Bachelor Girl

The experts were very precise about the origins, symptoms, and lasting effects of this disease. There were several different strains among unmarried women.

First, there was the “war working woman,” the woman who’d bravely pitched in during the Great War and was thus also referred to as “a warrior maid.” More commonly she was called an intersexual, a single woman who because of her odd experience somehow had fused with a male inner soul and who, though she appeared female, acted like a man. Charlotte Haldane, writer and antifeminist, viewed this “specimen” as a “significant enemy of motherhood.” As she explained, “The development through the experience of war work [led to] the phenomenon of the war working woman,” also the “more or less unsexed or undersexed specimen.”

Next came the so-called “mannish lesbian” or “mannish woman” who took things further by dressing the part. (The definition of “lesbian” as we know it still had not settled and the term was often used to describe a woman who dressed like a man.) In medical journals and many popular articles—the word warning often appeared in the headline—these women were referred to as subnormal or inverts. Inversion, as described by Havelock Ellis, the father of sexology, matched precisely the traits ascribed to the new woman/flapper/new spinster:

Not only is there frequently a pronounced taste for smoking cigarettes… but a… toleration for cigars. There is also a dislike of needlework, and domestic occupations while there is some capacity for athletics… brusque energetic movements… direct speech… [and] an attitude towards men, free from any suggestion of shyness… these will often suggest the underlying psychic abnormality to a keen observer.

Ultimately in the late 1920s, lesbianism began to take on its modern denotation: two women in a romantic and sexual pairing. No longer was the word used as a universal term gathering together schoolgirl smashes, the living situations of women in settlement houses, and heterosexual women who suffered subnormality and inversion. Lesbianism was, in sexological terms, about as bad as it got. As early as 1902, the Pacific Medical Journal had declared that “female boarding schools and colleges are great breeding grounds of artificial [acquired] homosexuality…. If carried into life, such learned perversities would lead to permanently skewed relations with men.” By 1925, the situation was much worse. Commented a woman sexologist that year: “Such a fate is so contrary to the fullness of female human development little can be said to express its horror.”

Statistics on lesbians, as so defined, are difficult to find, but one can find a bizarre number of estimates concerning frigidity. In 1925 leading sexologists estimated that 40 to 50 percent of all women were frigid, the highest numbers to be found among the more educated classes. According to experienced sexologist Weith Knudson, there were five categories of frigidity. Twenty percent of all women had turned out to be “cold,” 25 percent could be called “indifferent,” 30 percent “compliant,” 15 percent “warm,” and just 10 percent “passionate.”

From a sexological point of view, women living alone, especially those who made no effort to find a husband, were to blame. Knudson wrote angrily, “I have emphasized repeatedly that dysparunia”—the technical label for frigidity—“signals an inner negation…. obstinacy cancels the will to submission…. There are women who refuse to be made happy; they resent the thought that the man has saved them, that they owe him everything.”

But readers were assured that such an ungrateful unwed female would suffer for her obstinacy.

Walter Heape, an active commentator on sexological matters, called spinsters—all varieties—the “waste products of our female population… vicious and destructive creatures.” He suggested that like wounded dogs, they might, with the slightest provocation, snap entirely. “A thwarted instinct does not meekly subside,” he declared. “It seeks compensation and damages for its rebuff…. As the number of these women increases every year and, in systematic depreciation of the value of life, they are joined and supported by thousands of disillusioned married women who also scoff at marriage and motherhood as the only satisfactory calling for women.”

In other words, the single idea was contagious, and as it spread these women became increasingly scary. By 1929, the vicious psycho-spinster, a frustrated, vindictive harridan, had debuted as an American character. Walter Heape was one of many who characterized the evolving nightmare. Here is a part of his 1928 study of “inherently frustrated women who have failed to marry by the 25th year”: “She is… the guardian… [seated] in every auditorium of every theatre… haunt[ing] every library… in our schools, she takes little children and day by day they breathe in the atmosphere of her violated spirit.”

Sexology promoted itself as a salvation, a means for innately shy, prudish young girls—or girls who’d been wrongly swayed while at school—to marry and to enjoy a natural womanly sex life that led to many wonderful babies. There was the promise of great joy, if only a woman cooperated and did it right. Even the frigid might be brought back to life. But it was also true that some new spinsters were so deeply frigid, so mentally scarred, that there was no hope for their recovery or return to life.

This sad old girl was shown, as always, to be socially pathetic (“The normal woman must have something to live for, if it be only a cat,” wrote Mrs. Juliet Wilbor Tompkins in 1927.) But now she was also potentially sick. According to Tompkins in “Why Women Don’t Marry,” Cosmopolitan, for some new spinster misfits the “ways of sex will always remain a sealed—and rather horrid—book she reads at her peril.” Others of these “nuns by blood” would evolve a “repose, a gentle power of indifference” that sometimes made them “bewilderingly” interesting to men “who wonder if they may not be awakened.” The sad truth, however, was they would always be dormant. Even if they wed, their strange stillness would render any union abnormal. “Such women may marry and have ten children without seeming to come into any close relations with life: to the end they are stray angels, cool and aloof. The man who marries one of them will have no tempests to encounter, yet his way will not be… easy… for he can never fall back on his sex with her.”

The language of sexology, its strict hierarchies of frigidity and lesbianism, suggested that there was serious scientific proof for such claims. If anything, sexology gives us proof that female freedom was so terrifying, so unthinkable, that it had to be killed off—and not just by inventing replacement icons. Finally, all female abnormality would be smothered beneath a pile of specious scientific findings.

HOW THE NEW SPINSTER MADE OUT

In spite of these warnings, most young women still felt “a Ferris-wheel-at-the-top thrill,” as one of my own subjects put it, about trying on a single life. Even if the top jobs were closed to women,[9] there were still so many dizzying possibilities they seemed to pass by as if in a movie montage. My favorite character in search of career is the fictional Carol Kennicott, the determined, unintentionally hilarious heroine of Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street (1920). In one early packed paragraph, we learn that Carol had “hoped to discover that she had an unusual voice, a talent for the piano, the ability to act, to write, to manage organizations,” and that with each disappointment, she “evanesced anew—becoming a missionary, painting scenery, soliciting advertisements,” and on and on until she’s talked into marriage by a doctor from the Midwest with the promise of his rising hometown for her to conquer. Stuck in dreary little Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, she takes up urban planning, working to change street directions and move buildings, not that anyone has asked her to. She runs away once, to Washington, but comes back, because she’s waited too long. She has a child. She is not a career girl at this point but a middle-aged woman from, and even she has to admit it, Gopher Prairie.

Had it worked out for her in the big city, Carol might have discovered what many real young women had discovered: Jobs were not, as the Atlantic Monthly had concluded, “open-sesame’s to life.” They were, as any man could have testified, only jobs. Una Golden, hero of an earlier Lewis novel, The Job (1917), skips out on small-town life and rushes to the city where she finds work in an office, a new world that sustains her for about half the book. That is, until the day Una understands that it will never change. She asks herself, “[what are] days… beyond a dull consistency of… machines and shift keys and sore wrists?” Not much, and at the end Una establishes herself and her fiance in a successful real estate brokerage.[10]

She was one lucky character. In the late 1920s, the lawyer, writer, lecturer, and feminist Crystal Eastman prophetically stated, “Women who are creative… with administrative gifts or business ability and who are ambitious to achieve and fulfill themselves along these lines, if they also have the normal desire to be mothers, must make up