, the little dresses and booties, you still had on so much makeup and support garments that you kind of looked armored…. Most girls, remember, got married—that’s what you did; you got married and that was the progression. A lot of people lived through all the weirdness of the 1960s in a married couple. But when things really crashed—in 1969 and I’d say 1970—they really crashed. The changes started seeping out from there, and there was no going back.
Consider that in 1957, 53 percent of the American public had believed that unmarried people were “sick,” “immoral,” or “neurotic,” while only 37 percent viewed them neutrally. During the early seventies, a similar study found that just 33 percent of a large sample group had “negative attitudes and expectations” of the unmarried. Fifty-one percent viewed them “neutrally” and 15 percent approvingly.
There was even a weak but nonetheless official endorsement of single womanhood from the New York Times. In August 1970, the Times ran an editorial announcing the emergence of “the Liberated Woman.” It began by providing necessary context.
Because western societies are increasingly rich, they can afford to educate more of their women and provide them with leisure. Because science has eliminated most of the drudgery if not the tedium of farm [and]…household work, millions of women are free to leave the fields and the kitchens and work beside men…those women who have no taste for marriage or childbearing will feel less constrained by society to adopt roles which are uncongenial….
That was not to incite all solo girls to rush out and change. As the authors went on to note: “The family has proved to be a durable human institution in many social settings…. The revolution in the status of women will change much and will leave much else unaltered.”
One of the biggest changes would be in mass perceptions of unwed women.
During the next few years the single woman would enjoy her own widely endorsed public honeymoon. Newsweek reported the following year that “singlehood has emerged as an intensely ritualized—and newly respectable style of American life. It is finally becoming possible to be both single and whole.” There were stories on dropout wives, and some sociologists and economists predicted that we would eventually find ourselves in a “totally singles-oriented society.” Frozen dinners for one. A rebellion against the terms “double-occupancy” and “family discounts.” The Mary Tyler Moore show was in its prime, Rhoda and Phyllis still popping in to complain before fleeing Minneapolis for their own single sitcoms. In 1974 the New York Times wrote, “In all respects young single American women hold themselves in higher regard now than a year ago. [They are] self-assured, confident, secure.”
For the first time in decades, perhaps for the first time