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outrageous condemnation. Much of this criticism was aimed at upper-class feminist or “womanist” types, but it trickled down to the bachelor girl. In his tirades against “race suicide,” Teddy Roosevelt now looked directly at the unmarried white woman, even if she was only eighteen, and called her trouble. There were more immigrants. There were more inexplicably single women—bohemians—and so, as he saw it, more than mere laws were in order. (There had already been plenty of legal assistance. Contraception and abortion had been outlawed and between 1889 and 1906, state legislatures passed more than one hundred restrictive divorce laws.) White women of all sorts would have to cooperate!

The true bohemian, like the radical spinster before her, ignored the fuss. The bachelor girl, however, paid attention. There are guilty acknowledgments of this “race suicide” concept throughout my collection of press clippings “re: Bachelor Girl, c. 1908–1914.” In stories such as “The Lives and Loves of a Bachelor Miss,” “Date with a Bachelor Girl,” and “Today’s Modern Bachelor Girl—Her Hopes, Dreams, Her Chances in Life,” we hear about one’s “essential responsibilities,” about the “sacred” duties ahead, and more than once about knowing “when the party is over.” In the articles “The Bachelor Girl, As Told by One Who Knows,” “Bachelor Girls of Today and Yesterday,” and “I Am a Bachelor Girl,” the phrases “later on in my life, proper,” and “when I am settled down,” appear three times. Five times in all we hear the phrase “when I am the mother of” followed by the phrase “sweet babes” or “tender babes” or “six or seven babes.”

But no matter how often she pledged to defend her future fertility, the bachelor/working/single girl was just as likely to take delight in describing her life as it was at the moment—and especially as the terms “bohemian” (serious, artistic) and “bachelor girl” (worker bee out for fun) began slowly to blur.

We’ll call them, along with everyone else, B-girls.

Many wore their hair short, after the girl/boy heroine of Trilby, George Du Maurier’s 1894 novel. Virginia Woolf called the type “cropheads,” the name she’d given Dora Carrington after the young artist chopped off and banged her hair. Some girls went in for a Chinese plait, but the primary fashion influence was Trilby. Trilby had inspired an early rush of icon merchandising (Trilby hats, dresses, waffles), and everyone knew her story: Parisian orphan who boarded with a ragpicker and his wife and lived la vie bohème without affectation. She dressed in burlap sacks, and wore sandals on what were, by any standard, huge female feet. (She also had a large, pliable mouth.) For money, she ironed clothing and modeled nude for male artists without a hint of shame. At night she smoked, dressed like a man, and paraded the Quartier Latin, where she was queen of the cancan. (Of course she’s taken down—made to feel guilty about her “ways” by the respectable man she deeply loves. He drops her straight into a bog of depression and self-hatred that makes her perfect fodder for the devil, presented here in the form of a music teacher named Svengali.)

Young B-girls expanded on their visions of Trilby. They were reported to wear only “sheaths” or “smocks” and to eat with their hands. In the dark. Often a B-girl had the lights put out as necessary economy, and lived by red candles offset by gauzy veils. There was other folklore about her lifestyle, as one writer put it, “a maze of weird and witching elements.” Bathrooms, whether in the hallway or the flat itself, had no doors. Mice were welcome guests and fed at table, which happened to be the floor. Everyone smoked. According to one story in the original Life, the B-girls at times “unconsciously interpret[ed]…the eating rituals of [one]…tribe of Southern Africa…this conclusion is further supported by the post-prandial decision to paint their bodies with white and blue stripes and then to dance.” (The context of this short piece, wedged between two popular-science stories, makes it hard to say whether the speaker was joking.)

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