Bachelor Girl_ The Secret History of Single Women in the Twentieth Century - Betsy Israel [91]
In 1948 the U.S. Women’s Bureau held a conference to celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of the Seneca Falls women’s rights convention, calling it “The American Woman, Her Changing Role: Worker, Homemaker, Citizen.” The keynote speaker was Harry Truman, who changed the order of the roles in the title; “homemaker” went first and “worker” last. It had been psychological doctrine. Now it was an executive order.
THE AGE OF ANXIETY
Despite the at times surreal amount of cheerleading for marriage, for home and “womanhood,” the divorce rate was actually rising.
It had become much easier to accurately count the number of divorces nationwide. Before the era of Social Security numbers, driver’s licenses, and primitive computerized records, the actual number of failed marriages remained hazy. A 1995 edition of the Monthly Vital Statistics Report explained that after the war—well beyond the initial 1946 surge—there was a steady rise in the divorce rate. Ultimately, between 1946 and 1950, the number of divorces and annulments would total 4,020,000.
Magazines, newspapers, dime novels, even newsreels were quick to jump on the rising divorce story. One anonymous woman interviewed for Harper’s Bazaar in 1946 wrote, “It seems like everyone is getting divorced and, yes, that does scare a lot of women, including me on occasion…[but] I think what it comes down to is keeping up an interest in all areas of your marriage. Even if you are dishwater tired.”
But if a woman happened to be dishwater tired, how was she to recognize what the Reader’s Digest called “separation signs”? And what was she to make of the sudden presence of so many obvious divorcées?
Suddenly, in good communities, in any community across America, there were newly divorced women seen committing basic acts of daily life—smoking, retrieving the newspaper or mail, putting out trash, shopping, chasing kids. Divorcées had always seemed a little tarnished and sad, but in a certifiable man crisis they took on new characteristics. They were now directly threatening. Sexual. (As the divorce rate began its brief but dramatic decline during the monogamous fifties, the divorcée portrait—floozy blonde; blinds down at 2 P.M.—would become more of a gross sexual parody.)
Alice Hoffman gives a superb recounting of divorcée paranoia in Seventh Heaven, a novel set in the early 1960s on suburban Long Island. At the start we meet several housewives attempting to place a new neighbor. Finally, after much speculation, they come to what must be “the only explanation,” even though none can “bring themselves to say the word divorced out loud…. [But] the word was there, it had entered their vocabularies and now hung above them, a cloud over their coffee cups…they were all so completely married, and they were in it together…. And yet there it was, across the street, a hand without a ring holding a Windex bottle.”
The married women swing into defensive action, and “by the end of October, every mother of every child…knew that Nora was divorced….Billy [her son] was never invited over to anyone’s house after school…she herself hadn’t been told about the monthly PTA meetings. No one mentioned the Columbus Day Bake Sale.”
Hearing about it, Nora stays up all night making a cake, a handcrafted candy-dotted castle, pink and voluptuous, a real Jayne Mansfield of a cake. No one goes near it.
In 1949 one society matron confessed to the New York Times, “I do not invite unattached women because it seems to me—I don’t like to say this—but you know, Perry and I are so happy and these