Bachelor Girl_ The Secret History of Single Women in the Twentieth Century - Betsy Israel [77]
The normal social unit is made up of a man and a woman in love, courting or married. The unmarried woman who has made a job the other half of her social unit…is bound to be somewhat extraneous…out of the social picture…. The masses…administer printed condolences and sedative terms—“new woman,” “bachelor girl,”—but the world in general has not approved the sight of a lady jogging through life alone.
All of this discussion came to an instantaneous halt with the 1929 stock-market crash. Within weeks, it seemed, the troubling unwed American female—whether professional, fun, academic, political—slipped from beneath the cultural microscope. The U.S. Women’s Bureau estimated that just six months after the crash, two million women, many single, had lost their jobs. It was made very clear, however, that men had suffered more. They’d lost more than just jobs; they’d lost their essential core of masculinity. Amidst a collapse so hulking and vast, there was little energy left to think about the single woman. But there would always be something to say.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE SUSPICIOUS SINGLE: JOB STEALERS, THE RIVETING ROSIE, AND THE NEUROTIC HUSBAND HUNTER
—“But aren’t ya ever going to fall in love?”
—“A career itself is a romance. I haven’t the time…”
—“Aren’t ya ever going to marry?”
—“My de-aah, when you spend 14 hours a day with your dearest illusion, it loses something.”
—RUTH CHATTERTON EXPLAINS LIFE IN FEMALE, 1933
Now, listen…forget about yourself…You know what it means to the girls in this show? Those poor kids gave up jobs and will never be able to find other ones!…If you let them down…they’ll have to do things I wouldn’t want on my conscience and it’ll be on yours!
—ALINE MACMAHON, THE SMART CHORINE, GIVING HELL TO HER DELINQUENT PRODUCER, GOLD DIGGERS OF 1933
Let him know you are tired of living alone…. You want him to take charge. You want now to have your nails done.
—U.S. GOVERNMENT “READJUSTMENT” GUIDE, 1945
SINGLE GIRLS ONLY NEED APPLY
If attention turned to the single woman—and occasionally, of course, it did—there was just one question for her: Did she work?
If the answer was yes, the response was almost always angry. Women, during the Depression, were not under any conditions supposed to hold jobs. Jobs were for men—all those guys thrown out on their asses and depicted sitting home, too depressed to lift their feet for the carpet sweeper. Women seen dressed for work, entering an elevator in an office building, made this horrific situation, this stigma of compromised manhood, that much worse. Even if she was en route to a job no man would take, the stares, the muffled traitor talk, reminded her of life’s primary motto: “DON’T STEAL A JOB FROM A MAN!”
This made life tense and difficult for single women, because single women were just about the only women out there working—and sometimes there were more of them working than men. By 1932, legislation in twenty-six states prohibited married women from holding any jobs whatsoever, and that included teaching and positions in the Civil Service should a relative already hold one. In states where getting married didn’t require retirement, an employed woman who married was nonetheless expected to make a “full disclosure” or risk losing that job or incurring fines for “misleading statements.” And that applied even to women in those female jobs no man would take—typing, filing, cleaning.
My father, a schoolboy during these years, recalls: “If we found out a woman who worked in our school was married, we were shocked. I think at one point there was talk that the librarian had a husband and we wondered, why does she have a job? Why is she working? If her husband is a dentist or a lawyer or a truck driver, what does she have a job for?”
There was much discussion of job-hogging acts of afemininity. However, little was said about the myriad problems, anxiety, and sacrifices of single