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By Root 1499 0

it, assuming they would vote for portals and dukes and fancy dresses and any way out of wearing those blah “work clothes” plus having a horrible boss. But they surprised me. One told me there were no “jobs for women except secretaries” and so who would want to live then? Although, hedging, she added that Kate’s life “now” was “totally boring” and her blue dress was “extremely pretty.” A girlfriend of hers suggested that Kate could move to a better apartment and, because she’d been promoted, she could buy all new clothes! She could get “someone who wasn’t a weird geek for a boyfriend!” The first girl then added something that she’d learned in school: “Most people in those times didn’t even live to be thirty.”

Which led to a moment’s reflection. Another girl who had favored Kate’s going back now said, “If she really went back to then, then now, when it’s time for her real life, she’d already be dead.”

She should live well in her own time and, as they said when I was single, “On her own terms.” And no one should say anything more about any of it. There have been too many epitaphs for the single woman, and almost every one of them is pathetic. She is not.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

A study of single women relies heavily on the accomplishments of women’s historians. These academics and agitators have taken what was, twenty-two years ago, during my student years, a loosely organized post-sixties discipline and turned it into a recognized field of remarkable scholarship and theory. The body of historical works is at this point so vast that it is physically impossible to list all the books and articles I have consumed over the years and that have influenced my thinking about single women. But I include in the following notes the primary texts I consulted for each section of Bachelor Girl, any document I’ve quoted from, and a few related works that I think, or hope, will be of interest.

There are many excellent overviews of women’s history. I used the following: Sarah Evans, Born for Liberty: A History of Women in America (New York: Free Press, 1989); Mary P. Ryan, Womanhood in America: From Colonial Times to the Present, 3d ed. (New York: Franklin Watts, 1983); William Chafe, The Paradox of Change: American Women in the Twentieth Century, a 1991 reworking of his earlier The American Woman: Her Changing Social, Economic, and Political Role, 1920–1970 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972); Nancy F. Cott, ed., Root of Bitterness: Documents of the Social History of American Women (New York: Dutton, 1972); Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz, eds., Becoming Visible: Women in European History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977); Nancy F. Cott and Elizabeth Pleck, eds., A Heritage of Her Own: Toward a New Social History of American Women (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984).

A few more finely honed time periods: Mary Beth Norton, Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–1800 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980); Margaret Fuller, Women in the Nineteenth Century (1855; New York: W. W. Norton, 1971); Elaine Tyler May, Great Expectations: Marriage and Divorce in Post-Victorian America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).

On the history of feminism:

The standard reference and most frequently assigned women’s history text is Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States (1959; New York: Atheneum, 1970); Rosalind Rosenberg, Divided Lives: American Women in the Twentieth Century, American Century series, Eric Foner, ed. (New York: Hill and Wang/Noonday Press, 1992), is invaluable for its analysis of the parallel struggles of black and white women, individuals, and activists; Nancy F. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987); Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Eighty Years and More: Reminiscences 1815–1897 (1898; New York: Schocken, 1971); Elizabeth Cady Stanton/Susan B. Anthony: Correspondence, Writings, Speeches (New York: Schocken, 1981); William P. O’Neill, Everyone Was Brave: A History of Feminism in America