Bachelor Girl_ The Secret History of Single Women in the Twentieth Century - Betsy Israel [94]
“Jill,” as she was known within the installation, asked all visitors to leave their shoes at the door, directing them to period shoe racks that held all manner of appropriate footwear: bowling shoes, saddle shoes, impossible pumps, sensible shoes to look good beneath a gray flannel suit. If there were no shoes that fit, visitors walked in socks among the various pieces: the blond-wood Scandinavian couches and modular chairs, and the coffee tables—low and slatted or biomorphic—each stacked with amoebic ashtrays, old issues of Life and Look. A dwarfing hi-fi cabinet opened onto a tiny TV screen and turntable. The space was small, and because she’d made a breakfast nook and a sewing room and because there were filmy stockings everywhere on lines “drying,” visitors selected decorative pillows and hit the floor.
During the run of this “show,” Jill appeared in lima bean–green midriffs with striped pedal pushers. Or she’d whip open a door wearing mock Dior New Look tea dresses, squealing “hel—loow,” Annette Funicello trying on a mid-Atlantic accent. Most all of this annoyed her boyfriend, Jim, a writer who lived in the space with Jill, whose name, he liked to remind people, was really Ann. Jill would French-inhale her cigarette and squeeze his arm sympathetically. She understood. Here was a man who every day for months had been asked to impersonate a “beat poet, struggling,” when all he wanted to do was write or drink his coffee. But it was hard even for Jim to deny that life inside this made-up 1950s could be absurd and amusing. Jill served pancakes, fondue, and highballs all at once. And we all played a game she called Do the Dot. This required participants to gather around the ancient TV and stare expectantly at the tiny screen. Slowly the tiny white spot, the old TV warmup dot we’d all forgotten, would materialize at the center. It glowed there a minute, then expanded into a mess of bad reception. Everyone screamed for an encore and Jill would turn the TV on and off and then again—on and off—until she’d start to maniacally laugh and sometimes pretend to faint.
She’d get up, go on to the next activity, but the point, I always thought, had been made: Had she been a real fifties single, a bachelorette, alone, with all the perquisities of married life but no marriage, she might have gone crazy.
Simply stated, marriage in the 1950s was the absolute norm. In 1953, Look magazine rhapsodized: “Not since the age of Victoria has the idea of the happy home compelled such overt sentiment and general admiration…advertisements with their happy parents and rosy children in a setting of creature comforts and domestic bliss, the magazine covers with their warm scenes of family life…testify to the expectations with which men and women enter the blessed state.”
Young women earned great praise for their compliance with the prerequisites and demands of this blessed state. Especially considering—and everyone had to concede the point—that some had once led different lives, lived at least a little bit like “Jill.” As a 1952 Good Housekeeping guide to marital relations put it, “Having worked before marriage, or at least having been educated for some kind of intellectual work [the woman] finds herself in the lamentable position of being ‘just a housewife.’…In her disgruntlement, she can work as much damage on the lives of her husband and children and her own life—as if she were a career woman and, indeed, sometimes more!”
But as it was expressed in almost every publication, public-service announcement, newsreel, and classroom lecture, a Female Miracle had occurred, resulting in the birth of a new “unique femininity.” In reaction to the postwar man shortage, or to the pop–Freudian imperatives to “adjust,” many women had abandoned their drive to work in the world of men. Look editors, as if celebrating a new-model car, wrote: “Forget