Many feared that women who cherished their memories of younger years (even if that meant life three years before), would not, en masse, become the next mothers. They would never wear down peacefully into housewives who bought large appliances. They would not even make proper spinsters.
THE ALL-NEW IMPROVED SPINSTER
So we come to the last of the Jazz Age single icons: the New Spinster, the single icon most likely to be crowned ancestral career woman. She had a surprisingly good job. A nicely decorated place of her own, in which she was often pictured seated in an art moderne chair beside her telephoning table. She was well dressed, she had her own car, and her days were so busy she required a diary, an antique sort of Filofax made of red leather, monogrammed and chrome-bound, with a lipstick case to match. As she perceived it, the mechanics, “the orientation,” of her own life “allowed her to glide along smoothly.” All she had to do was to slip into a casual dress or blouse with skirt, toss on a jacket and a pair of pumps, and rush to her car, without asking anyone’s permission. One reporter described her like this:
Today’s spinster is fashionable to a fault. She… knows how to buy and because she is spending money she has earned, she has both assurance and discretion… And because she had avoided the extra duty and unexpected worry which are so often part of married life [she’s] kept her looks… at 35 or 40 the unmarried woman looks fresher and younger than many a married woman of the same age!
And she was patient in a way only a mature, confident person could be. When barraged with public queries —“How could she
Occasionally new spinsters wrote about life and inserted the slightly regretful “I look at my beatific sister with seven beautiful children…” sentence. But the majority of them wrote about their lives the way this thirty-year- old woman did in
Of course this newest spinster confronted some of the same problems as had her predecessors. As Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote at the time: “There has occurred a rush of activity such as no one could have predicted even a decade ago… still values have not fundamentally changed.”
In other words, no matter how fashionable she appeared, she could not always peel off the scarifying old spinster markings. For example, many wives maintained a “considerate” refusal to discuss sex in the spinster’s presence, so that she would not “too acutely feel her loss.”
More significant, an unwed woman was still considered on permanent call to her family. Just as immigrant girls had been required to hand over their paychecks, so new spinsters were expected to keep an open-wallet policy. In the early sound film
Among more firmly middle-class families, the situation was even worse. Mothers loved to throw lavish Sunday dinners. “Enormous chunks of meat for all!” read the caption of a cartoon defending the single girl who’d been asked to “bring in a few things.” There’s a horde of people in the background, watching her, waiting for her to leave and get the ham, the roast beef, bread, vegetables, puddings, cakes, and anything else that will be needed. The point seemed to be that because she supported no one but herself, she could contribute lavishly to the family fund. Brothers seemed to have felt this entitlement most acutely. Even if these men had jobs, the jobs never brought in enough cash. They had children, demanding wives, and other personal interests to support. And so, as it was reported again and again, brothers hit up their single sisters for cash, knowing that loyal single sisters would keep it secret. Many sisters came through. Thus, in the story, her moral superiority to the family is revealed not by hard work and generosity but by loyalty and discretion.
Of course some sisters saw it differently, and they wrote about it, one calling the condition “the New Dependency.” For years after, novels and short stories took on the issue. In Josephine Lawrence’s novel
The new dependency became a subject not only for married-women/single-girl debates (by then as common as ads for talcum powder). Editorialists and college presidents joined in the discussion. Unanimously they sympathized with the sponger and somehow blamed the giving sister. One much-circulated and reprinted pamphlet explained this point of view: “How can this young man ever hope to get back on his feet when he is demoralized into taking such ‘gifts’ from an unwed sister? It saps the moral strength, turns our bright young men soft, unenterprising… ruined for all chances of manhood by the humiliation of taking handouts from a sister.”
And there was worse in store for the new spinster.
SEXOLOGY AND THE SINGLE GIRL
The response, or backlash, came in the form of sexology, a pre-Freudian system designed to scientifically classify types of sexual behaviors. Sexology was often confused with “free love,” the thrilling, somewhat baroque concept popularized in the novels of D. H. Lawrence and Henry Miller. In fact, sexology, a conservative response to new women workers, concerned just the opposite. It reworked elements of phrenology (the categorizing of persons according to skull differentiations) and eugenics, the study of superior human breeding, to codify acceptable sexual practices, and then to regulate it.
An antivalentine to the single women of America, sexology propounded that sex was good, wondrous, life- affirming—
As far back as 1910, when “race suicide” was a familiar and threatening term, bookstores had been stocked with antisingular tracts condemning the “social worker” or “New Woman.” They had titles like
From another doctor: “Discovering… her innate feminine charm in the selling of dry goods [treating it] as a more alluring expression of her female self than that of the homely status of wife and mother, the girl exposes the grave crisis of the modern age…. This bounding into the world represents a futile struggle against nature… it touches on disease.”
