Bachelor Girl_ The Secret History of Single Women in the Twentieth Century - Betsy Israel [99]
By changing the color and hue of your hair, you can change your entire way of being. It frees you to behave and act in ways you would never have dreamed possible when you were your former self…. And you can do it in secret. People will notice you and think, “She seems different.” “And her hair!” “How did she get it to look so lovely?” “Is it a wig?” “Is it dyed?”
Paraphrasing a question her mother-in-law once asked in Yiddish, Polykoff put forth her own query: “Does she or doesn’t she?”
Playboy magazine, then in its mysogynistic glory days, was quick to point out that hair color didn’t matter, not for a wife of all people, and certainly not for that inherently slutty single girl. In the “Playboy Coloring Book,” a popular monthly feature, the reader was presented with three single chicks he might place inside his make-believe bachelor pad.
The only instructions: “Make one blond. Make one a brunette. And make one a redhead. It doesn’t matter which.” In the Playboy schematic, what mattered was mammary glands—bosoms, bazooms, jugs; only class-A breasts could really alter the average woman. Although, even then, she’d be a joke. One popular Playboy cartoon at that time was, in fact, called The Bosom. Here was the story of a woman who measured 43-22-36. In each issue, the Bosom tried, despite mighty gravitational pull, to walk down the street.
Because so many people thought and often talked about blondness and breasts, even the most highly educated single found herself forced to consider the merits of Clairol and falsies or, more bluntly put, peroxide and “stuffing.” And she confronted an onslaught of beauty advertising—campaigns and strategies way beyond hair dye—that would have made a devoted flapper faint. In its 1956 issue on the American Woman, Life took great glee in itemizing the tricks and tools of the chase. That year alone American women had spent $1.3 billion on cosmetics and toiletries, $660 million on beauty treatments; $400 million on soap and electric grooming devices; $65 million on “reducing.” And that leaves out of the calculations all the clothes that were purchased to allure what Playboy called “the female’s permanent cash box. The hapless soon-to-be-broke American male.”
If some single women were repelled by this competition, others were matter-of-fact. Wrote one woman in the Life extravaganza: “If the race is to continue, we like to provide a second parent. So we go about the serious business of finding husbands in a serious manner, which allows no time for small luxuries like mercy toward competitors. Nature turns red in tooth and claw, every method is fair and rivals get no quarter.”
To say the least, this materialistic—and carnivorous—vision of the single world was disturbing. Columnist Anita Colby, a single working woman herself, wrote in 1956, “Emotionally we single women are at the greatest disadvantage of all women…we face a frightening world by ourselves…. Our enemies are loneliness and insecurity. Anxiety is a familiar houseguest.” But she had some encouragement to add. “Don’t go around feeling unfulfilled, jealous of your married friends, looking at every man you meet as ‘game.’…You have a life of your own.”
As early as 1957, there were 11.5 million single women over eighteen in the United States, compared with 14.5 million single males. Not all of them were updated Eve Ardens—self-deprecating, not quite beautiful, resigned to it—nor were they pathetic Miss Lonelyhearts, the name, in fact, of a character in the 1954 Hitchcock film Rear Window. In this, a bored wheelchair-bound photographer casually watches, and names, his neighbors, following a whole courtyard of minidramas and intrigue, including of course