Bachelor Girl_ The Secret History of Single Women in the Twentieth Century - Betsy Israel [80]
Bertha couldn’t possibly have kept up with the traffic. According to Hutchins, there were between 100,000 and 150,000 homeless women wandering around, many of them teenaged runaways who slept outside. The YWCA estimated in its 1933 Christmas message that there were 145,000 women who “very well could be” described as “home-less and footloose…at dangerous odds.” In 1935 the Salvation Army reported that in eight hundred cities across America there were 10,000 women a night asking for shelter. Another source of information about transient women was social scientist Thomas Menehin, who wrote of his travels “hoboing” his way around the country in 1936. His estimates: One out of every twenty tramps was a “girl,” although many, like Veronica Lake in Sullivan’s Travels (1942), dressed as a man for protection. Life on the road was extremely tough; women were in constant danger of rape, especially in the public shelters.
Or so it was assumed. Menehin, like others, did not have any hard data on what homeless women did at night or, for that matter, by day. Did they band together, or was it a rule of the road to trust no one? Where did they sleep? “The Forgotten Man” became a vivid national icon in part because he turned up in newsreels. With the colorful exception of Boxcar Bertha, Forgotten Women were invisible. Writer Meridel LeSueur asked, point-blank, in a 1932 issue of The Masses:
Where do they go when they are out of work and hungry?…they are not on the breadlines. There are no flophouses for women…you don’t see women lying on the floor of the mission in the free flops…or under newspapers in the park and trying to get into the Y without any money or looking down at the heel. Charities take…only those called “deserving.” The lone girl is under suspicion by the virgin women who dispense charity…. Where do these women go?
One read about these women on very slow news days, in stories that often seemed more like public-service announcements. Women who made the news were valorous like Eleanor Roosevelt, brave and spunky like Anne Morrow Lindbergh, glamorous—the duchess of Windsor, Marlene Dietrich—or extraordinary, like Babe Didrikson Zaharias, the mega-sportswoman. (At a time when there were no organized women’s sports, Zaharias served as a one-woman Olympic team. Asked once if there was anything she didn’t play, she answered, “Dolls.”) But the average single woman wasn’t asked very often what she thought or did. And when someone—a man, an official—happened to ask, certain assumptions about her character seemed always to creep their way into the questions.
THE CASE OF THE MISSING HEART
One of the key single-female motifs in Depression-era America was the heartless woman. She stole jobs from men. She stole herself away from men who needed her. She even stole cosmetics from stores. She could not help herself. Either she’d been born hard or, to paraphrase from numerous magazines and dime novels, something human had been ground out of her in hard times. She was missing a vital piece. The word malevolent began to appear before the words woman or female.
The mannish sexological ice block seemed healthy and whole in comparison. Here was a woman missing more than sexual warmth or desire. She was missing her heart. And this freak condition was best open to exploratory surgery on film. As early as the mid-twenties movies had featured intense, almost rabid female bosses who spit out orders. They hired! They fired! They lived in art moderne palaces around servants they hired and fired! Most important, they dismissed romantic love as a plebeian distraction. At least for the first forty-five minutes of the movie. A classic example in this brittle-bitch genre is Smouldering Fires (1925), starring Pauline Frederick