Bachelor Girl_ The Secret History of Single Women in the Twentieth Century - Betsy Israel [72]
Commentators, editorialists, and well-dressed ladies worried that second-stage flapperism might become a way of life. Imagine it: Each year more girls went to college, fooled around yet somehow still graduated, then, well-dressed and outspoken, became career women. As it turned out, more women during this time married and had babies than any peer group in thirty years. But the impression of a dangerous “flaming youth” refused to die a natural death.
There was no choice but to kill her.
At the close of 1928, the New York Times ran a front-page obituary for the Flapper. To replace her, editors endorsed a diaphanous, vaguely European creature called the Siren. She was an imaginary woman of great style and mystery who possessed an “air of knowing much and saying little…a mysterious allure.” These truly feminine qualities, especially the part about saying little, “spelled death” for the flapper, that “fashion-killing” young woman who through sheer “force of violence established the feminine right to equal rights in such formerly masculine fields as smoking and drinking, sweating, petting, and disturbing the peace.”
The siren quickly would be revealed as the brainchild of French couturiers concerned about the straight, unremarkable silhouette of flapper dress styles. And the attempt to delete flappers from the cultural record would ultimately fail—but not because the siren proved so blatantly artificial. Those much-feared “second stage” flappers, the ones said to have transposed young flapper moxie into grown-up careers and single lives, simply refused to give it up. They had moved on in life, but their “true selves,” as one put it, lay hidden behind a “jazz mask.”
Writing in The New York Times Book Review, an “unrepentant flapper” recalled:
dancing brown-skinned in a hula-hula skirt…learning how to smoke and swear and stand up for myself…proud of my nerve…shameless, selfish and honest, but at the same time consider[ing] these attributes virtues…with the sharp points (worn) down…the [flapper’s] smoothly polished surface [will] provide interesting, articulate, unstuffy companionship to men in years to come…. Be thankful that we could be the mothers of the next generation.
Many feared that women who cherished their memories of younger years (even if that meant life three years before), would not, en masse, become the next mothers. They would never wear down peacefully into housewives who bought large appliances. They would not even make proper spinsters.
THE ALL-NEW IMPROVED SPINSTER
So we come to the last of the Jazz Age single icons: the New Spinster, the single icon most likely to be crowned ancestral career woman. She had a surprisingly good job. A nicely decorated place of her own, in which she was often pictured seated in an art moderne chair beside her telephoning table. She was well dressed, she had her own car, and her days were so busy she required a diary, an antique sort of Filofax made of red leather, monogrammed and chrome-bound, with a lipstick case to match. As she perceived it, the mechanics, “the orientation,” of her own life “allowed her to glide along smoothly.” All she had to do was to slip into a casual dress or blouse with skirt, toss on a jacket and a pair of pumps, and rush to her car, without asking anyone’s permission. One reporter described her like this:
Today’s spinster is fashionable to a fault. She…knows how to buy and because she is spending money she has earned, she has both assurance and discretion…And because she had avoided the extra duty and unexpected worry which are so often part of married life [she’s] kept her looks…at 35 or 40 the unmarried woman looks fresher and younger than many a married woman of the same age!
And she was patient in a way only a mature, confident person could be. When barraged with public queries