Bachelor Girl_ The Secret History of Single Women in the Twentieth Century - Betsy Israel [76]
This sad old girl was shown, as always, to be socially pathetic (“The normal woman must have something to live for, if it be only a cat,” wrote Mrs. Juliet Wilbor Tompkins in 1927.) But now she was also potentially sick. According to Tompkins in “Why Women Don’t Marry,” Cosmopolitan, for some new spinster misfits the “ways of sex will always remain a sealed—and rather horrid—book she reads at her peril.” Others of these “nuns by blood” would evolve a “repose, a gentle power of indifference” that sometimes made them “bewilderingly” interesting to men “who wonder if they may not be awakened.” The sad truth, however, was they would always be dormant. Even if they wed, their strange stillness would render any union abnormal. “Such women may marry and have ten children without seeming to come into any close relations with life: to the end they are stray angels, cool and aloof. The man who marries one of them will have no tempests to encounter, yet his way will not be…easy…for he can never fall back on his sex with her.”
The language of sexology, its strict hierarchies of frigidity and lesbianism, suggested that there was serious scientific proof for such claims. If anything, sexology gives us proof that female freedom was so terrifying, so unthinkable, that it had to be killed off—and not just by inventing replacement icons. Finally, all female abnormality would be smothered beneath a pile of specious scientific findings.
HOW THE NEW SPINSTER MADE OUT
In spite of these warnings, most young women still felt “a Ferris-wheel-at-the-top thrill,” as one of my own subjects put it, about trying on a single life. Even if the top jobs were closed to women,* there were still so many dizzying possibilities they seemed to pass by as if in a movie montage. My favorite character in search of career is the fictional Carol Kennicott, the determined, unintentionally hilarious heroine of Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street (1920). In one early packed paragraph, we learn that Carol had “hoped to discover that she had an unusual voice, a talent for the piano, the ability to act, to write, to manage organizations,” and that with each disappointment, she “evanesced anew—becoming a missionary, painting scenery, soliciting advertisements,” and on and on until she’s talked into marriage by a doctor from the Midwest with the promise of his rising hometown for her to conquer. Stuck in dreary little Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, she takes up urban planning, working to change street directions and move buildings, not that anyone has asked her to. She runs away once, to Washington, but comes back, because she’s waited too long. She has a child. She is not a career girl at this point but a middle-aged woman from, and even she has to admit it, Gopher Prairie.
Had it worked out for her in the big city, Carol might have discovered what many real young women had discovered: Jobs were not, as the Atlantic Monthly had concluded, “open-sesame’s to life.” They were, as any man could have testified, only jobs. Una Golden, hero of an earlier Lewis novel, The Job (1917), skips out on small-town life and rushes to the city where she finds work in an office, a new world that sustains her for about half the book. That is, until the day Una understands that it will never change. She asks herself, “[what are] days…beyond a dull consistency of…machines and shift keys and sore wrists?” Not much, and at the end Una establishes herself and her fiancé in a successful real estate brokerage.†
She was one lucky character. In the late 1920s, the lawyer, writer, lecturer, and feminist Crystal Eastman prophetically stated, “Women who are creative…with administrative gifts or business ability and who are ambitious to achieve and fulfill themselves along these lines, if they also have the normal desire to be mothers, must make up their minds to be sort of superman.”
Margaret Culkin Banning, who wrote sensible new-spinster stories for the Saturday Evening Post, continued well into the 1920s to praise the new spinster as that sleek figure in a modish cap,