Bachelor Girl_ The Secret History of Single Women in the Twentieth Century - Betsy Israel [6]
As of this writing, 42 percent of the American female population over age eighteen is technically single. Most have never married, although I must note that it’s difficult to say precisely how many in this grouping are gay. (Census takers cannot by law ask, most gay-rights organizations are too financially strapped to conduct precise nationwide counts on their own, and of course many respondents would not answer truthfully. Thus, figures vary dramatically.) The never-weds are followed in number by widows and then the divorced, a number that fluctuates constantly.
Some census officials, and the professors and authors I’ll call census spectators, predict a drop in the age of first marriage (now 26.1 for men; 25.2 for women) and an “increased post-collegiate married cohort.” Others predict just the opposite, describing a country inhabited by urban “tribes,” groups of thirtyish women and men who have extended the college-era concept of the group house into adult life. (The TV phenomenon Friends picked up on this years ago.)
Whatever the prevailing trends, most every woman will one day find herself in the single subcategory, marked as I was as a single type, an inexplicably stubborn and undesirable female alien. And there will be no escaping it. As a prescient single woman wrote, in 1955, for Mademoiselle: “We are never allowed to forget what the billboards, television, movies, and the press would have us remember.”
That is the story Bachelor Girl has to tell.
CHAPTER ONE
THE CLASSICAL SPINSTER: REDUNDANTS, THE SINGLY BLESSED, AND THE EARLY NEW WOMEN
My dear, to a brighter future—when there will not be so many forced marriages, and women will be taught not to feel theirs a destiny manqué, nor the threat of poor spinsterhood, should they remain single.
—BRITISH WOMAN, NINETEEN, WRITING TO A “MOST-BELOVED” (PRESUMABLY UNHAPPY) MARRIED SCHOOL FRIEND, 1859
He: Who’s the fat lady with the heavy brows and all the hair?
She: A spinster aunt.
He: Where are you, taking the picture?
She: I’m the fat lady with the heavy brows and all the hair. I’m poor
Aunt Charlotte. And I’m still not well.
—BETTE DAVIS, HAVING LOST WEIGHT, NOW, VOYAGER, 1942
The woman of a certain age is a very charming concept in French. In just about every other language it is a euphemism for having lost, through age, whatever charmant thing it was that made you charming. And for a woman who never married, there are no euphemisms. The “losing” in her case is a condition, a pathology. It is about as far removed from a charming concept as a brain tumor.
—DORIAN, THIRTY-EIGHT, NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO PRODUCER, 2001
IN THE SPINSTER MUSEUM
It seems safe to say that in 2002 nobody is a spinster and that a certain percentage of the population is not entirely aware of what a spinster is. For those in the latter category, I offer a brief tour of the Classical Spinster Museum.
WHAT THE OLD GIRL LOOKED LIKE:
“…grey-haired…desiccated…with a funny little tic that twitched her left eye-brow, and a mole on her upper lip….”
—A DESCRIPTION OF MISS SKIDMORE FROM EDNA, HIS WIFE MARGARET AYERS BARNES, 1935
WHAT SHE DID EACH DAY:
“I went upstairs to my flat to eat a melancholy lunch. A dried-up scrap of cheese, a few lettuce leaves for which I could not be bothered to make any dressing, a tomato and a piece of bread and butter followed by a cup of coffee…a woman’s meal, I thought, with no suggestion of brandy afterwards.”
—MILDRED LATHBURY, HEROINE, EXCELLENT WOMEN, BARBARA PYM, 1951
WHAT OTHERS