Bachelor Girl_ The Secret History of Single Women in the Twentieth Century - Betsy Israel [95]
Single life more than ever stood out as a social aberration, what an old family friend of mine calls “living polio. Not married, you were in the iron lung. Paralyzed.” And there was resolutely no excuse for it. One 1954 home-economics textbook spoke out harshly. “Except for the sick, the badly crippled, the deformed, the emotionally warped and mentally defective, almost every girl has an opportunity to marry.” A popular female advice columnist seemed to feel even more strongly. “Every American girl must acquire for herself a husband and a home and children…any program for life in which the home is not the center of her living, is worse than death.”
Occasionally, a writer broke ranks and published a story with a title like “There’s No Right Time for a Girl to Marry” (the New York Times, 1952). But these were anomalies and served most often as dartboards for more conservative writers and for the corporate heads who felt moved now and then to speak out about the necessary place of the American female in the home. (The manufacture and sale of furnishings and cars had become huge business, and between 1950 and 1958 sales of major appliances alone would rise by 240 percent.)
It all sounds a bit crazy, I have to say, almost science-fictional. But the rhetoric is backed up by numbers. By 1951, almost 60 percent of all American women were married—one in three of them having wed by age nineteen. By 1957, 14 million girls were engaged at age seventeen and many more were married by age twenty, and most of them were mothers at twenty-one. In 1958, 97 out of every 1,000 girls between the ages of fifteen and nineteen gave birth. Betty Friedan would later estimate that the U.S. birthrate in the mid-1950s had come close to overtaking India’s.
I interviewed one woman, a pediatrician, married at twenty in 1956, divorced in 1968 with four kids. She laughed, then deeply sighed as she recalled “the marriage-attack-from-Mars years.”
If I tried honestly to describe it, I’m not sure my own four girls would believe it. One example, in high school, if you did not have a date for a Saturday night, that meant you stayed in, hiding out, and swearing your younger siblings to silence. And I mean you were HIDING. In your room, with the lights off, in the event a boy you knew passed in a car and saw your light on. That meant they would KNOW you were in without a date…. College years, it was all right to date around for a year or so…[but] if you weren’t set by junior year, and there was another group of new freshmen coming, oh, that meant your life was slipping away…. Land[ing] a guy seemed like the only possible way you were going to survive economically…
It is hard to read a magazine or watch a movie from that time and imagine any woman living in peace by herself. Everyone in the culture seemed programmed to harangue her. The Saturday Evening Post warned in 1952, “It’s harder than ever to snare a husband!” Unless, of course, one made sacrifices, for example, abandoning school. The writer, Rufus Jarman, speculated that the dreaded war brides, all 113,000 of them, had moved in on American women because too many of “these American dynamos had those three letters of doom—Ph.D., doctor—in front of their names.” To the GIs, the American single had shown “superior airs” and no instinctive gifts for housekeeping. But now, he noted, “most girls who are doing postgraduate work for various high-flown careers would drop their studies and get married in a minute if the right man came along.”
Some limited exceptions were made for artistic types—dancers, actresses, fashion designers—and it further helped if one resembled Lauren Bacall or Audrey Hepburn. Later in the decade, exemptions passed to younger celebrities