Bachelor Girl_ The Secret History of Single Women in the Twentieth Century - Betsy Israel [90]
And those were the healthy married ones. The mid-twentieth-century single woman presented a scarier case. As the authors saw it, the country had already faced down the feminists, bohemian nuts, and, worst of all in retrospect, the suffragettes, whose “ferocity…led to property destruction on a large scale; damages ran into the millions. The government seemed powerless to deal intelligently with the situation. Women had truly gone berserk.” And now came the lost woman, plagued by a “bundle of anxieties” all of which were grotesquely heightened in the unwed woman. “If she hasn’t a husband and is seeking one she is fully aware that others of her kind have the same primal purpose…. She cannot help but observe[women] scattered about profusely…stenographers, secretaries, hat-check girls, models, fashion designers or female riveters…they are no longer secluded, hidden away, but out hunting, as it were, in packs.”
These edicts had to be viewed in their proper Freudian context. As explained in numerous books but most forcefully in Modern Woman, all women had a biological and social imperative to mate, then to reproduce. Throughout her life, in other words, a woman was really no more than half of a human unit, who alone could not evolve and maintain her own superego. As a “half,” she would not ever be able to make up her own mind—a primary trait of many fifties TV heroines. And never would she possess a fully formed conscience. Only a man could provide the already unsteady, unmoored modern woman with moral balance.
Of course women did not walk through life upset because their “primordial rhythms” had “broken,” nor did they believe—not really—that they inherently lacked some essential mental component. But many beleaguered single women believed they now had not only a personal but a societal obligation to find a man. This led to an epic outburst of tension—at least as it was reported in magazines—and especially between friends who had come to share the same (nagging, anxious) suspicion: Wasn’t every woman a potential “other”?
Many books appeared to help her in battle—“finding,” “attacking,” “getting,” “securing,” “safeguarding.” Reading about single life circa 1948 is like browsing through a collection of busy war strategies that alternate with wordy, scolding conduct guides. A great example of the latter genre is Anything but Love by Elizabeth Hawes (1948), a thick book that was to serve as “a complete digest of the rules for feminine behavior from birth to death, given out here in print, but also put forth by the author…over the air…in popular magazines and on film…[advice] seen and listened to monthly by some 340,000,000 American women.”
A few of her dictates, all eerily reminiscent of the nineteenth century:
All girls want to be whistle-worthy, and that raises what is…the biggest worry in your life: Does he see you as pretty?…One of the miracles which mass production has wrought is that every single American girl can be seen as pretty. Our ugly ducklings can be turned into beautiful swans.
The main purpose of girls getting jobs is to meet men they may subsequently marry. A girl may continue to hold a job and earn her living in whole or part to age 23. Thereafter, only if she has become a successful star of stage and screen.
Occasionally something appeared that single female life as pitiable, it went without saying, but manageable for a reasonable amount of time. Jean Van Ever, in 1949, published How to Be Happy While Single, a practical guide to living life alone before marriage. As she wrote: “Meal planning, marketing, vacuuming, and the wear and tear of housekeeping…these skills are worth the struggle to master, so, while you have the chance, practice up. Even if you have a job and you are tired at the end of the day. Practice.”
But increasingly the “authorities”—and they were everywhere—didn’t bother with the particulars of single life (the hunt,