Bachelor Girl_ The Secret History of Single Women in the Twentieth Century - Betsy Israel [124]
I know it’s bullshit…but what if there isn’t a man there, watching me? Then it’s like this moment—whatever it is I am doing—doesn’t matter…. Of course I really care about my girlfriends; that’s a given in my life. But those bonds can’t really ever develop into what I’d call the fundamental thing. To make it real, or meaningful, or whatever, there has to be the sound of one man clapping. I know this sounds totally sick.
Miller argued that such women—and there were a lot of them—suffered less from father fixations or advanced insecurities than they did problems of “affiliation,” what Miller called the learned overemphasis on connections to men. As she wrote, “They lack the ability to really value and credit their own thoughts, feelings and actions. It is as if they have lost a full sense of satisfaction in the use of themselves and of their own resources or never had it to begin with.” One single woman, thirty-one, put it bluntly: “There’s the sense that there has to be the other person there.”
There was also the shared sense that the singles scene, or culture, or business was becoming an embarrassment. “I went, I swear, once to a ‘singles fair,’” says a bonds trader, forty-eight, married now but at the time the kind of woman who had “affiliation” issues. (“I always sat on my couch facing kind of sideways, with my legs curled up, as if I was having a conversation with someone. I wasn’t.”)
She recalls leaving the fair after one group exercise: To walk out of the hotel hosting the event and into a nearby “department store and to walk out with the names and phone numbers of three single men. I would rather have risked the humiliation of being rejected at Studio 54 than have had to do that,” she says. “This was the key to my future?”
Singles expos, singles magazines (Your Place or Mine?), and humiliating gift books (How to Make Love to a Man, with chapter headings such as “Wash the Dishes Nude”) made single life seem sleazy. And it was still, more so than ever, a dangerous way to live.
City cops and social workers routinely made statements to newsmagazines such as, “Young unmarried women are destroyed by seeing liberation strictly in terms of sexual freedom.” They referred to the fact that the single murders so common in ’73 and ’74 had continued and now most often had a drug connection. And they didn’t mean the much beloved Quaaludes. (Just to give some sense of how “beloved”: In 1979, Edlich’s Pharmacy at First Avenue and Fiftieth Street reported filling eighteen thousand prescriptions for methaqualone, generic for ’ludes, more than half the entire state’s total and more than half went to young women.)
“Nice” girls were found in motels far west on Forty-second Street, overdosed on heroin, and others OD’d from the lines of cocaine that were passed around on party platters. Girls from the suburbs were found in Central Park, unconscious or dead. Rape attacks were up or just reported more consistently.
The head of the New York City rape squad very memorably put it this way: “Single women should avoid being alone in any part of the city, at any time.”
And there were deeper, less immediately palpable terrors still.
In January 1979 the New York Times reported, “Hospital at last identifies its shopping bag lady.” Pictured was an old Hungarian woman who’d been found a while back wandering, stupefied, her possessions—old photos, letters, postcards, canned soup, pretty scarves—neatly arranged inside Bloomingdale’s and Macy’s shopping bags. The director of the Human Resources Administration’s Office of Psychiatry noted that “there are probably a couple of hundred shopping bag ladies in the city.” (If you had looked up the very first reference to “shopping bag lady” in The Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature, 1977, you’d have found “see tramps.”)
Her cheeks had collapsed around her gums. Her hair was gray and spongy,