Bachelor Girl_ The Secret History of Single Women in the Twentieth Century - Betsy Israel [89]
That is to say, she’d had a job, she’d lived alone or with a group of other working women and had somehow mislaid her supply of charming helplessness.
One World War II veteran I interviewed recalled:
When we came back from the war, yes, my God, there was a sense that [even] if we’d changed, we hadn’t expected women to change…. There were lots of women everywhere, very breezy, confident. It was…a little shocking at first, but not really a bad thing. I remember being on a subway and this woman just sitting down next to me and starting a conversation, and all I remember thinking is, she’s not even going here for a pickup, she was chatting. Women didn’t do things like that before…. Now they were different, more of a presence.
He might have added that there were just more of them. As actor Glenn Ford spat at Rita Hayworth in Gilda (1946): “Ha!…There’re more women out there than there are insects!”
Cursory reports from the Census Bureau confirmed that women had become the majority sex in the United States. Obviously there’d been war losses. But medical data was also starting to show that men had a higher susceptibility to disease and infection and that women in general had stronger immune systems.
In the spring of 1948 The New York Times Magazine devoted a cover to the news that women were “The Stronger Sex.” They had stronger hearts. They faced far fewer bar brawls, stressful commutes, industrial accidents, et cetera, but the news still was not good. Because of their newly discovered strength, women were more likely than ever to end up alone—widowed and unable to beat out the competition for a replacement—a condition that was made to sound far worse than that of all the many men who would simply be dead. (The piece led with an illustration showing buxom ladies with butterfly nets desperate to catch their weak, elusive prey.) The Times had in ways been covering this story since late 1945, when it first reported that because of war losses, population shifts, and female longevity, 750,000 women would most likely have to live without husbands. Three years later it was time to assess damages and ask the important questions: What was going to happen to all these women? What would it mean for society if there was suddenly a permanent single class? Would government, at the local or federal level, in some way be responsible for their welfare, and how would such women fare emotionally?
Everyone at least had an answer for that last one: very poorly.
This conclusion was rooted in a kind of pop-Freudian mandate that had evolved during the war. According to the tenets of this new “understanding,” modern woman was no longer merely frigid or heartless; she was a full-scale neurotic. In Modern Woman: The Lost Sex (1947), a bible of sex-role hysteria, authors Marynia Farnham and Ferdinand Lundberg labeled the twentieth century a time of “epidemic neurosis” and characterized women as its most appalling victims. Theirs was an existential crisis, for they had lost their essential identity and purpose. That is to say, females had been torn from their place in the home, metaphorically removed from the hearth. As the two doctors explained in both the book and in a series of stern filmed lectures:
Thousands of women became deeply and genuinely uncertain about whatever they undertook. More and more conscious of themselves as “drags” upon their husbands in the competitive struggle for place and prestige, frustrated at the inner core of their beings, they proceeded to react in a number of ways—as male-emulating careerists, as overdoting, restrictive or rejecting mothers,