Bachelor Girl

counterparts she seemed aged due to the impression, even in casual conversation, that she was always giving a speech. Of course there were fights to fight, but as one young woman told Harper’s magazine, “the New Women don’t seem to see how there is… life to live!” This dated “new” character with her upstanding shirtwaist and erect posture made one observer think of “a funereal procession of one.” New womanhood seemed to be set to a dirge while the young(er) world was starting to move to popular songs.

This generational divide is reminiscent of the gap so painfully in evidence during the late 1980s and ’90s. It’s fair to say that second-wave feminists were so successful that the entire Western world changed heroically. But if you were a baby while it was changing, if you missed the big battles—and never experienced the old restrictions and unfairnesses—then how could basic freedoms generate a sense of wonder? Of gratitude? How could you be on your guard for hints of sexist regression?

A young woman, twenty-three, an artist’s model and aspiring dress designer, told Life magazine in 1923 the same thing someone twenty-three might have said eighty years later: “I think many of our women’s rights people expect that everyone is going to work for their ideas and causes, even though the battle’s already won as much as it will ever be…. They get very angry if they sense you have an interest in minor things, in how you dress, not in political talk. Or you are not interested in THEM and their struggle to free YOU and your friends. Why aren’t we all grateful?”

A symbolic battle had been declared against the tedious new woman—its rallying cry a slogan borrowed from a Life magazine cartoon showing a mother draped in a suffrage banner with a daughter in sporty clothes, holding a tennis racket. The mother is lecturing; the daughter smiles but shrieks to herself: “Oh, Mother dear, please I do need to leave to go please, please, SHADDUP!”

A backlash against the educated female had developed from within her own ranks.

In a first-person magazine confessional, “Why I Am an Old Maid” by “A Daughter of New England” (1911), we learn that “men instinctively avoid a woman who can discourse at length on sun spots.” More serious statistics seem to bear out this observation—or at least women’s belief in it.

Consider some figures from Bryn Mawr College. Between 1889 and 1908, the peak political years of new womanhood, only half of all graduates married. Of those who did, some 62 percent continued on to graduate school and nearly all the married new women continued, according to a university report, “to achieve in their chosen professions.” But that changed. Just a few years later an additional 10 percent of all graduates started to marry out of school and the number who continued in their careers simultaneously began to drop. Between the years 1910 and 1918, only 49 percent of married class members continued on to graduate school.

I’ll call it the age of the popular as opposed to the reformist new woman, a new woman without the glasses and the prim boater, and in its place a huge yellow hair bow. (And I mean huge, as if she were wearing two colorful party balloons joined at the nape of the neck and floating upward. In my grandfather’s Springfield, Ohio, high school yearbook, 1911, not one girl in forty-three is minus her gargantuan bow.)

This new girl, known once again as the bachelor girl or “the bachelorette,” had grown up, according to the Saturday Evening Post (1912) “permeated in the modern world.” During the years 1910 to 1913, six states voted in favor of a women’s suffrage amendment. Advertisements, popular novels, quick-change fashion trends—all had been present from the start of her conscious life. Our new bachelor girl wore looser-fitting skirts that allowed her to bicycle everywhere. Some had been on aeroplanes, and others boasted that they’d made cross-continental phone calls. With one million plus cars out on the roads, they’d all been out driving, even if they retained passenger status (there were no laws against women driving, just, initially at least, a reluctance to let them take control).

Much of the Jazz Age imagery we associate with the 1920s—driving, incessant dancing, loose-fitting clothes—actually took shape around 1913. One Boston American columnist described the popular new woman like this: “…the 1914 girl: You’ll recognize her. Just look for a slim creature who is not on closer inspection a boy in a dress, shaped like a pencil.”

One columnist for the St. Louis Mirror called the era “sex o’clock in America.”

Both these comments were made while writing about the phenomenon known as the the dansant, or the notorious afternoon tea dance at which gin stood in for the tea. Think of a very small racket—it’s crowded and everyone’s dancing to a modern gramophone that spins seventy-eight-r. p.m. records. (The tango, imported from Deauville, France, is the dance of the moment, in part because the General Federation of Women’s Clubs has banned it as immoral.) It’s all very casual. No one has sponsored the dance or sent invitations; like the floating urban clubs of the 1980s, it appears from place to place: in a bachelor’s apartment, in someone’s parlor—provided the parents are out, of course—or in the back room of a restaurant.

The tea dancers come from all over. There are college girls on break, working girls out on adventure, brides- to-be making their way through long engagements. There are many actressy characters who mix freely with the working girls and, as it’s always noted, a contingent of timid girls who look as if they’ve never been out and aren’t exactly sure where they’ve turned up. All of them play dress-up. Some use sashes to shorten their skirts or change the style altogether, attempting to create straight, narrow frocks that cut just above the knee. Using their ribbons, they tuck up long wavy hair to see how it might look cut bobbed and modern. Long, pointy shoes with buttoned straps radically reveal the ankle. Eventually, even the little sisters, the timid girls, show up in skinny dresses and Mother Goose shoes. Instead of hair bows, they wear shimmery bands that wrap around the forehead and sprout feathers.

And so tea dancing spreads from city to city, and the late afternoons grow very long. Adults, alone at dinner, slowly take notice.

“DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOUR DAUGHTER IS THIS AFTERNOON?” asked Harper’s in 1914, anticipating the famed 1970s TV query: “It’s ten o’clock. Do you know where your children are?”

One red-faced columnist in the Boston American explained precisely where they were: “Tea! Tea! What is this tea!? An excuse, a forum for young girls, many of them obviously of breeding and refinement, dancing cheek by jowl with [female] professionals whose repute is doubtful… and learning the insidious habits of the early cocktail.”

Belle Moskowitz, an impassioned old-school reformer and later a savvy operative in New York State politics, spoke out on drinking and dancing and the “corrosive” influence of these “other,” or lesser, working girls: “[Working] life cries out for rational recreation [but] what?… Girls do not of intention select bad places to go to…. [But] the girl whose temperament and disposition crave unnatural forms of excitement is nearly beyond the bounds of salvation…. she may affect the well being of others.”

One of several sudden reports on female criminal tendencies, The Cause and Cure of Crime (1914), declared, “Many girls are diseased. Physically and mentally contaminated.” The superintendent of one reform school declared, in support, “One bad girl can do more harm than fifty depraved boys… many are… abnormal or feeble-minded and should be held in custody for a long time or for life.”

Slowly, concern that morally corrupt girls were lurking around the the dansant seemed to fuse with parents’ fears about the men who were forever lurking everywhere. And in this age of new womanhood (or “post” or “fun” new womanhood), when there were “simply more women outside doing things,” these fears were heightened by the sense that girls faced other, unexpected sources of contamination.

BEWARE THE WHITE SLAVER

For several years during the early teens, the nation was captivated by one villain: the White Slaver. He was that legendary fiend who kidnapped young white girls, drugged them with chloroform-drenched kerchiefs, stuck them with morphine needles, then sold them into prostitution. The slaver, usually a “hit man” for a criminal syndicate, preyed most often on new arrivals to the country, single girls just off the boat, the less English spoken the better. Slavers also worked Upstate New York and Pennsylvania towns, luring girls without prospects by promising—and sometimes actually pretending—to marry them, then at some point drugging them and turning them over to colleagues in New York City.

As one typical headline shrieked in 1913: 50,000 GIRLS DISAPPEAR YEARLY! The subhead: “Before the