Bachelor Girl_ The Secret History of Single Women in the Twentieth Century - Betsy Israel [92]
And occasionally we witnessed the angry single sniper in action. In A Letter to Three Wives (1949), morbid suspicion of the other, experienced woman animates the entire film.
The story is this: Three wives each receive a letter from the town vamp, socialite Addie Ross. The letters inform them that Addie has stolen one of their husbands and plans to leave town with him that very day; one of them, in other words, is in for a nasty surprise at dinner. We never meet Addie; she speaks off camera in an alluring faraway voice, the siren song of the willowy bitch. The three women spend the day together, each dropping off into long spells of contemplation. How has her marriage, and how has she, been disappointing? The mood is thick with apprehension, ill ease, and finally paranoia until the moment we know. As it turns out, they all are safe. One husband had planned to leave with Addie but changed his mind. All is well and Addie and her giggly voice recede, though it’s clear she’s had a wonderful time torturing these three to the very core of their feminine souls.
Still, women were interested in reading and watching films about women in situations other than domestic panic. Some of the period’s most popular films concern women who had jobs, and not only the Mildred Pierce psycho-careerists who haunted “women’s films.” Claudette Colbert played a haughty novelist in Without Reservations; Ginger Rogers played a tough editor in Lady in the Dark; in Laura Gene Tierney was a graphic designer, and Rosalind Russell in Take a Letter Darling had a male secretary (who eventually accused her of anti-womanhood as if it counted as an un-American activity). Most delightful was Bette Davis in June Bride, playing a top magazine queen who’s got a bum but loveable writer fiancé in her past. During the course of one horrific wedding shoot, she’s tossed back together with him and, ultimately, has to choose: power, top job perks, great apartment, or a loving if irresponsible man from the past.
They surrender, all, but with seconds to go before the closing credits, a holdout that is less a suspense tactic than a means for allowing female viewers two full hours of screen time to watch funny, smart-ass women brilliantly run the show. (A similar device operates in some of the era’s most popular radio soap operas, for example, Portia Faces Life and The Romance of Helen Trent, each primarily about love relationships, the stuff of female life, but as experienced by, respectively, a lawyer and a Hollywood designer.)
This same kind of “holdout” was at the core of the bobby-soxer phenomenon. There were other elements, of course, namely, advertisers thrilled to have unearthed an independent peer group (pubescent girls) that ran a slice of underground economy (baby-sitting). Bobby-soxing further gave to Shirley Temple a mature but still cute persona to inhabit before retiring. But most important, to be a late-forties bobby-soxer was to be a young woman between girl and wife. Soon enough she’d emerge from the protective cocoon of rumpled jeans, saddle shoes, and daddy’s shirts. Soon she’d begin her husband hunt in earnest. But just for the moment she was off the market.
Once-upon-a-time single women might have urged her to stay there, or at least not to rush.
In 1949 the New York Times interviewed female members of the college class of 1934 to see how their lives had played out during the Depression and World War II. Of the entire class, 82 percent were still married and only 12 percent worked “outside the home…the predominant experience of the class of 1934 was as housewife.” We also learn that almost 90 percent had children, and that as of 1949 many of these kids were not yet in school. The story moves along to its point: “A strong note of betrayal runs through…the study. These women entered public life in a