Bachelor Girl_ The Secret History of Single Women in the Twentieth Century - Betsy Israel [5]
Most interesting to me and in many ways most useful, I read diaries of women who’d lived singly in 1866–69, 1884–88, 1900, 1942, 1951, 1961–62, 1973–76, and 1999.
A FEW NOTES ON APPROACH
The roots of single phobia curl back into antiquity. But I’ve started my investigation with the industrial revolution, and the emergence of displaced single women, specifically the middle-class spinster and the immigrant working girl. I’ve organized the chapters according to the single icons that came after—factory girls, “shoppies,” steno girls, new women, bohemians, Gibson Girls, and the numerous other types that followed them across the twentieth century and into the present. But Bachelor Girl is not a simple pictorial timeline, a semiotic tour that charges through decades, admires the era’s single pinup, then rushes on. Nor is it encyclopedic history. I have combined my historical single archetypes with their rough counterparts now—mostly women in their midthirties and early forties, the point that marks what one magazine editor, forty-four, calls “The Pass-Over Ceremony.” As she explains: “In your twenties, you’re a free bird. You are an unmarried person who has options she hasn’t yet exercised. After the pass over…it’s metamorphosis…. You are viewed, and you know it, as a different woman. An unmarried, as opposed to a merely single, person.”
Along with this primary peer group, I interviewed all over the age map: women in their late teens and twenties, a big eager group now in their fifties and sixties, a few in their seventies, one voluble eighty-five-year-old, plus the occasional ten- or twelve-year-old with strong views about independence as it might affect future careers in veterinary science. Except for the under-twelves, all but one wanted their name and any identifying detail changed. I agreed, of course, but asked that my subjects choose their own pseudonyms. This request seemed appropriate, since many of the earliest single working girls invented fantasy names for themselves. Whether stuck in a factory, behind a store counter, or cleaning someone’s house, the Marys, Hannahs, and Bridgets of the world became for ten to fifteen hours a day Absintheia, Serenissima, Cassamandrina, or my favorite, Briar Desdemona Woods, née Mary O., a seamstress circa 1870 noted for her speed and small stitches.
Because I’ve drawn from the popular media, in its infant and more mature forms, I have narrowed my dig to the feminine icons most consistently held out to represent American womanhood. My primary iconography, therefore, is white, if not always predictably middle-class. Of course women of (all) color have lived out, and continue to live, the single drama, and their personal narratives intersect at many points with those I’ve emphasized. But they make few primary appearances in the public record until occasional stories on the “sad,” “dreary,” or “dead-end” world of the “Negro single,” circa 1966. (It would be impossible, anyway, to do justice to the complexities of the black single experience in this volume. It requires and deserves its own study, and I sincerely hope someone takes on the challenge.) Likewise, I have not included much material on self-defined lesbian women. But I do work through the various ways that “spinster” and “lesbian” have overlapped at times to describe an afeminine woman who, according to prevailing dicta, ranked as a human mutation.
Finally, I have pretty much settled the single woman in New York