• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1413 0

in her dealings with the world and men especially a brittle and sarcastic presence. The essential icon in this category was TV journalist Murphy Brown, as played by Candace Bergen on the long-running TV series. Murphy was known for many things, but I remember most the dresses that had openings at the shoulders, as designed specially for the show by Donna Karan. These “cold-shouldered” outfits were the power look of the moment, I always thought, because the metaphorical chips on Murphy’s shoulders were so huge they mandated special tailoring. It seemed that women who’d worked their way to a position like Murphy’s were just as pathetic as the Alices, if in a different way. They were tougher, more accomplished, richer, and had fabulous perquisites, all to cover unsuccessfully for the fact that they had forfeited their ability to do anything “female” in life. The macho career woman was depicted as an update on the harsh 1930s career woman, that intersexual, mannish, possibly lesbian postwar working bitch missing a heart. As it was most often expressed in the late 1980s and ’90s, this woman had some kind of cerebral and/or neurological inability to deal with children. (Other people’s children, of course, for it was presumed that she wouldn’t have any of her own.) For example, if there was a baby in her apartment, how was she, a person with important work to do, supposed to know what it wanted?

Movies, again, form an excellent primer. One precursor to this 1990s archetype is Elizabeth Lane, the Barbara Stanwyck character in Christmas in Connecticut (1946), an early Martha Stewart kind of columnist who writes of her farm and her fabulous meals and her babies, although the entire thing is made up. She lives in the city and can’t boil water. At Christmastime, the great Mrs. Elizabeth Lane is asked to play hostess to a war hero. On her farm. With her cows and antiques and babies and all the rest, including a husband, and so the panicked Stanwyck promises to marry a man she detests in order to borrow his farm. She also “borrows” a baby. At one point we hear the baby crying in the other room. Everyone looks at Mrs. Lane. Finally she understands! It’s the baby! “It’s crying!” she says, looking panicked. “Oh, um, I must go to it!” Forty years later Diane Keaton, the harried “tiger lady” in Baby Boom (1987), is not even capable of lifting the infant that’s been left to her by a relative. Even with the improvements since Elizabeth Lane’s day, “J. C.,” the MBA and brilliant marketing executive, cannot get a diaper on the baby. A diaper is not within her conceptual framework.

A related example from real life: When the late film executive Dawn Steel had a baby, people in the Hollywood community asked, jokingly, “Who’s the mother?”

But life among single professional women, or any other single women, simply was not all that harsh. In 1986 the government funded a large six-state study of single women’s sex habits. It turned out that a third of all subjects at one point had cohabited because they did not feel “ready” to get married. With more than half of all marriages failing, and a hefty percentage failing during the first two years, some felt no rush to marry. And, for many women, the question was, “Marry who?” (“All the men I meet are either gay, married, crazy, or just plain boring,” went the popular lament; if it could have fit onto coffee mugs and bumper stickers, it would have.)

Research also showed that women in the eighties and nineties were not as depressed or as suicidal as others liked to think. It had long been a truism, for example, that single women were twice as likely to suffer from depression as married women. But a 1992 study of 18,600 professional middle-class white women and men, single and married, showed that the difference in rates of depression was pretty low. Of all the married women interviewed, 3.5 percent had been diagnosed with major depressive disorders, compared with 4.1 percent of the single women; after divorce, the transition back into singlehood, the rate flew up to 9 percent, then dropped down within eighteen