Bachelor Girl_ The Secret History of Single Women in the Twentieth Century - Betsy Israel [55]
The latchkey at last.
Some girls wore their spindly keys on long chains that dangled, while others hid theirs inside a boot or a shoe and stood on it all day to be sure it was safe. It was not an engagement ring, but in its way it symbolized a rite of passage; single female life had at last been deemed a grown-up life. In his 1992 film Singles, Cameron Crowe captures the same sort of exultation on the face of Kyra Sedgwick as she holds up her newly acquired garage-door opener. (It’s meaningful, really, because it is her own garage, and that garage is just below her own very first ever condo!)
And once the key, one’s own private space, had been secured? Then came relief, excitement, and a swiftly spreading sense of disappointment. Girls called the arrangements “better,” “more free”—they loved having unsupervised parlor time—but they also used phrases such as “in the overall, small in feeling.” One twenty-one-year-old office clerk told Munsey’s Magazine that the Trowmart and its few imitators had “narrow rooms” with bad lighting and “mincy wardrobes.” Many residents took to the parlors, although these filled up rapidly, and so in all kinds of weather packs of girls were out on walks. Out wandering—swiftly wandering so as not to seem vagrant or “loitery”—they often met equally claustrophobic friends, and had marathon teas. A bit later on they escaped to nickelodeons, neighborhood theaters consisting of a small homemade screen and wooden chairs.
There is no document of daily life at the Trowmart Inn. But we can imagine it based on the descriptions of comparable hotels, both the real, for example, the Barbizon—subject of numerous Sunday-magazine features during the 1950s and ’60s—and the fictional. There’s a great section of Kitty Foyle in which she describes her life at the fictitious Pocahontas Residence for Women, a dwelling obviously based on the Barbizon. As always, Kitty narrates in a tart but sympathetic manner:
A neurosis to every room. I can see them yet in the dining room, poor souls with the twice a week chicken croquettes and those rocking little peas, sort of crimped so they wouldn’t skid…. They called them bachelor girls, but a bachelor is that way on purpose. One evening one of them must have gone haywire [because] she yelled out into the courtyard, “there’s a Man in my room!…Now, everybody, they had seen the sinister fellow…but he was nowhere…only…a pale phantom of desire.”
THE BACHELOR GIRL AND THE BOHEMIAN
By the turn of the twentieth century, so many single girls were visibly out there—working, eating in restaurants, dancing—that it became harder to immediately categorize them. (And arranging single girls into identifiable groupings was a necessity not only among editors, writers, and retail merchandisers. State and U.S. government officials frequently organized mass prostitution raids. An increasingly diverse single population made the task much more difficult. At urban rackets and in the newer Broadway cabarets, government agents became famous for “getting the wrong girl wrong,” accusing a shop girl of being a hooker, and “getting whonked for their mistakes,” meaning kicked in the ankle.)
One magazine columnist, writing in 1907, put it this way: “In the great cities, thousands of our young women” live in a “swarm of singularity.”
But there was an identifiable strain of “new girl” who appeared at the turn of the century, an intense, dramatic type who’d consistently reappear in years to come: the bohemian. Typically our bohemian was a high school or college dropout who had tried but could not live within the strictures of the bourgeois society she had only narrowly escaped. She often told reporters,