Bachelor Girl_ The Secret History of Single Women in the Twentieth Century - Betsy Israel [93]
But it would be far worse—and there was a consensus among the women interviewed—to go through life singly. To be single was to “experience the feeling of contamination,” as one expert put it in Ladies’ Home Journal, or as Time somewhat awkwardly described the single state in 1950: “pin-stuck with a cramp of isolation.”
Of course there is a women’s film that deals specifically with issues of singular contamination and isolation. It’s called, appropriately, Autumn Leaves (1956), and stars Joan Crawford, as a spinster who marries a man she does not really know in order to improve a life spent inside her L.A. bungalow, where she types manuscripts with maniacal speed and efficiency. As it turns out, her husband, a younger man, is plainly maniacal—a kleptomaniac, a pathological liar, prone to crying and “shrieking like a woman,” until Joan has no choice but to “put him away.” At the home, he receives electroshock treatment, a procedure usually associated with snarly, uncooperative women. Joan, soon after, receives a jolt of her own. Seated on the edge of a straight-backed chair, hands mangling her purse, she confronts the psychiatrist, the authority figure who had replaced the preacher as the man who brings the bad news.
The diagnosis: As a late-marrying spinster, she does not represent to her husband an actual wife. Rather, she represents “neurotic need.” If she had children or seemed at all a sexual creature, she might have been a mother figure; as it is she is more of an “aunt.” It is clear that he will have to leave her because she is, in her tainted spinsterish way, as sick as he is. Still, there is some twisted hope for them both. The wounded man and his neurotic need walk together across the hospital grounds. He pauses at a point to examine her hand, which is bandaged. Once, before his commitment, as she lay sobbing on the ground, he dropped the typewriter onto her wrist, making it impossible for her to earn a living. In so doing, he had graphically demonstrated his desire to be a man. A starting point.
Anyway, at least, they were married. And nothing would have more social significance in the 1950s.
Sociologist David Reisman, author of The Lonely Crowd (1950), once remarked that in the nineteenth century the failure to marry was considered a “social disadvantage and sometimes a personal tragedy.” In the 1950s, however, it would become “a quasi-perversion.”
CHAPTER FIVE
THE SECRET SINGLE: RUNAWAY BACHELOR GIRLS; CATCHING THE BLEECKER STREET BEAT AND/OR BLUES AT THE BARBIZON
It may be said that she has learned by the use of her independence to surrender it without a struggle or murmur when the time comes for making the sacrifice.
—ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE, ON AMERICAN WOMEN, 1838
The Single Career woman…that great mistake that feminism propagated may find satisfaction in her job. But the chances are that she will suffer psychological damage. Should she marry and reproduce her husband and children will be profoundly unhappy.
—LIFE MAGAZINE, SPECIAL REPORT ON WOMEN, 1956
Girl gets off bus in Port Authority Terminal, goes into Bickford’s, Chinese girl, red shoes, sits down with coffee, looking for Daddy. Life. Something.
—JACK KEROUAC, “A BEAT TOUR OF NEW YORK,” HOLIDAY MAGAZINE, 1959
I DO, I DO, I HAVE TO
I had a friend for a while when I was single who, between day jobs, worked as a performance artist. According to her self-produced catalogue notes, her art consisted of, or was “located” in, the re-creation of “aesthetic epochs,” as they were “parsed out in the locution, Decades.” That meant she continually redid her apartment according to themes such as “1922” and “1890.” The 1950s,