Bachelor Girl

bathrooms. (More expensive rooms had the bathrooms in the room itself!) It had laundry facilities.

The latchkey at last.

Some girls wore their spindly keys on long chains that dangled, while others hid theirs inside a boot or a shoe and stood on it all day to be sure it was safe. It was not an engagement ring, but in its way it symbolized a rite of passage; single female life had at last been deemed a grown-up life. In his 1992 film Singles, Cameron Crowe captures the same sort of exultation on the face of Kyra Sedgwick as she holds up her newly acquired garage-door opener. (It’s meaningful, really, because it is her own garage, and that garage is just below her own very first ever condo!)

And once the key, one’s own private space, had been secured? Then came relief, excitement, and a swiftly spreading sense of disappointment. Girls called the arrangements “better,” “more free”—they loved having unsupervised parlor time—but they also used phrases such as “in the overall, small in feeling.” One twenty-one- year-old office clerk told Munsey’s Magazine that the Trowmart and its few imitators had “narrow rooms” with bad lighting and “mincy wardrobes.” Many residents took to the parlors, although these filled up rapidly, and so in all kinds of weather packs of girls were out on walks. Out wandering—swiftly wandering so as not to seem vagrant or “loitery”—they often met equally claustrophobic friends, and had marathon teas. A bit later on they escaped to nickelodeons, neighborhood theaters consisting of a small homemade screen and wooden chairs.

There is no document of daily life at the Trowmart Inn. But we can imagine it based on the descriptions of comparable hotels, both the real, for example, the Barbizon—subject of numerous Sunday-magazine features during the 1950s and ’60s—and the fictional. There’s a great section of Kitty Foyle in which she describes her life at the fictitious Pocahontas Residence for Women, a dwelling obviously based on the Barbizon. As always, Kitty narrates in a tart but sympathetic manner:

A neurosis to every room. I can see them yet in the dining room, poor souls with the twice a week chicken croquettes and those rocking little peas, sort of crimped so they wouldn’t skid…. They called them bachelor girls, but a bachelor is that way on purpose. One evening one of them must have gone haywire [because] she yelled out into the courtyard, “there’s a Man in my room!… Now, everybody, they had seen the sinister fellow… but he was nowhere… only… a pale phantom of desire.”

THE BACHELOR GIRL AND THE BOHEMIAN

By the turn of the twentieth century, so many single girls were visibly out there—working, eating in restaurants, dancing—that it became harder to immediately categorize them. (And arranging single girls into identifiable groupings was a necessity not only among editors, writers, and retail merchandisers. State and U.S. government officials frequently organized mass prostitution raids. An increasingly diverse single population made the task much more difficult. At urban rackets and in the newer Broadway cabarets, government agents became famous for “getting the wrong girl wrong,” accusing a shop girl of being a hooker, and “getting whonked for their mistakes,” meaning kicked in the ankle.)

One magazine columnist, writing in 1907, put it this way: “In the great cities, thousands of our young women” live in a “swarm of singularity.”

But there was an identifiable strain of “new girl” who appeared at the turn of the century, an intense, dramatic type who’d consistently reappear in years to come: the bohemian. Typically our bohemian was a high school or college dropout who had tried but could not live within the strictures of the bourgeois society she had only narrowly escaped. She often told reporters, whether she’d been asked or not, that she possessed a “real” self, a poetic artistic self that had been stifled in her previous existence. But now, surrounded by other like souls, in a unique and freeing place, she, or this self, or something new and amazing would emerge. Generally speaking, she was hoping for signs of artistic talent or the ability to attract a monied husband who would elicit and encourage her inchoate artistry. One twenty-year-old told the Saturday Evening Post in 1905, “It is wonderful to be able to walk along the street, singing…. There are men who admire that impulsive daring.”

The bohemian had a less deeply poetic, slightly less intense, kind of younger cousin. That was the Bachelor Girl. “The B.G.,” as she was known, had come to the city not so much to escape, but to work and send money home. Which she did. But she also developed a taste for rushing after work or whenever possible to Greenwich Village, at that time the city’s premiere “artistically inclined place of residence.” (I quote from “Why I Am a Bachelor Girl,” The Independent, 1908.)

By 1910, the Village had settled as an Italian and German enclave, surrounded by the baronial brownstones of Washington Square and Fifth Avenue and pockets of very poor blacks and Irish. For the committed or aspiring bohemian, the setting was perfect—filled with cafes, tearooms, spaghetti parlors, and the unlikeliest and therefore the most interesting people in New York just lounging about. It was still almost a secret. Before 1918, no subway stops connected Greenwich Village to the rest of the city, and one had to practice at navigating its tiny disjointed streets. Many houses, painted pink or blue, had no numbers. Asking directions was useless. Most inhabitants couldn’t quite explain it. Didn’t know. Didn’t feel like it. They spoke, one visitor told the New York Times, “in an iambic pentameter, as a bad word play or joke.”

Wandering the Village, bohemian and bachelor girls could, to borrow from their own overly dramatic phrasebook, create themselves anew. Margaret Ferguson, of Ruth Suckow’s 1934 novel, The Folks, makes a wonderful case study of this transformation. We meet her as a girl, the older, misunderstood “dark” daughter of a prosperous Iowa farm family. Not as pretty as her sister, often overlooked, she comes to believe there is “a wonderful shining special fate for her” and that she will find it in New York City. If she didn’t take the dare and leave, she would likely wander into a more ordinary female fate, “getting older and older, a spinster daughter like Fannie Allison, who had taught the third grade every year since anyone could remember… and lived with her brother and his wife and took care of his children.”

Margaret moves to the Village and takes a candlelit cellar apartment that has a green door. At a party a few nights later a strange man sprinkles a few drops of gin on her forehead and she is rechristened Margot.

For real characters, there were many similar declarations of freedom. Taking a walk without interrogation or scrutiny. Entering a restaurant, sitting down, and not feeling the urge to rush out. One might sit for hours in a teahouse, one of those dimly lit and narrow rooms that were always decorated with mismatched furniture and too many dark oil paintings. One might even talk to a man seated nearby and not, for the moment, think: What would Mother say?

Of course, one knew what Mother would say. In the age of the bachelor girls and, worse, bohemians, distraught mothers quickly became as acute a national stereotype, appearing in cartoons and illustrations holding another sibling back from the door, or bent over war-room tables covered with maps of Greenwich Village. This was the start of a war, all right, a protracted generation conflict that would grow more serious and heartbreaking as years passed. In the meantime, there were others more immediately upset by these unnerving young women.

As working gals had inspired absurd terror theories—Will she forgo having children and become a slut?—so these newest strays attracted fresh, outrageous condemnation. Much of this criticism was aimed at upper-class feminist or “womanist” types, but it trickled down to the bachelor girl. In his tirades against “race suicide,” Teddy Roosevelt now looked directly at the unmarried white woman, even if she was only eighteen, and called her trouble. There were more immigrants. There were more inexplicably single women—bohemians —and so, as he saw it, more than mere laws were in order. (There had already been plenty of legal assistance. Contraception and abortion had been outlawed and between 1889 and 1906, state legislatures passed more than one hundred restrictive divorce laws.) White women of all sorts would have to cooperate!

The true bohemian, like the radical spinster before her, ignored the fuss. The bachelor girl, however, paid attention. There are guilty acknowledgments of this “race suicide” concept throughout my collection of press clippings “re: Bachelor Girl, c. 1908–1914.” In stories such as “The Lives and Loves of a Bachelor Miss,” “Date with a Bachelor Girl,” and “Today’s Modern Bachelor Girl—Her Hopes, Dreams, Her Chances in Life,” we hear about one’s “essential responsibilities,” about the “sacred” duties ahead, and more than once about knowing “when the party is