Bachelor Girl_ The Secret History of Single Women in the Twentieth Century - Betsy Israel [4]
Then one night I began to recall that time, the entire trip, more coherently. I was seated, at the moment, with my children in the emergency room. We’d been playing a game; I was “asleep” and to wake me one child had shoved a tiny stiletto Barbie shoe up my ear. Now it was stuck. Oh, they were sorry, twisting themselves around my legs and crying, but I had trouble reassuring them and seeming “fine.” I was aware only of stupid pain, ambulance sounds, and, from the smell of things, other patients hiding day-old French fries in their coat pockets.
I closed my eyes. As if it were a taxi, a Red Cross flying carpet, the lost divan pulled up in my brain. Easing back the silky black covers, I climbed in.
A DIVE INTO THE SINGLE FILES
There is an incredible amount of written material on single women out there. Amazon.com lists 787 current titles, most fitting into one of several single niches. The most obvious is the advice from “the woman who knows” (usually a doctor who goes by a first name such as Dr. Paula or Dr. Joan) to the woman who clearly doesn’t. Nonexpert advice and guidebooks for single women could fill a New Age college catalogue—finding soul mates; learning to love yourself first; identifying obstacles and creatively crashing through them; and how to drag him back using every imaginable part of your body as an arsenal.
There are hundreds of relevant novels, ranging from The House of Mirth, Sister Carrie, and After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie to Fear of Flying, Looking for Mr. Goodbar, and Bridget Jones’s Diary. There are some fascinating academic studies. And there are many interesting if sometimes repetitive journalistic offerings, usually magazine articles (a day/night/week in the life of a single) that grow into books and/or oral histories.
Some of the best oral histories become meditations, as in The Improvised Woman, a wonderful book by journalist Marcelle Clements, in which she alternates subjects’ remarks with her own thoughts—all to explain how thousands of women, thirty-five to fifty-five, found themselves permanently single and raising children alone. This she viewed as nothing less than a radical rewriting of the social contract. Because of this proposition, the book was trashed by critics as “too seventies,” meaning that it seemed too celebratory, too self-consciously groundbreaking—too feminist.
I may as well warn you that there is no way to discuss single life at this point without getting “feminist.” Nearly all American women will for some part of their adult lives exist singly—that is a statistical fact. Some of us will enjoy it, some will feel relieved or depressed or will have no particular views on the subject. And yet we all know that “single” as a social entity has its unique complications. Namely, other people’s sexist attitudes.
A Columbia University senior sighs and says, “You know that, as a woman, single is childlike, younger, and that a mature individual forms combinations…. If, as a woman, you do not, you will come to understand that ‘single,’ as a word, begins with the same letter as ‘stigma.’…‘Cancer,’ I am sorry to say, has the same number of letters.”
A thirty-six-year-old graphic designer is less glib: “I see my married friends and female relatives mostly when the ‘other half’ is away. They come down to my loft and it’s, like, they’re so amazed to find that it’s really specifically decorated…. And this is even if they’ve been there before. It’s so insulting. I had one friend, a school chum, who seemed paralyzed by my having Le Creuset cookware. It was, like, do you have to have a wedding license to apply for heavy French pots?”
No one has the ability to make the many presumptuous views of single women disappear. But