Bachelor Girl_ The Secret History of Single Women in the Twentieth Century - Betsy Israel [83]
In 1935, shortly before her death, Charlotte Perkins Gilman lamented that the original new women had failed to train successors. Others admitted that they had, in fact, alienated many young women by publicly insulting the popular culture of the 1920s. All that was true. But if many young women were apolitical, it was not because they felt excluded by older feminists. With the exception of the very wealthy and the very lucky, most young women had missed out on the basic things they’d been raised to expect, as one young woman told the New York Times: “dating, driving, horseback riding…. I never went ice skating or out dancing…. One year our school play was canceled because the stage was considered unsafe and there was no money to replace it. Also we had no sets and costumes.”
As the Depression finally eased, this young woman, like thousands of others, would officially attempt to have fun. As early teenagers, these “kids” threw parties, listened to music—big-band, swing—that offended their parents, evolved an inside slang (“ugly duck” and “scrag” versus the “fly” or “nifty” girl), and traveled in high school packs, kid constituencies that, as in the 1920s, formed a discernible if less extravagant youth group.
As one salesman put it, there was scattered throughout the country a whole generation, sixteen to twenty, “none of whom have owned a second pair of shoes. Can they know what it is to have a closet full of shirts? Wearing the same clothes every day for weeks, months on end…. How many recordings does the average youngster own? No need to start counting…. Imagine having your own radio!”
This atmosphere was captured by one of my oldest subjects, who declines to give her age but says, “My name is Ida-Mae, that’s how old I am”:
There was a longing to run around with your friends, and talk fast about…pure nothing…. I remember our mothers couldn’t understand why we wanted to have many boyfriends, instead of just one. And music, oh yes! My mother, I remember this, called it “Jewish sex music”! Maybe the clarinet was too phallic for her. Benny Goodman was prominent…. We were always dancing, in basements or someone’s living room. Sometimes it got a little lewd. But, believe me, in the average crowd, nobody had sex. We ran around with boys…. After the Depression years, going out for a soda—that was fun. Oh boy! And if you happened to go with fifteen other kids who all wanted to sit in the same booth—even better!…Nobody knew what was coming. I remember thinking about two things. I was going to find a husband. And I was going to college. Not in that order.
But, like others, she encountered resistance to what she called “the college end of the bargain.” With the wane of the crisis came a renewal of public arguments about the purpose of higher education for women. Why, and especially after this enormous social mess, would the average girl want more than a home? And if that was to be her destination, was it fair to men, who had suffered, that she take up needed space in classrooms? The Atlantic Monthly, 1937, solemnly noted: “When the point is reached where, in order to secure a higher salary, she must study for a master’s degree, she may realize with a sudden anguish that her chance of marriage [is] growing more remote and that the pattern of her life is more and more following the lines of spinsterhood.”
During the late 1930s universities were referred to as “spinster factories.” And as in the Victorian period, prescribed remedies to this factory life turned up in the media. A typical Life feature demonstrated how a mother might work on a girl when she was young so that when it came time for college that girl would already be married. One 1937 story consisted of several panels in which the chosen