Bachelor Girl_ The Secret History of Single Women in the Twentieth Century - Betsy Israel [121]
“Women’s lib,” as it was still called, had started to change things. “I never in a gazillion years thought I would rent, much less buy a house without being married or at least living with someone,” says one never-wed art appraiser, “age—deliberately vague.” But, she says, by the time she’d reached thirty, “I was tired of living out of the big version of a suitcase—not having the nice things in the style I wanted them in because, goddamit, I was supposed to have these things selected from my registry, or to pick them out together with my husband, with whom I was to establish a real, permanent home…. I didn’t even have a nice car. Everything was on hold and I was just too far along in all the other areas of my life to live without a decent shower curtain or wineglasses.”
One marketing executive called it learning to “think singly.” And everyone, even the very married, was advised to learn the dance steps.
By 1975, one in four households were headed by single women, the combined results of so many women waiting to wed and so many others having their marriages unexpectedly end. The Equal Credit Opportunity Act of that year made it much easier for women to buy condos and entire houses and to have aligned in their wallets as many credit cards as they chose. (Before that, in many states, it was impossible for a woman to get credit except under her husband’s name.) And many were using them “to buy very ‘nice things’ like Limoges china and Baccarat crystal,” as The Christian Science Monitor reported in 1975. “They don’t feel that a woman’s home life begins when she marries.”
“It’s hard to imagine attaching much importance to an ashtray, or to even now believe you owned an ashtray, but I bought a Steuben ashtray,” says “Jo March,” forty-six, special-events manager for a large department store. “It was so clear and heavy and big it took over the room. I saw it that way, anyway. Because it was ‘real.’ Because it didn’t fold up or come in garish colors. I’m not sure I even liked it, I just wanted to have a Something that told people I was living in that place for real, that I was a big girl, and that I had taste.”
The other enormous change in single lives was the addition of children.
Back in 1960 an approximate 10 percent of all unwed mothers had kept their babies; ten years later that number had climbed to 45 percent, and in 1975 fully half of all unwed mothers—in most major cities in the Western world—kept their babies. When interviewed, most of these women said they’d like a mate and a large number indicated that they had wanted to live with the baby’s father. Then they’d go on to explain why, for many complex reasons, it was not possible. But that didn’t change a thing about the baby. He/she was hers and belonged to her alone (not in any way to her parents, spouse, priest, “society,” or the baby’s father), and she planned to raise him/her on her own. Starting in 1970, more young mothers every year would never marry.
It had also become easier for a single woman to adopt. In 1968 New York City officials had looked at the “staggering illegitimacy rate” and decided, according to one city-administration official, that “half a home would be better than none.” Borrowing from a Los Angeles program, New York social services offered to qualified singles “children termed hard to adopt,” meaning over the age of three, handicapped, or mixed-race. The adoptive parent had to meet specific criteria—have a steady income and a college degree. It was important that they have primary family members nearby. As it happened, all of those who qualified were women, former or full-time social workers, either widows or divorcees.