Bachelor Girl

So let’s clarify and state that the new woman, an essential character in the history of single female life, belonged to a group of women considered “individualized” (roughly translated, self-aware and unconventional) that the press began to cover at the start of the twentieth century. At the time, everyone was reporting on single phenomena—the bohemian, the numerous varieties of working girl—and “new woman” sometimes served as an umbrella designation for every newly uncovered independent life-form. (“No one who is not absolutely an old woman,” remarked humorist George Ade, “is safe from being considered a new woman.”) But the true new woman, a term derived from Henry James and his irreverent moderns Daisy Miller and Isabel Archer, was very much a distinct singular entity. Unlike the average bohemian or bachelor girl, the new woman possessed a leftist intellectual pedigree. Her attitudes and beliefs were descended from the elite early feminists—the singly blessed spinsters of the Civil War era and the later reformers who’d helped found or been among the first to attend the women’s colleges.

Our early-twentieth-century new women went to college, and some even managed to argue their way into traditionally all-male graduate schools. Some were suffragists (ette, they believed, was a cute, belittling suffix) known for their impromptu speeches and some for their acts of political agitation—hunger strikes, for example, or handcuffing themselves to the fence outside the White House. Some were “womanists,” precursors to feminists whose ideology stressed women’s social and moral duties as opposed purely to women’s rights. Others had unlikely careers—choreographer, economist, journalist, politician, pilot—while still others advocated dress reform, abortion, and contraceptive rights, or simply smoked defiantly in public, a punishable offense after 1908, the year the federal government banned women from smoking. Some new women—Margaret Sanger, writer and economist Charlotte Perkins Gilman, writer Louise Bryant, reporter Ida Tarbell—became living monuments to what many called the “new possibilities.”

But the new woman was most famous for her refusal or, rather, polite disinclination, to marry. (And when new women did marry, the unions were almost always unconventional. Margaret Sanger, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Jane Addams, Edna St. Vincent Millay—all had marriages that involved living apart, sometimes continents apart, “with an understanding.” There were public and tolerated affairs; in some cases they divorced and husbands took custody of the children.)

The press continued to recycle the prevailing view of matrimony: that no woman was qualified to do anything else but wed. In The Ladies’ Home Journal, 1900, we learn that “to women, the business world looks to be a great mysterious whirl of which she can understand nothing…. To attempt… comprehension is to strain unnecessarily.” In a 1904 survey, Good Housekeeping asked five thousand men to list the qualities they required in a potential bride and then those features that “repelled” them. The winning prerequisites were an “attractive manner,” “Christian tendency,” “modesty,” and “womanliness,” while “career mindedness,” “an argumentative nature,” “the urge to smoke,” and “physical imperfection” doomed an increasingly large percentage of the population to a new old-maidhood.

But I doubt that many in the ranks of new womanhood took subscriptions to Good Housekeeping. Author Susanne Wilcox, writing in The Independent in 1909, explained, “The desire to participate in what men call the ‘game of life’ has fastened itself upon many modern women, and their appetites are whetted for more abundant and diverting interests than the mere humdrum of household duties.”

A male peer writing in the same publication in the same year noted, “The average young American woman, especially if college-bred, now leads a life of mental unfolding and progression abreast with young men… many occupations have been thrown open to her…. If she does not find a congenial mate, she avails herself of these opportunities and finds much satisfaction.”

Here were the true perpetrators of Teddy Roosevelt’s alleged “race suicide.” Between the years 1880 and 1913, the U.S. marriage rate hit its lowest point in the country’s history, and an unprecedented drop in the birthrate followed. It further seemed that many who’d already married were determined to get out. In 1870 there had been just 1.5 divorces per 1,000 marriages; by 1890, that figure had doubled, and by 1910, it had risen to 5.5 per 1,000, the majority of petitions filed by women with at least a high school education.

A researcher studying the 1902 edition of Who’s Who isolated the women honorees (977 of a total of 11,000 entries) and investigated details of their personal lives. He found that 45 percent of these prominent women had married but that 53.3 percent of them—for the time an enormous number—said they would never marry, viewing it as a “profound disincentive” to serious work. Many new women wrote essays and editorials in response, pointing out that the majority of white middle-class women eventually married (which they did—80 percent in 1910). But the notion of the best and the brightest refusing to marry and reproduce, preferring instead to conduct scientific research, attend conferences, smoke and/or chain themselves to fences, had taken hold.

According to much-quoted psychologist Stanley G. Hall, “The daughter refuses to do the things her mother did without question… higher education is at fault.” Charles W. Eliot, writing in the North American Review, agreed. “Girls are being prepared daily, by ‘superior education,’ to engage, not in child- bearing and house-work but in clerkships, telegraphy, newspaper-writing… and if they have their ‘rights’ they will be enabled to compete with men at the bar, in the pulpit, the Senate, the bench.” Because many an average new woman had read Chaucer, spoke French, and knew chemistry, she had developed, in Hall’s phrase, “unreasonable expectations” that led her to “abhor the limitations of married life.”

One can almost hear a new woman snort with laughter. Jane Addams once asked rhetorically: “[Is she] supposed to stay at home, to help her mother entertain?… Take a course in domestic science?… How… could any girl stay sane?”

The new women had an altruistic streak. They had come largely from the comfortable middle class—the truly rich upper-class girl did not go to college—and they genuinely hoped to “reclaim” or “uncover” the “individualistic possibilities” in every woman, educated or not. In 1912 Marie Jenny Howe, a nonpracticing Unitarian minister, founded Heterodoxy, the country’s first feminist (as opposed to strictly suffragist) group in Greenwich Village. As a nascent consciousness-raising group, it required of each member only that she “not be orthodox in her opinions.” It helped if she lived in the Village or at least in the city and could attend the argumentative all-night meetings. But Heterodoxites took their show on the road. They were the first to sponsor popular general-interest meetings about feminism, the first of them, in 1913, called “What Is Feminism?” or, as it was officially titled, “Breaking into the Human Race.” These were huge affairs for up to one thousand, and they featured prominent women from around the world addressing every issue imaginable. Here, according to an account, one could “glimpse the women of the future, big spirited, intellectually alert, devoid of the old ‘femininity.’”

The language of Heterodoxy briefly entered the national vocabulary, if only as a source of fun. Political cartoonists played for months with phrases such as the “free-willed, self-willed woman” and “the parasitism of the home woman.” Marie Jenny Howe’s declarations, too, were a source of much joking: “We declare to be ourselves, not just our little female selves, but our whole big human selves” or “we are feminists!” Feminism, as a term, did not exactly leap into everyday use. (The Oxford English Dictionary would not include it until 1933.) And that was to some extent because it had so quickly, so immediately, been turned into a joke. But it was also true that no one really believed in the prospect of a larger women’s movement. No one really believed much would change.

Even Ida Tarbell, the first woman “muckraker,” author of History of the Standard Oil Company (1904) and defiantly never wed (“it would fetter my freedom”), had her doubts. As she wrote, “In an urban setting, there are now simply more women outside, doing things. There is a sense of freedom, due to numbers of women…. But that doesn’t mean freedom.”

In a preview of what would be called “sexological” thinking, psychologist Stanley G. Hall summarized the “new” situation in far more draconian terms. The woman who “abhorred the limitations of domestic life” was not just unconventional, newly or blissfully “devoid of the old femininity.” She was “functionally castrated.”

SEX O’CLOCK IN AMERICA

To young single women who’d been born just as new womanhood coalesced—say, around 1895—the idea of a “new” woman quickly came to seem kind of old. Even if the woman in question was only thirty, to her younger