Bachelor Girl_ The Secret History of Single Women in the Twentieth Century - Betsy Israel [96]
But even here, in provincial married America, all sorts of girls went astray. Even if they did so very briefly.
DOWN THE UP STAIRCASE
The roots of the 1950s marriage mania reached back into the postwar culture: the GI Bill, which made low-income housing and other benefits available to veterans who married; the restrictions these same GI privileges imposed on women (fewer college openings; fewer jobs), and then all that pseudo-Freudian dogma demanding that real women seek out their male halves. But there were thousands who, setting aside domestic destiny, graduated or just left home with something else in mind besides a wedding. Stashing their marriage prospects into imaginary safety deposit boxes, middle-class girls traveled to Europe. Traces of these temporary runaways can be found in fifties films such as An American in Paris, Three Coins in the Fountain, Funny Face, Marjorie Morningstar, in some of the Gidget movies, and, most memorably, in Breathless, in the form of Jean Seberg’s morally ambiguous girl/boy reporter.
Others left home for New York and jobs in theater, dance, publishing, or just to cut themselves off from suffocating fiancés, dull jobs, or like Holly Golightly in Truman Capote’s novella, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, lives so desperate and dreary one can only guess at the details.
Starting in about 1953, at the height of “togetherness”*—a magazine-inspired concept advocating the total centrality of nuclear-family life—there seemed to be a rise in the number of single young women settling in New York City. The intensity with which reporters tracked this alleged rise, interviewing employment agents, Realtors, or clerks at all-girl hotels, demonstrates how terrorizing the single female was as mere concept.
“It was still such a radical notion,” says one my subjects, Simone, now sixty-six.
In fact, to get away was like testifying before a miniature version of the HUAC committee: Were we now and had we ever been inclined to hurt ourselves by deliberately ruining ourselves?…Leaving home was supposed to be very, very dangerous…. But we were girls who were not ready for the Donna Reed life. Poor Donna Reed! Even she wasn’t Donna Reed! She was an Oscar winner!…At home, everyone, in that J. D. Salinger sense, was required to put up a false phony self and it just got so tiring…. So you confronted your parents, and they acted as if you’d just announced you’d become a Communist or a Nazi and a slut. But your bags were packed. Like a spy, you had the details worked out in advance. Now, you had to hold your ground under interrogation.
Many editors, professors, and psychiatric professionals fixated on this “lone female” escapee, studying her like a lab animal who’d been wired to do one thing and was now atypically doing something else. In the press there was the formal bow, or military salute, made to the good-sport all-American wife out in the ’burbs. But the real fascination was with these city types—the astonishing 34 percent who, by 1954, had made it to age twenty-four without marrying. She or “it” was debated, as an entity, in every publication from the Reader’s Digest to the Atlantic Monthly. Sometimes she appeared as a caricature—a dazed-looking girl, hitchhiking, a bridal gown in one hand and a suitcase in the other (no one picks her up), or a young woman watering plants on a sooty fire escape juxtaposed with a woman, in sun hat, cutting flowers in a large country garden. Humorists created bestiaries of lone-girl types, for example, the “Can’t-Help-It-Drabbie,” “The Mammary-Deprived,” “The Marginal Wallflower,” the “Office