Bachelor Girl_ The Secret History of Single Women in the Twentieth Century - Betsy Israel [127]
THE BIG CHILL: THE ANTISINGLE EIGHTIES AND NINETIES
During the 1980s bookshelves were crammed with punishing tirades: Otherwise Engaged: The Private Lives of Successful Career Women; A Lesser Life; Smart Women, Foolish Choices, and many tomes that featured the words “biological clock,” a phrase repeated so often I began to think of it as a body part, perhaps a moody colon or a giant cyst. I include as an adjunct to this sad single genre the Cathy cartoon books, which seem innocuous enough until, on the fourth or fifth volume, the self-deprecation starts to seem like a pathological tic. In retrospect, I also think the most popular cat book of the era—and at the time “cat” was its own publishing category—played on stereotypes associated with single women. Garfield was a male cat, but his primary characteristics were borrowed from traits commonly ascribed to single females: he was fat, eccentric, sneaky, and lived in constant anticipation of food because there was nothing else in his life.
These books had various points to make, but the primary conclusions were always, however expressed or disguised, that women had paid an enormous personal price for the successes of feminism, in particular the demands and sacrifices required by their jobs. Married women with children, those said to “juggle”—the euphemism for impossible trade-offs between work and family—were well known to confront physical breakdown if they did not ultimately choose the part-time “mommy track,” meaning the relinquishing of their career goals to work a nontenured, nonpartner three-day week that allowed them to leave at five.
The single woman confronted different kinds of possible and likely breakdowns. One of these, as described by a USA Today reporter in 1989, was “an O.D. of Machisma.” The other can be summarized as a kind of all new quiet spinsterly death by pathos.
This last was best described in a 1991 story, “What About Alice?,” that appeared in The Washington Post. The piece, written by a man, began, “I shall invent a woman.” And he did. A prototypical lawyer, good salary, fairly attractive, and, at thirty, still unwed. As the story begins, it was “dawning on Alice that she [might] never get married. And the same thing seemed to be occurring to many others she knew.” Nobody understood why, but that’s how “things were working out” and it was becoming frustrating. And expensive. Her creator explained:
Alice is tired of celebrating the milestones of others. Sometimes her life is a wearying round of parties and weddings, showers and more parties. She is asked to celebrate what she is coming to see as reminders of her own failure: The engagements, weddings and babies of others. Each invitation is like a flunking report card. These events are not only emotionally draining. They are costly as well.
“Alice,” he wrote, as if addressing all the unmarried law-school grads and unattached MBAs of the universe, “my heart goes out to you. You are the grim smile of every Academy Award loser.” And he concluded by reminding us that Alice did not exist. Had she been real, she’d have “broken your heart.” For all those like her—those contending with their non-chance of marriage, all those still forced to argue (years later!) about Fatal Attraction—it sounded grim. The San Francisco Chronicle summarized the dating climate, circa 1990, as an anti–greeting card: “Modern romance is a mess. To enter this magic land, one must maneuver through a gantlet of expectations, confusing miscommunications, desperate avoidance of intimacy and fears of everything from rejection to sex disease.”
The professional woman “O.D.ing on Machisma” was just as sad. Older than Alice, this single character had spent years struggling against sexism, suppressing anger, and she was thus