Bachelor Girl_ The Secret History of Single Women in the Twentieth Century - Betsy Israel [135]
Repeat.
Well, it makes for terrifically grim and sorry copy. And for a long time, I think, women believed it. Or at least they understood there were restrictions, a unique system of singular Jim Crow—unwritten laws concerning where they could go, when, for how long, and with whom. Through the 1960s these matters were actually spelled out in terms so precise the syntax and wording seem borrowed from Deuteronomy.
But though still misunderstood and—thanks to writers and directors—still so often maligned, single life is no longer what we for years have enjoyed calling a half life. There are still archetypes, easily applied methodologies for organizing and controlling the way we think about single women. Then there are the unavoidable live women themselves as opposed to the images.
During the nineteenth century, many real women (as opposed to spinsters and shrews) found it easier and more satisfying to choose women friends over men and/or family for their essential life “partners.” And it’s this long-discouraged practice that accounts for the true appeal of Sex and the City. A simple reading presents a very clever, witty drama concerning a variety—almost every variety—of relationships with men and sexual issues (premature ejaculation; strange bathroom habits; trying to make lovers out of sex toys and humans out of men who are angry, et cetera). But the real action and pleasure and love is among the four girlfriends, who spend all their available time together, discussing all of these other relationships. It’s like life on an imaginary cruise ship—the four separate briefly, go off and have their various trysts in their various rooms, then return to the dining room, where they review the day, drink, and split dessert four ways. The real conflict occurs right there, among the women; it’s in the way they push one another, tell one another the embarrassing absolute truth, hitting on weak spots and self-defeating patterns. And the amazing and perhaps fantastic element is how they don’t walk out on one another. If they do, if there are hurt feelings, everyone participates in the reunion, which will typically involve baskets of homemade muffins and/or blender drinks and new shoes.
And it is now distinctly possible that another generation is going to miss the cues of single-illness, or uncomfortability, altogether. Recently I took a bunch of ten-and eleven-year-olds to see the movie Kate and Leopold, starring Meg Ryan as a thirty-fivish career woman who dresses like and has the body of a good-looking young man. In fact, her boss at the marketing company to which she’s devoted her life compliments her by telling her that she’s not really a woman. She’s like, and this is the good part, she’s like…a man. Her ex-boyfriend, like that of every other alleged spinster character—like Bridget Jones and Ally McBeal—has let her down. She gave him “the best seven years of her life.” He replies: “Those were the best?”
He’s much too preoccupied, anyway, with finding fissures in the space/time continuum and, as the movie starts, has found a portal into the nineteenth century. A handsome duke and inventor somehow follows him back into the present and home to his apartment. Two hours later, Meg, who still lives upstairs from this unfortunate boyfriend, is given every single working woman’s dream choice: Go back in time and be rich and beautiful and beloved by a handsome duke, or stay here and be great at your job. Of course, she goes, by throwing herself off the Brooklyn Bridge, the site of the portal, and landing in the nineteenth century, wearing a blue dress.
I asked the ten-and eleven-year-olds what they thought about