Bachelor Girl_ The Secret History of Single Women in the Twentieth Century - Betsy Israel [78]
“A quarter of all women” is a much repeated estimate that’s hard to break down. But it’s known that thousands would not, as planned, attend college or at least finish up their degrees. Hundreds of thousands who would have married never wed, never had children, and by 1932 the U.S. marriage rate had hit a historic low, while the birthrate had dropped to its lowest point since 1900. And many of those who married simply did not consider themselves financially stable enough to have children. Despite the danger and illegality, abortion was commonplace, and according to a 1933 Gallup Poll, 63 percent of the population favored “some form of birth control.” In 1933 the condom industry, a $350 million enterprise, produced something like one million units a day. Wives could obtain an early form of diaphragm known as a pessary, and so could single women, as long as they posed as wives and appeared in doctors’ offices wearing wedding rings.
Mary McCarthy* describes the complex procurement process in her novel The Group, set in the thirties and written in 1966. For weeks one character schemes and plans to get the item, telling her prospective lover that she will call him as soon as she has it in her hands. After an embarrassing doctor’s “fitting”—what is perhaps the first flying-diaphragm scene in all literature—she leaves with her secretive bag and calls him to find he’s not in. She walks around, calls again, then again, and finally tells his landlady that she is waiting in Washington Square Park. Seated on a bench, the precious treasure on her lap, she starts to reconsider. Hours have passed and obviously he’s not coming. Ultimately she leaves the bag beneath the bench and walks off feeling terribly alone and embarrased.
Many real single women spent the Depression years feeling terribly alone and desperate. Work was hard to find and no matter how irrational it came to seem, there was still a stigma attached to the job hunt. The compromised “forgotten” man—he was the one who needed work. But there were also needy women, and some of them literally began to starve. Fainting, in fact, became a common melodramatic plot point in the numerous backstage musicals of the time. The starving girls were almost always revived by Broadway stars who just happened to be passing by and who went on to make the emaciated girls tap-dancing miracles. Back on earth, of course, fainting was not a career option. Most women who could, as well as those who couldn’t, typed. Even college graduates typed. Barnard College reported that only one third of the class of 1932 who sought jobs found them, and that most of the class at some point took up typing.
“Most of the girls I knew in those years were typists or bookkeepers who had their jobs because they were the only ones who knew how some cigar-reeker of a slob kept his files,” recalled Bess, now seventy-nine and herself a bookkeeper who worked until 1997. “Women weren’t taking over men’s places. What man do you know who wants to cross his legs and take dictation?”
This was still an age of classifieds listing “Jobs—male” and “Jobs—female.” (In fact, this age would last until the late 1960s, when protests and sit-ins inspired newspapers to blend the job offerings.) And it was “Jobs—male,” the jobs in heavy industry, that took the biggest hits during the thirties. Clerical jobs, like all others, thinned out but never to the point where there was nothing. Women who held these jobs both hated and cherished them. There was little else out there and, for the city emigrants, nothing at all to return to.
But there were a few positions beyond typist, telephone operator, unwed teacher, and a handful of actress jobs. The biggest