over.” In the articles “The Bachelor Girl, As Told by One Who Knows,” “Bachelor Girls of Today and Yesterday,” and “I Am a Bachelor Girl,” the phrases “later on in my life, proper,” and “when I am settled down,” appear three times. Five times in all we hear the phrase “when I am the mother of” followed by the phrase “sweet babes” or “tender babes” or “six or seven babes.”
But no matter how often she pledged to defend her future fertility, the bachelor/working/single girl was just as likely to take delight in describing her life as it was at the moment—and especially as the terms “bohemian” (serious, artistic) and “bachelor girl” (worker bee out for fun) began slowly to blur.
We’ll call them, along with everyone else, B-girls.
Many wore their hair short, after the girl/boy heroine of
Young B-girls expanded on their visions of Trilby. They were reported to wear only “sheaths” or “smocks” and to eat with their hands. In the dark. Often a B-girl had the lights put out as necessary economy, and lived by red candles offset by gauzy veils. There was other folklore about her lifestyle, as one writer put it, “a maze of weird and witching elements.” Bathrooms, whether in the hallway or the flat itself, had no doors. Mice were welcome guests and fed at table, which happened to be the floor. Everyone smoked. According to one story in the original
Reporters were out in full on the B-girl beat—the preflapper demimonde that stood to sink our great civilization. One cigarette-holding girl flung open the door (there apparently was a door) and met the press by exclaiming, “Welcome to liberty hall! Here we do exactly as we please!” She told all about her purple robe—no lilac for her but a
“[Their] room[s],” noted one disgusted male correspondent, “[are] a mass of delightful contrivances whereby her gown inhabits the window seat and her frying pan the bookcase…. They eat off the ironing board, roaring with laughter about having only cheese to feast upon.” More serious stories tried to see past the “nursery antics” and into the inevitable repercussions.
Let’s consider the arguments of one Juliet Wilbor Tompkins, who like many writers on the somber subject of race suicide and later, “sexology,” used three names in her byline. (It informed the reader that the author was married but independent minded; it further indicated that she had a “career,” not a job.) In
Sometimes they are young women of means, who find complete satisfaction in dogs and horses, or in travels and learning or bridge or nature-study. But more often you will find that they are workers… earnest young social workers… editors… energetic souls… [many] living in an eight-by-ten room, cooking [their] own chocolate over the gas, and studying avidly… full of pity for the shut-in woman…. And they are very happy in the middle twenties… with their battle cry of freedom! To their ignorance, life offers an enchanting array of possibilities. They see ahead of them a dozen paths and have but contemptuous pity for the woman of the past who knew one dull highway.
Others pointed out how many female characters in novels killed themselves rather than admit to failure at bohemian life, that is, the failure of all that presumed artistic talent or any men whatsoever to emerge. They were only bachelor girls, after all. Wrote a male reporter in
The plain fact is that the bachelor and… bohemian girl [are] merely single women of small means living in the city in order that [they] may work…. As for her chances [with men] she may become a little harder to suit, but, on the whole, even that is doubtful. That she stays in her single state is largely due to the fact that possible men are just as scarce in the domain of the bachelor girl as in the life of the domestic.
But as bachelor girl Olga Stanley wrote back in 1896: “Probably the thing which first appeals to us is our absolute freedom, the ability to plan our time as we will… bound by no restrictions, except those imposed upon us by a due regard for proprieties.” As for those who called “her existence ‘pathetic,’” what was more pathetic than waiting to find out whether “Tom, Dick or Harry or whoever he may be turns out to be a good husband?” Of course she’d take a husband, “forego the delights of female bachelorhood,” if an excellent opportunity arose. Until then, however, she and her many unwed sisters would emit “a sigh of thankfulness… and draw nearer the fire, and resting our toes on the fender, lean back in our easy chair and congratulate ourselves upon our good fortune.”
CHAPTER THREE
Thin and Raging Things: New (New) Women, Gibson Goddesses, Flapping Ad Darlings, and the All-New Spinster in Fur
Am I a boy? Yes I am…Not.
Don’t worry girls! Corsets have gone! The American girl is independent!…a thinker who will not follow slavishly the ordinances of the past!
On the street, you do not recognize old maids and spinsters anymore. You cannot pick them out. But you will be conscious of an increasing number of women who are alert, handsomely dressed, of spirited car riage. That is the picture of today’s unmarried woman. You may be very sure she has a fur coat.
I AM (NEW) WOMAN, WATCH ME SMOKE
It is tricky to reconstruct a group photo of the New Woman. A few visual details float into focus—shirtwaists, suffrage banners, serious-looking girls with their arms around each other—but much of the picture has faded. Over time, the precise meaning of “new woman,” like that of the contemporaneous term “free love,” has become impossibly blurry.
