Bachelor Girl_ The Secret History of Single Women in the Twentieth Century - Betsy Israel [62]
I’ll call it the age of the popular as opposed to the reformist new woman, a new woman without the glasses and the prim boater, and in its place a huge yellow hair bow. (And I mean huge, as if she were wearing two colorful party balloons joined at the nape of the neck and floating upward. In my grandfather’s Springfield, Ohio, high school yearbook, 1911, not one girl in forty-three is minus her gargantuan bow.)
This new girl, known once again as the bachelor girl or “the bachelorette,” had grown up, according to the Saturday Evening Post (1912) “permeated in the modern world.” During the years 1910 to 1913, six states voted in favor of a women’s suffrage amendment. Advertisements, popular novels, quick-change fashion trends—all had been present from the start of her conscious life. Our new bachelor girl wore looser-fitting skirts that allowed her to bicycle everywhere. Some had been on aeroplanes, and others boasted that they’d made cross-continental phone calls. With one million plus cars out on the roads, they’d all been out driving, even if they retained passenger status (there were no laws against women driving, just, initially at least, a reluctance to let them take control).
Much of the Jazz Age imagery we associate with the 1920s—driving, incessant dancing, loose-fitting clothes—actually took shape around 1913. One Boston American columnist described the popular new woman like this: “…the 1914 girl: You’ll recognize her. Just look for a slim creature who is not on closer inspection a boy in a dress, shaped like a pencil.”
One columnist for the St. Louis Mirror called the era “sex o’clock in America.”
Both these comments were made while writing about the phenomenon known as the thé dansant, or the notorious afternoon tea dance at which gin stood in for the tea. Think of a very small racket—it’s crowded and everyone’s dancing to a modern gramophone that spins seventy-eight-r. p.m. records. (The tango, imported from Deauville, France, is the dance of the moment, in part because the General Federation of Women’s Clubs has banned it as immoral.) It’s all very casual. No one has sponsored the dance or sent invitations; like the floating urban clubs of the 1980s, it appears from place to place: in a bachelor’s apartment, in someone’s parlor—provided the parents are out, of course—or in the back room of a restaurant.
The tea dancers come from all over. There are college girls on break, working girls out on adventure, brides-to-be making their way through long engagements. There are many actressy characters who mix freely with the working girls and, as it’s always noted, a contingent of timid girls who look as if they’ve never been out and aren’t exactly sure where they’ve turned up. All of them play dress-up. Some use sashes to shorten their skirts or change the style altogether, attempting to create straight, narrow frocks that cut just above the knee. Using their ribbons, they tuck up long wavy hair to see how it might look cut bobbed and modern. Long, pointy shoes with buttoned straps radically reveal the ankle. Eventually, even the little sisters, the timid girls, show up in skinny dresses and Mother Goose shoes. Instead of hair bows, they wear shimmery bands that wrap around the forehead and sprout feathers.
And so tea dancing spreads from city to city, and the late afternoons grow very long. Adults, alone at dinner, slowly take notice.
“DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOUR DAUGHTER IS THIS AFTERNOON?” asked Harper’s in 1914, anticipating the famed 1970s TV query: “It’s ten o’clock. Do you know where your children are?”
One red-faced columnist in the Boston American explained precisely where they were: “Tea! Tea! What is this tea!? An excuse, a forum for young