Bachelor Girl_ The Secret History of Single Women in the Twentieth Century - Betsy Israel [70]
Mother Number Two was a new woman, a onetime progressive reformer, desperate because her own daughter had no political views and had never even heard of the National Women’s Party, the ERA-devoted Congressional Union, the Women’s Trade Union League, nor even the National American Woman Suffrage Association. What views the girl held seemed to concern her right to act as she chose and to denounce her mother. Consider some of the contemporary first-person story titles: “The Harm My Education Did Me,” “Confessions of an Ex-Feminist,” or, more to the point, “The Injurious Strain of My Mother’s Devotion.” As far as one girl was concerned, such impossible new women had “crammed their bookshelves with pamphlets on venereal diseases [and] suspected all…male acquaintances of harbouring a venereal taint.”
As if writing for the girl groups of the early sixties, another annoyed daughter wrote: “I’m out of here, mama, and don’t you try to come my way, too.”
Still, it was sometimes mothers who provided the most insightful information about their daughters. An excellent example is “A Tale of Not So Flaming Youth,” by Mrs. Virginia Kirk, published in McCall’s in 1929 and deemed so compelling it was reprinted in the Literary Digest in May 1930.
Mrs. Kirk was concerned. Her “own daughter was nearly ready for that stage in her education [high school]; and she wanted to know what the girl had to face.” Although she was “ten years out of university” Mrs. Kirk appeared so youthful “that she could pass for seventeen.” And so, posing as a student, she infiltrated the high school scene.
She got it firsthand. The number of girls who smoked was on the rise. Nearly 95 percent of all students did not attend church, although most seemed to have notions of a “secret personal religion.” Moving on to the primary topic, she reported that sexual behavior remained the same as in her day. Boys craved physical contact. So did girls, though they were “afraid of the social and biological consequence, not to mention the religious aspects and reasons.” But, she emphasized, sex had lost some mystery due to “semi-realistic and suggestive” film content. Any mother who ignored the subject or “berated” her daughter was pushing the girl “closer” to an unmarried sexual encounter.
Mothers also needed to know that “treating,” the ancient dating ritual, had become a standardized business transaction. Boys understood that they were to fund goods and activities—a corsage, car, food, movies, plays—and girls were expected to allow an increasing degree of sexual progress as dates and sums accumulated. But of course many girls were reluctant. And of course boys resented this fact and punished the recalcitrant girl by calling her a “gold digger,” a bitch out for only one thing: boys who could produce a paycheck from a part-time job or generous parental grants. Girls denied the charges. But how to explain? Although they were flappers, flirtatious and bold, they still were nervous. And because they were flappers, because they were flirtatious and bold, they had their doubts about men and the romantic scheme in general.
Wrote Mrs. Kirk: “Marriage can no longer be represented to them as an infallibly ideal state, since they only need to look around to see scores of their elders making a failure of it.”
To a reporter, at lunch or over drinks, some young women tried to explain their conflicted feelings, their “inability to live life according to the rules” or their “unwillingness to conform.” Most hoped to explain how “in due course [they would] do something quite grand.”
The interviewer was always intrigued by his subject and at the same time scornful. In my favorite, “An Interview with a Young Lady” (1927), the subject, an “aspiring writer” who has taken “a man’s point of view as her mother never could,” explains herself well, then gaily leaves