Bachelor Girl_ The Secret History of Single Women in the Twentieth Century - Betsy Israel [59]
—PROFESSIONAL WOMAN, HARPER’S, 1929
I AM (NEW) WOMAN, WATCH ME SMOKE
It is tricky to reconstruct a group photo of the New Woman. A few visual details float into focus—shirtwaists, suffrage banners, serious-looking girls with their arms around each other—but much of the picture has faded. Over time, the precise meaning of “new woman,” like that of the contemporaneous term “free love,” has become impossibly blurry.
So let’s clarify and state that the new woman, an essential character in the history of single female life, belonged to a group of women considered “individualized” (roughly translated, self-aware and unconventional) that the press began to cover at the start of the twentieth century. At the time, everyone was reporting on single phenomena—the bohemian, the numerous varieties of working girl—and “new woman” sometimes served as an umbrella designation for every newly uncovered independent life-form. (“No one who is not absolutely an old woman,” remarked humorist George Ade, “is safe from being considered a new woman.”) But the true new woman, a term derived from Henry James and his irreverent moderns Daisy Miller and Isabel Archer, was very much a distinct singular entity. Unlike the average bohemian or bachelor girl, the new woman possessed a leftist intellectual pedigree. Her attitudes and beliefs were descended from the elite early feminists—the singly blessed spinsters of the Civil War era and the later reformers who’d helped found or been among the first to attend the women’s colleges.
Our early-twentieth-century new women went to college, and some even managed to argue their way into traditionally all-male graduate schools. Some were suffragists (ette, they believed, was a cute, belittling suffix) known for their impromptu speeches and some for their acts of political agitation—hunger strikes, for example, or handcuffing themselves to the fence outside the White House. Some were “womanists,” precursors to feminists whose ideology stressed women’s social and moral duties as opposed purely to women’s rights. Others had unlikely careers—choreographer, economist, journalist, politician, pilot—while still others advocated dress reform, abortion, and contraceptive rights, or simply smoked defiantly in public, a punishable offense after 1908, the year the federal government banned women from smoking. Some new women—Margaret Sanger, writer and economist Charlotte Perkins Gilman, writer Louise Bryant, reporter Ida Tarbell—became living monuments to what many called the “new possibilities.”
But the new woman was most famous for her refusal or, rather, polite disinclination, to marry. (And when new women did marry, the unions were almost always unconventional. Margaret Sanger, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Jane Addams, Edna St. Vincent Millay—all had marriages that involved living apart, sometimes continents apart, “with an understanding.” There were public and tolerated affairs; in some cases they divorced and husbands took custody of the children.)
The press continued to recycle the prevailing view of matrimony: that no woman was qualified to do anything else but wed. In The Ladies’ Home Journal, 1900, we learn that “to women, the business world looks to be a great mysterious whirl of which she can understand nothing…. To attempt…comprehension is to strain unnecessarily.” In a 1904 survey, Good Housekeeping asked five thousand men to list the qualities they required in a potential bride and then those features that “repelled” them. The winning prerequisites were an “attractive manner,” “Christian tendency,” “modesty,” and “womanliness,” while “career minded-ness,” “an argumentative nature,” “the urge to smoke,” and “physical imperfection” doomed an increasingly large percentage of the population to a new old-maidhood.
But I doubt that many in the ranks of new womanhood took subscriptions to Good Housekeeping. Author Susanne Wilcox, writing in The Independent in 1909, explained, “The desire to participate in what men call the ‘game of life’ has fastened itself upon many modern