Bachelor Girl_ The Secret History of Single Women in the Twentieth Century - Betsy Israel [122]
The most visible symbols of change were not these sudden mothers minus fathers but the outspoken and very cool-looking single celebrities. The best example of the breed was without a doubt Gloria Steinem. Steinem began her public life during the early sixties as a hardworking journalist, who happened to be very pretty and went to A-list parties and dated famous men. She hated being referred to as a “woman writer,” which of course meant the secondary, soft kind of reporter. But from the start of her writing career, she’d been drawn to women as a subject. To mass changes occurring in women’s lives. And to situations that exposed what was not yet called sexism. She also chose female subjects who seemed to have much stifled anger and no voice, most famously Pat Nixon, who managed to express much outward public rage at Steinem’s perceptive and honest portrayal.
The details of Gloria’s life intrigued people. She’d grown up poor and neglected, then won a scholarship to Smith and spent a year abroad as a Neiman Fellow in India. She returned to New York and settled into an Indian-themed studio in the East Seventies that she kept filled at all hours with interesting people—politicians, reporters, actors, and, increasingly, prominent women. Over the years, Gloria was most frequently pictured out dancing with her wealthy, good-looking beaux. But by the early seventies, once she’d been declared the new voice of feminism, magazines like Newsweek stopped the dance-party photos and went with long vertical shots of her giving speeches, the sort where the viewer begins at the shoes and works up the long, long legs to the incredibly short dress, to the famous hair, and then, lastly, the microphone.
No matter what Gloria Steinem said or did, no matter whom she interviewed—and she was for a long time a political columnist for New York magazine—it would be noted only that she “did something for clinging dresses,” thanks to legs “worthy of mini skirts.”
She was described as “the thinking man’s Jean Shrimpton.” Even after she’d founded Ms., turned her apartment into a sort of women’s shelter, and become the women’s movement’s most important player, its secret weapon—the one not perceived as ugly, angry, or cranky—here’s how people wrote about her: “She stands there, striking in hip-hugging raspberry Levi’s, 2-inch high wedgies and a tight poor-boy t-shirt. Her long blonde-streaked hair falls just so above each breast and her cheerleader-pretty face has been made wiser with the addition of blue-tinted glasses; she is the chic apotheosis of with-it cool.”
Gloria Steinem liked to state that “young girls were refusing to be blackmailed into domesticity.” But no matter what she said, the ultimate question for Gloria Steinem was always What about you? She was gorgeous, though well into her thirties, and so what was she waiting for? When all was said and done, people wanted to know When Would Gloria Settle Down?* Otherwise put, when would she shut up and get a man?
She married for the first time at age sixty-five.
THE SINGLE TAKES A SLIDE
The 1980s, by any estimate, marked a low point in the public accord between single women and men, each side accusing the other of roughly the same crimes: insensitivity, dishonesty, stupidity, and sometimes martyrdom. It was during the late 1970s that this public mudslinging got under way. In newspapers and books and on TV talk shows, the women—“liberated,” successful, often divorced—suddenly began to lament a shortage of intelligent, sensitive men. And it was more than mere numbers, more than the well-known fact that so many men were gay. It was the quality of the men themselves. As Mademoiselle had put it with great prescience back in 1955, “Perhaps there is only a shortage of desirable men—men who are not too fearful and too repressed or too smug or too uninteresting.”
In stories typically entitled “Where Are the Men Worthy of Us?” prominent women denounced the single-male population—those “guys” hunkered down in dated bachelor pads, who readily lied and preferred jail bait or the standard fuck-and-run. Reporters