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The Kinsey Report on Female Sexuality, published in 1953, shocked readers as much as had the original male report several years before—and seems to have fed fears about these amorphous but threatening gangs of female strays. (One of Kinsey’s troubling statistics: More than half of all college-educated women, plus 20 percent of noncollege girls, had engaged in at least one same-sex erotic experience. If that was true, what was likely to occur in “pervert’s-ville” New York City?) Post-Kinsey, the language used to urge girls back into domesticity, into marriage (as if all that many had actually left!) turned apocalyptic.

For a while, in 1954 and ’55, writers bypassed the gray and rainy adjectives common to sad-spinster stories and rushed on toward the nuclear arsenal: “Atomic Red Alert for Romance!” “From Here to Oblivion—Marry Now or Marry Never!” “Snag Your Space of Shelter, Girls, Before You’re Crowded Out!”

Despite a birthrate like a third world country’s—and despite the fact that more eighteen-year-old girls got married some years than went to the prom—the perception spread that Young White Single Females had to be reined in. In the form of the helpful how-to “service” story, magazines revived one of the world’s older single propositions: to move single women in herds from dry areas (Washington, D.C., ranked worst overall; New York and Boston ran close seconds) to places where men were plentiful. In pieces that included maps, arrows, and literal directions, editors set out to pinpoint where on earth men were most heavily clustered.

Call it, after the movie, the song, the theory in general: Where the Boys Are.

According to the Census Bureau, UPI reported, women outnumbered men in every section of the country except in the wild “western” areas. Thus one typical newspaper headline read, “Go West Young Woman, if You Want to Wed!” The text continued, “Droves of bachelors are on the great open range begging to be roped and branded…in Wyoming and Nevada there are seven unmarried men for three single women…for the girl willing to migrate for marriage, the best trails lead west.”

In “Memo to the Girls,” Look undertook “a massive man-hunt missive,” noting, “there is a surplus of bachelors…but husband hunters should know where to look.” The winning locales were the same as those cited elsewhere, as if a consortium of media and governmental bureaus had conspired in a campaign to reinaugurate the mail-order bride.

Life editors found two bachelor girls who’d moved themselves to Caspar, Wyoming, then had them, for the benefit of the photographers, throw an impromptu bachelor-girl party. Panel by panel, we follow the action: The girls make last-minute “on-the-spot” calls to boys. The girls prepare the beverages and then, the triumphal sequence, “the boys respond to the call.” Twelve men, big hefty guys, thirtyish and single, have all crowded into their living room. The caption read: “They bagged twelve!” But “bagging” out in Caspar didn’t require throwing a “do.” We also see the “lucky” Barbara Mills receive a “quadruple escort” just by walking through the business district. It was noted that had she lived in Montana, the number of escorts might have been up around nine.

GETTING THE GIRL BACK IN LINE

As in the nineteenth century, the plans for mass removal of single women to isolated areas did not catch on. Young women continued to move to New York and to Washington, and others—older women, especially—continued to express their concern. In 1956 Mademoiselle published a remarkably progressive piece, “What’s Wrong with Ambition?” intended to highlight the views of young women who’d gone off on their own and were loving it. But the most shocking, radical aspect of the “Ambition” story was the response it provoked—both in letters and in stories published in other magazines.

“They make me nervous,” said one married woman of girls cut loose in major cities. “I could shoot the first woman who went to work in a man’s job. My ambition is to please my husband in every womanly