Bachelor Girl

Chloroform, the plaintive cries: ‘Sir, please, I am a decent girl! Who earns her Wages.’”

One girl expanded on this familiar scenario in The Independent: “A girl is sitting there at the films. Or on a bench nearby a tree. They creep behind and… they force a cloth across your face, there goes the needle in your neck or your ankle or arm, and you go dead black for a time, only to wake up in hell. And no chance of getting back.”

As another girl interviewed for the same story put it: “They can take away your own life from you without killing you first.”

Quickly this new terror found its way into melodramatic plots. Especially onscreen. By World War I, movies had evolved from primitive hand-cranked “flickers” into longer films shown in makeshift neighborhood theaters. One of the first box-office hits in film history was called Traffic in Souls (1913), a white-slaving film that was thought to have no commercial prospects. It was seventy minutes—much too long for nickelodeons, which could handle only one-and two-reelers—and required a legitimate theater (where plays such as The House of Bondage and The Lure ran briefly before being shut down). More important, as one critic prematurely put it: “Who among us wants to witness a tale of unfortunates abducted, put to sale, forced to the sickening biddings of madam or whoremonger?”

The answer was just about everyone. Traffic in Souls grossed $450,000 after showing for a few weeks at twenty-eight theaters in New York City.

It is true that hundreds of young women were kidnapped, drugged, and then sold, usually into out-of-state brothels. And it’s true that several state and federal commissions eventually conducted mass investigations. But for a time the white slaver was foremost a mythic devil whose presence seems directly linked to that of the single working woman. Women who had sex outside of marriage, circa 1912, would most definitely have been part of the groupings loosely called “new woman” or “bohemian.” The average working woman may have “spooned” (“petted”), but she was likely to have remained a virgin. Despite that technical point, she was still out there, a girl without a husband, alone on the street. In other words, she was a walking sex target. Terms that had been at the edges of the vernacular since Bowery days suddenly began to reappear. A girl was said to be “flaunting it” or “showing what she’s got.” The white slaver represented, I think, an epic punishment for all those singles who were “flaunting it,” asking for it, seeming, whether they were or not, overtly sexual.

(A punishment theme turns up in many of the era’s popular-film titles: The Girl Who Didn’t Know, The Girl Who Didn’t Think, The Price She Paid. In one white-slaving film, Damaged Goods (1914), the action came to an abrupt halt about midway through, and a doctor appeared on screen to lecture about syphilis. This seemed an odd non sequitur. But in fact syphilis was a serious sexual threat, a much more common occurrence than white slaving, and there were few ways of discussing it publicly except as a cameo topic in a larger story of female sexual depravity.)

At the same time that white slavery was a vicious cautionary tale, it also served as a secretive sex fantasy. If it was a terrifying act to contemplate, it was also titillating. The language used to describe new women, working women, single women was often so hostile that the male anger behind it is palpable. A destructive or at least demeaning rape narrative was, for some, probably satisfying as a daydream or masturbatory scenario. For single women themselves, guilty or perhaps confused about their sexual impulses, the fantasy of a man rendering them helpless and submissive, with the evil details, the horrid fate left to imagine, well, it could have made the average workday pass a little faster.

That is not to be glib. White slaving was a real and extremely serious crime. The Rockefeller Commission and other smaller committees spent years patrolling docks, brothels, rackets and their upscale counterparts, cabarets, and while few people were ultimately prosecuted, Congress passed the Mann Act, a law prohibiting the transport of underage women across state lines for the purpose of prostitution.

Still, the passage of the Mann Act would not become the lasting legacy of this episode. Nor would the vilification of men who preyed on defenseless young women. The primary message, unspoken but unmistakable, was to condemn women out on their own and also to scare them. The idea that you, as a girl alone, could be lifted from life and that nobody would notice became—and would remain—a significant element of single lore.

Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that the first beloved single-girl icon of the twentieth century was not the bachelor girl or the tea dancer or anyone new in between. She was someone who didn’t quite exist.

BEHOLD THE GIBSON GODDESS

The Gibson girl, a well-bred upper-class beauty, independent, athletic, and terrifically busy, appeared first as an illustrated character in a 1902 issue of Collier’s. She was named for her handsome, sociable, much reported-on creator, Charles Dana Gibson, an illustrator who had for years drawn variations of this all-American girl the way someone might doodle the same image over and over at school or work.

The finished product would become the official, polished trademark of new womanhood.

The Gibson girl was classically elegant and feminine—tall and thin, with small hands and feet, china-white skin, and a retrousse nose. But she was also strikingly athletic. Her shoulders were well proportioned. Her hair was piled high, creating the illusion of greater height, and loose strands around the face suggested that she’d just come in from riding or tennis or some other mildly strenuous sport at which she had displayed a calm mastery. She was windswept perfection. A Valkyrie holding a teacup.

At Collier’s, the girl’s home for many years, the staff practiced editorial taxonomy, organizing and subdividing the character’s various incarnations into seven distinct types of modern goddess: the Boy-Girl, the Flirt, the Beauty, the Sentimental, the Convinced, the Ambitious, the Well-Balanced or Rounded. Regardless of her precise type, the magazine declared, “she is incarnate, a representation of modernity, individuality, and personality.” As a female fan wrote in a letter to the magazine: “We admire most about her the manner in which she keeps her own counsel.” When pictured with one of her inevitable suitors, the Gibson girl rarely looked directly at him; rather, she gazed off into the distance, suggesting that she saw on the horizon possibilities beyond that man, or suggesting perhaps to the man that he would never penetrate to the core of her self-containment.

The girl, whether girl-boy athletic, well-balanced friend, flirt, or beauty, became a young single icon in the same way that white slaving became the iconic crime committed against the single girl: through the burgeoning media. The slave scare came alive on film; the Gibson girl was born in print and took on larger life as she was reproduced in a mass-merchandising campaign historic in its scope.

It’s true that stage stars and characters such as Trilby had appeared before on wallet cards, postcards, and wall-size posters (many saloons were miniature shrines to certain adored actresses). But the Gibson girl appeared everywhere: on china dishes, drinking glasses, furniture (vanities, dressers, hallway chairs and chests), calendars, flasks, cigarette cases, flatware, paper dolls, dress patterns, hair ribbons, ink blotters, and on down a long list that ends in lockets and thimbles. Her image also inspired look-alike pageants and song and essay contests, and of course she had dances and drinks named for her.

It was as a mass commercial entity that the Gibson girl had her greatest impact on single-womanhood. Nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century advertising concentrated on endorsing and explaining a product’s merits, at very great length and often in very tiny print. The emphasis was on solidity and tradition, a confident masculine promise of quality. But as single young women attained some purchasing power, it became clear that the old ways—selling only to wives and mothers—would not hold. Nor would the dull thousand-word odes to the sturdy reliability of a detergent. The Gibson girl provided a form of early branding, a visual shorthand for a product’s values that had previously required great amounts of text to describe.

As early as 1915, the Ivory Soap girl, traditionally a symbol of saint-like purity, had become a rouged and healthy-looking Gibson type. These ads contained less text than had previous ads, and the illustration of the girl was larger. In this way, the Gibson prefigured the eventual death of testimonials and the rise of psychological advertising, that is, the use of images to put forth a dream world, a perfect person—things and qualities you might have, that you might actually be, if you would only buy the product. Just as early silent films propagated cautionary tales for new women, ads began, just a little bit, to peddle images of freedom and beauty.