their minds to be sort of superman.”
Margaret Culkin Banning, who wrote sensible new-spinster stories for the
The normal social unit is made up of a man and a woman in love, courting or married. The unmarried woman who has made a job the other half of her social unit… is bound to be somewhat extraneous… out of the social picture…. The masses… administer printed condolences and sedative terms—“new woman,” “bachelor girl,”—but the world in general has not approved the sight of a lady jogging through life alone.
All of this discussion came to an instantaneous halt with the 1929 stock-market crash. Within weeks, it seemed, the troubling unwed American female—whether professional, fun, academic, political—slipped from beneath the cultural microscope. The U.S. Women’s Bureau estimated that just six months after the crash, two million women, many single, had lost their jobs. It was made very clear, however, that men had suffered more. They’d lost more than just jobs; they’d lost their essential core of masculinity. Amidst a collapse so hulking and vast, there was little energy left to think about the single woman. But there would always be something to say.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Suspicious Single: Job Stealers, The Riveting Rosie, And The Neurotic Husband Hunter
—“But aren’t ya ever going to fall in love?”
—“A career itself is a romance. I haven’t the time…”
—“Aren’t ya ever going to marry?”
—“My de-aah, when you spend 14 hours a day with your dearest illusion, it loses something.”
Now, listen… forget about yourself… You know what it means to the girls in this show? Those poor kids gave up jobs and will never be able to find other ones!… If you let them down… they’ll have to do things I wouldn’t want on my conscience and it’ll be on yours!
Let him know you are tired of living alone…. You want him to take charge. You want now to have your nails done.
SINGLE GIRLS ONLY NEED APPLY
If attention turned to the single woman—and occasionally, of course, it did—there was just one question for her: Did she work?
If the answer was yes, the response was almost always angry. Women, during the Depression, were not under any conditions supposed to hold jobs. Jobs were for men—all those guys thrown out on their asses and depicted sitting home, too depressed to lift their feet for the carpet sweeper. Women seen dressed for work, entering an elevator in an office building, made this horrific situation, this stigma of compromised manhood, that much worse. Even if she was en route to a job no man would take, the stares, the muffled traitor talk, reminded her of life’s primary motto: “DON’T STEAL A JOB FROM A MAN!”
This made life tense and difficult for single women, because single women were just about the only women out there working—and sometimes there were more of them working than men. By 1932, legislation in twenty-six states prohibited married women from holding any jobs whatsoever, and that included teaching and positions in the Civil Service should a relative already hold one. In states where getting married didn’t require retirement, an employed woman who married was nonetheless expected to make a “full disclosure” or risk losing that job or incurring fines for “misleading statements.” And that applied even to women in those female jobs no man would take—typing, filing, cleaning.
My father, a schoolboy during these years, recalls: “If we found out a woman who worked in our school was married, we were shocked. I think at one point there was talk that the librarian had a husband and we wondered, why does she have a job? Why is she working? If her husband is a dentist or a lawyer or a truck driver, what does
There was much discussion of job-hogging acts of afemininity. However, little was said about the myriad problems, anxiety, and sacrifices of single women, many of whom were also supporting their families, parents, siblings, grandparents—the new dependency in crisis mode. Millions of unemployed single men would ultimately regain jobs and misplaced respect. So would some single women. But more than a quarter of all women who’d been between twenty and thirty during the Depression years would never have careers. They also stood to lose much more.
“A quarter of all women” is a much repeated estimate that’s hard to break down. But it’s known that thousands would not, as planned, attend college or at least finish up their degrees. Hundreds of thousands who would have married never wed, never had children, and by 1932 the U.S. marriage rate had hit a historic low, while the birthrate had dropped to its lowest point since 1900. And many of those who married simply did not consider themselves financially stable enough to have children. Despite the danger and illegality, abortion was commonplace, and according to a 1933 Gallup Poll, 63 percent of the population favored “some form of birth control.” In 1933 the condom industry, a $350 million enterprise, produced something like one million units a day. Wives could obtain an early form of diaphragm known as a pessary, and so could single women, as long as they posed as wives and appeared in doctors’ offices wearing wedding rings.
Mary McCarthy[11] describes the complex procurement process in her novel
Many real single women spent the Depression years feeling terribly alone and desperate. Work was hard to find and no matter how irrational it came to seem, there was still a stigma attached to the job hunt. The compromised “forgotten” man—he was the one who needed work. But there were also needy women, and some of them literally began to starve. Fainting, in fact, became a common melodramatic plot point in the numerous backstage musicals of the time. The starving girls were almost always revived by Broadway stars who just happened to be passing by and who went on to make the emaciated girls tap-dancing miracles. Back on earth, of course, fainting was not a career option. Most women who could, as well as those who couldn’t, typed. Even college graduates typed. Barnard College reported that only one third of the class of 1932 who sought jobs found them, and that most of the class at some point took up typing.
